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:
- Lover’s Gifts XL: A Message Came by Rabindranath Tagore
- Владимир Высоцкий – Не дыми, голова трещит
- Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
- Fine Apricot Lodge by Wang Wei
- The Virgin Martyr
- Something by Robert Creeley
- Ready for Retirement by Mike Yuan
- Олег Бундур – Совет
- What’s wrong with volunteering?
- Elegy Written At Hotwells, Bristol by William Lisle Bowles
- Poor Honest Men by Rudyard Kipling
- Tonight she remembers by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- Николай Некрасов – В тоске по юности моей
- Writing to Onegin by Ruth Padel
- The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot
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
- Scoring Highly on the Psychopathy Scale by P.J.Reed
- Primrose by Patrick Kavanagh
- Pollination by Pamela L. Laskin
- This Evening Also by Paul Celan
- Landscape by Paul Celan
- Peace by Patrick Kavanagh
- Planet Earth by P. K. Page
- O Little Root of a Dream by Paul Celan
- Night Ray by Paul Celan
- Motel Pool by P. K. Page
- Miss Brown by Samuel Stephen Wakdok
- Miracles by Paul Hostovsky
- Memory Of My Father by Patrick Kavanagh
- Le monstre by Patryck Froissart
- Landscape by Paul Celan
- Jokes on You by Rohan Dunbar
- Pamela Griffiths – Pamela Griffiths
- In Spite Of by Patricia Farley
- In Memory Of My Mother by Patrick Kavanagh
- I Want Those Words Today by Pandian Chelliah
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.