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:
- I hear the roar of a Harley… by River Urke
- The Fiddling Wood by Stephen Vincent Benet
- A Man Young And Old: VII. The Friends Of His Youth by William Butler Yeats
- Time of Roses by Thomas Hood
- The Echo by William Barnes
- Владимир Британишский – В чащобах памяти кого не встретишь вдруг
- The Sympathies of the Long Married by Robert Bly
- Curtis by Susan King Saunders
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Kind Moon by Sara Teasdale
- Sonnet 135: Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will by William Shakespeare
- America by Phillis Wheatley
- Epigram to Miss Jean Scott by Robert Burns
- Владимир Высоцкий – Оплавляются свечи на старинный паркет
- Михаил Кузмин – Вы белое бургундское вино
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
- love.html
- lord_god_have_mercy_on_me.html
- libation.html
- least_in_a_list.html
- interpret_the_light.html
- innocence.html
- in_the_stone_i_rooted.html
- in_between_the_strophes.html
- human_joys.html
- human_charms.html
- he_who_creates_re_creates_himself.html
- hai_kou_unpublished.html
- hai_kou.html
- greek_light.html
- greece.html
- golden_eangle.html
- gesture_theory_a_villanelle.html
- gem_immortality.html
- fruit_leaf_roots_flowers.html
- first_verse.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.