Swing Shift Blues

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.

Poetry Monster – Home

A few random poems:

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 

• A Winter Ship by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• A Secret by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Years by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Words by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Wintering by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Widow by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Who by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Whitsun by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Whiteness I Remember by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Verbal Calisthenics by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Vanity Fair by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Tulips by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Touch-And-Go by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Totem by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Three Women by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Thalidomide by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Terminal by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

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

Poems by Author and Category

The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works