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 Костров – Вот избушка
- Epistle II: To A Lady (Of the Characters of Women) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Ambulances by Philip Larkin
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Ребенку
- Prologue To Spring by Sylvia Plath
- Sonnet 57: Being your slave, what should I do but tend by William Shakespeare
- Владимир Маяковский – Частушки
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Запретный плод
- Vote Excerpt
- Владимир Маяковский – Врангель (РОСТА №477)
- Address to Edinburgh by Robert Burns
- Holding my heart for YOU by Neelam Sinha
- Ольга Берггольц – Синеглазый мальчик, синеглазый
- Twelve Months After by Siegfried Sassoon
- Низами Гянджеви – Слышишь, звякнул бубенцами
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
- Allegory by Thomas Hood
- A Lake And A Fairy Boat by Thomas Hood
- Your Last Drive by Thomas Hardy
- Without Ceremony by Thomas Hardy
- [Greek Title] by Thomas Hardy
- Afterwards by Thomas Hardy
- A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy
- love_is_just_like_the_rain.html
- boy_running_in_the_rain.html
- xai_kou_from_book_seeds_of_faith.html
- xai_kou1.html
- xai_kou0.html
- xai_kou.html
- vorticism_is_a_choka_in_its_modular_home.html
- victor.html
- traveling.html
- tracks_in_the_private_country.html
- the_world.html
- the_holy_tree.html
- the_emigrant.html
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.