A poem by Alan Dugan
What is better than leaving a bar
in the middle of the afternoon
besides staying in it or not
having gone into it in the first place
because you had a decent woman to be with?
The air smells particularly fresh
after the stale beer and piss smells.
You can stare up at the whole sky:
it’s blue and white and does not
stare back at you like the bar mirror,
and there’s Whats-‘is-name coming out
right behind you saying, “I don’t
believe it, I don’t believe it: there
he is, staring up at the fucking sky
with his mouth open. Don’t
you realize, you stupid son of a bitch,
that it is a quarter to four
and we have to clock in in
fifteen minutes to go to work?”
So we go to work and do no work
and can even breathe in the Bull’s face
because he’s been into the other bar
that we don’t go to when he’s there.

A few random poems:
- Владимир Высоцкий – Всё было не так, как хотелось вначале
- On His Blindness poem – John Milton poems
- Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon
- Dilton Marsh Halt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
- Let Me Tide Over by Vattacharja Chandan
- Apologetic Postscript Of A Year Later by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Спиридон Дрожжин – Я для песни задушевной
- Новелла Матвеева – Набрела на правильную строчку
- Владимир Набоков – В полнолунье, в гостиной пыльной и пышной
- Владимир Маяковский – Неделя фронта (РОСТА)
- Orlando Furioso Canto 5 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Holding On by Philip Levine
- Василий Жуковский – На первое отречение от престола Бонапарте
- On the Burning of Lord Mansfield’s Library by William Cowper
- Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn (Song) by Robert Burns
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
- Valhalla
- The Masks of Love
- The Bull Moose
- The Window
- So Small, So Vital
- If Only
- haiku
- Valhalla
- The Masks of Love
- The Bull Moose
- The Window
- So Small, So Vital
- If Only
- haiku
- A Mysterious Naked Man
- A Certain Kind of Holy Men
- A Life Story
- Two Quits And Drum And Elegy Drinkers
- Two Quits And A Drum And Elegy For Drinkers
- To Sayf Al Dawla
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.