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:
- Dedication by Rudyard Kipling
- Каждый день и каждый миг судьбу благодарю
- Нина Воронель – Сиротское
- Scars on Paper by Marilyn Hacker
- To Mrs. M. B. On Her Birthday poem – Alexander Pope
- Time To Transplant by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Thou and You poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Sonnet 16: But wherefore do not you a mightier way by William Shakespeare
- Eidólons. by Walt Whitman
- Владимир Высоцкий – Лежит камень в степи
- Comments: A Life Well Lived is Always an Inspiration – My Friend Muniappan Velu of Chennai, India
- The Eagle and the Dove by William Wordsworth
- Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
- Shot? So Quick, So Clean an Ending? poem – A. E. Housman
- Ribbons & Pearls by Timothy Cole
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
- On The Tomb Of A Priestess Of Artemis by Sappho
- To One who Loved not Poetry by Sappho
- To One False In Love by Sappho
- To Aphrodite by Sappho
- To A Girl In A Garden by Sappho
- Before They Were Mothers by Sappho
- The Torments Of Love by Sappho
- The Silver Moon by Sappho
- The Death Of Adonis by Sappho
- Like The Sweet Apple by Sappho
- In the spring twilight by Sappho
- The Silver Moon by Sappho
- Sappho To Her Girlfriends by Sappho
- To One who Loved not Poetry by Sappho
- On The Tomb Of A Priestess Of Artemis by Sappho
- Of course I love you by Sappho
- Ode To A Loved One by Sappho
- My Garden by Sappho
- Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel by Sappho
- Loneliness by Sappho
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.