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:
- A Poet’s Eightieth Birthday poem – Alfred Austin
- I Just Wanna Be Your Number One by Miraj Patel
- Clinic by Rob Leatherman Sr.
- Владимир Маяковский – Вон самогон
- Sonnet 114: Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you by William Shakespeare
- Feroza
- The Poor House by Sara Teasdale
- Ольга Высотская – Волны
- Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman by Michael Ondaatje
- The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- God Scatters Beauty by Walter Savage Landor
- A Library Of Skulls by Thomas Lux
- A Boston Ballad, 1854. by Walt Whitman
- Ольга Седакова – Липа
- Chaplain To The Forces by Winifred Mary Letts
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 Story Of Our Lives by Mark Strand
- The Self and the Mulberry by Marvin Bell
- Your Poems on My Patio by Martina Reisz Newberry
- The Room by Mark Strand
- Yesterday’s Mishaps by Mary Etta Metcalf
- The River Has Its Memories by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Yes Dear by Mary Etta Metcalf
- The River by Mark Olynyk
- Words Unspoken by Mark Olynyk
- The Remains by Mark Strand
- Woman With Parasol by Martin Willitts Jr.
- The Poetic Principle by Mark Olynyk
- Why Write? by Mark Olynyk
- The Other Side of Panic by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Where Have We All Gone by Mary Etta Metcalf
- The joyful things in life by Martin Smith
- What is Poetry? by Mark Olynyk
- The Frantic by Mark Miller
- Wednesday by Marvin Bell
- The End of the Argument by Martina Reisz Newberry
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.