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:
- Arabian Night’s Entertainments by William Ernest Henley
- The Song of the Little Hunter by Rudyard Kipling
- Mountain Wellhead
- Алексей Жемчужников – Раскаяние
- Владимир Орлов – Как появились ромашки
- Rosalie by Washington Allston
- Homecoming by Robert Lowell
- The Café Filtre by Paul Blackburn
- As I Walk These Broad, Majestic Days. by Walt Whitman
- In My Own Shire, If I Was Sad poem – A. E. Housman
- Иннокентий Анненский – Леконт де Лиль. Явление божества
- To the Author of a Poem Entitled Succession poem – Alexander Pope
- Mama I’ll Sing One For You by Shel Silverstein
- Огюст Барбье – Корреджо
- English Poetry. Thomas Moore. From “The Odes of Anacreon”. Ode 56. Томас Мур.
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
- Вера Павлова – Вот и пришли времена
- Вера Павлова – Вопрос ребра
- Вера Павлова – Весть обызвестковалась
- Вера Павлова – Вергилий в предсмертном бреду
- Вера Павлова – В ранец тетрадки собраны
- Вера Павлова – Утро вечера мудренее
- Вера Павлова – Удобряю ресницы снами
- Вера Павлова – Учась любовной науке
- Вера Павлова – У святителя вместо спины
- Вера Павлова – Ты вольно или невольно
- Вера Павлова – Твоя хладность
- Вера Павлова – Трогающему грудь
- Вера Павлова – Торчащее обтесать
- Вера Павлова – Толстые икры правителей
- Вера Павлова – Телефонные кнопки
- Вера Павлова – Сражаться с прошлым
- Вера Павлова – Снежную бабочку-однодневку
- Вера Павлова – Снег
- Вера Павлова – Слово держу осторожно
- Вера Полозкова – Или, к примеру, стоял какой-нибудь
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.