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 Бенедиктов – Мысль
- Николай Гумилев – Капитаны
- Омар Хайям – Благородство страданием, друг, рождено
- Владимир Корнилов – Старость
- A slant of sun on dull brown walls, by Stephen Crane
- Владимир Маяковский – Дачный случай
- Алексей Жемчужников – Прелюдия к прощальным песням
- Under Saturn by William Butler Yeats
- Astrophel and Stella: LXXI by Sir Philip Sidney
- Lover’s Gifts XLVII: The Road Is by Rabindranath Tagore
- A Faery Song by William Butler Yeats
- A Teenage Pregnancy
- Platonick Love
- Crow’s Nerve Fails by Ted Hughes
- Юрий Левитанский – Иронический человек
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
- Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees by William Shakespeare
- Orpheus by William Shakespeare
- Not marble nor the guilded monuments (Sonnet 55) by William Shakespeare
- Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck (Sonnet 14) by William Shakespeare
- Love by William Shakespeare
- It was a Lover and his Lass by William Shakespeare
- Hark! Hark! The Lark by William Shakespeare
- From you have I been absent in the spring… (Sonnet 98) by William Shakespeare
- from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare
- Fidele by William Shakespeare
- Fear No More by William Shakespeare
- Fairy Land v by William Shakespeare
- Fairy Land iv by William Shakespeare
- Fairy Land iii by William Shakespeare
- Fairy Land ii by William Shakespeare
- Dirge of the Three Queens by William Shakespeare
- Dirge by William Shakespeare
- Carpe Diem by William Shakespeare
- Bridal Song by William Shakespeare
- Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind by William Shakespeare
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.