A poem by Alan Dugan
He had a back office in his older brother’s
advertising agency and understood the human asshole.
He turned his father’s small inheritance over and over
on hemorrhoid ads between three-hour lunches
at the Plaza every day and cocktails at five-thirty
with different dressy women waiting in our front office.
We joked that he fucked them up the ass to make more customers
and were nauseated by him because he picked his ears
with the lead end of his lead pencil as he argued and argued
hemorrhoid copy with us on nauseating Mad. Ave. mornings.
Why argue? It must have been for executive power-feelings
because the copy never changed. Every week, the poor
bleeding assholes bought the shit. When my mind
began to get fucked and go as black as his inner ears
I quit as broke as I began, remembering his prophecy:
that the last working television set in the world
would be showing a hemorrhoid ad for ANUSALL
at Armageddon, that it would have been written
by him, that he would be watching it at 6:00 P.M.
in the bomb-cellar lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel
with a blonde’s ass in one hand and a scotch in the other,
and that he would die happy, with his old man’s
money intact and his asshole too, unlike us prat-boys.
A few random poems:
- La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
- Rains Have Come poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Malaria
- Lohengrin poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- excerpt_from_the_quotgertrude_steinquot_collaborative_series.html
- Владимир Маяковский – Пахали сохой — запашем трактором (Главполитпросвет №42)
- The Ivy by William Barnes
- Happiness by Wilfred Owen
- Evenén in the Village by William Barnes
- Английская поэзия. Уильям Шекспир. Сонет 139. Оправдывать меня не принуждай. William Shakespeare. Sonnet 139. o call not me to justify the wrong
- Sorrow’s Importunity poem – Alfred Austin
- Robert Burns: The Wounded Hare:
- A COUNTRY LIFE:TO HIS BROTHER, MR THOMAS HERRICK by Robert Herrick
- A Poet’s Epitaph by William Wordsworth
- Love and Law by Vachel Lindsay
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- The Campera, the Foreigner y el Novio by Marjorie Kanter
- The Boy by Marilyn Hacker
- The Aegean by Maria Luisa Spaziani
- The Gate by Marie Howe
- The Copper Beech by Marie Howe
- Synchronicity by Marina Cecilia Kohon
- Subjective Genocide by Marie Starr
- Subject to Change by Marilyn L. Taylor
- Spenser’s Ireland by Marianne Moore
- Song by Margaret Widdemer
- Silence by Marianne Moore
- Scars on Paper by Marilyn Hacker
- Rosemary by Marianne Moore
- Release by Marie Starr
- Reading Runes by Marina Cecilia Kohon
- Portrait in Black and White by Marjorie Kanter
- Poetry by Marianne Moore
- Peter by Marianne Moore
- Passion by Sera Jacob
- Paragraphs from a Day-Book by Marilyn Hacker
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works

Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.