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:
- My Daughter at 14, Christmas Dance, 1981 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- Яков Полонский – Песня циганки
- A Veterans Memories Breeze By In the Wind by Stacey Chillemi
- Наум Коржавин – На друга-поэта
- Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare
- A Wintry Picture (II) poem – Alfred Austin
- Омар Хайям – Будь хмельным и влюбленным всегда
- Evenèn Light by William Barnes
- Stars and Jasmine by Maurice Riordan
- Conscious by Wilfred Owen
- O You Whom I Often and Silently Come. by Walt Whitman
- Crazy Jane On The Day Of Judgment by William Butler Yeats
- On The Loss Of The “Royal George” by William Cowper
- Flute Notes From A Reedy Pond by Sylvia Plath
- Hymn To Adversity by Thomas Gray
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
- Fault by Sara Teasdale
- Enough by Sara Teasdale
- Dust by Sara Teasdale
- Doubt by Sara Teasdale
- Did You Never Know? by Sara Teasdale
- Debt by Sara Teasdale
- Come by Sara Teasdale
- But Not To Me by Sara Teasdale
- Buried Love by Sara Teasdale
- Blue Squills by Sara Teasdale
- Because by Sara Teasdale
- Barter by Sara Teasdale
- At Midnight by Sara Teasdale
- Alone by Sara Teasdale
- After Parting by Sara Teasdale
- After Love by Sara Teasdale
- A November Night by Sara Teasdale
- A Cry by Sara Teasdale
- To Youth by Sarojini Naidu
- The Soul’s Prayer by Sarojini Naidu
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.