another
thirteen year-old
suicide in
the first tentative days
of spring
the sun big and beautiful
and without heat
the noose tight at
both ends
it’s a small price to pay for
electricity
or the atomic bomb
nothing crazy horse
could’ve seen coming
nothing reagan
ever pretended to care about
and on good days
the highways still take
the rest of us
where we have to go
[b]Sparrows[/b]
Sparrows perch on a narrow ledge
Half hidden in the eaves
Of my awning and from the window
I can watch them mating
A hop and a flutter of wings
Another hop and more flutter
And in the smallness of their love
They resemble shot glasses
Stacked two high
One within another
The sparrows have built three nests
Half hidden in shadows of my awning
Each one a weave of honey blonde grass
Into a unkempt mass
That is oddly symmetrical
Like the disheveled hair of three girls
Sitting side-by-side on a bench by the lake
Each one tangled and mussed
In the very same direction
On an afternoon in March
[b]Pink Font[/b]
And I tell her
Write to me in feminine fonts
That flower and bloom and
Twist in flowing script
And curve in colored pale pastels
That calls to mind
A fullness of Lips and the hint of hues
That form crescents of flushness
Around her cheeks
And I tell her
Talk to me only with a tint of pink words
Whispered on the ether of each exhale
And floating weightless
On the warm vapor of each breath
For I am helpless and entranced
Possessed and driven by each letter
And word and phrase and line
And I tell her
Take these hands and move them
To capture each word that falls
From her mouth and is
The slow ripened fruit
Of many idle hours
And graces my writing table
In lushness like a still life
With peaches and oranges
[b]Incantation[/b]
She looks at me and says that I am the ghost of my father
Sitting on her sofa or sleeping on her love seat
And I agree an tell her that his death is simply a ruse
To avoid work and shirk obligations
I believe he still lives
Hiding in fugitive fashion
Like some old Nazi who escaped justice
Somewhere in South America
At the dinner table she calls me by his name
The incarnation of his waywardness
Whenever displeasure is expressed or faults counted
Whenever work goes undone and money is squandered
When promises are broken and bills unpaid
My father lives again
It is all his fault his spirit his failures his disappoints
That haunts this home and those who dwell here
For he has died and left the TV on
Some annoying remnant of him
As if the aftershock of his life here remains
And it is only the words repeated three times as you spin
Around and round
Fast and faster with arms extended
That can exorcise this house
And cleanse it of all his vices
The smell of cigarettes mixed with the muskiness
Of yesterdays clothes and somehow
Silence the sound of his snores
As he naps in the sunlight on summer afternoons
In childish invocation you must say as you twirl
With centrifugal speed in the center of the living room
And repeat after me the tragic incantation
That will force out his ghost
I love your snores
I love your farts
I love your gone
[b]Passion Poem[/b]
Something in me died today
Ever so quietly it passed
It had lingered sickly
For quite some time you know
So while it was not totally unexpected
Its passing is still a shock
I for one am glad the suffering is over
And here in this season
Of death and rebirth the symbolism
With irony so cutting
It hurts so deeply to understand
I shall mourn and grieve
In solitude and feel at oddly
Silent moments the loss
Dark is the tomb and
Bright is the light of our rebirth
To new life and the discovery of
Liberation in casting off the shrouds
And winding sheets that bind us
With our old form and cloak
The newness of our beginnings
[b]Poem For My Father[/b]
My father was the simple man,
Who wanted things to fit his plan.
Not highly lettered this I know,
He never wrote a word although
He held strong views on many things
That dealt with cabbages and kings.
You see, my father felt that all good verse
In rhyme and meter was immersed,
That poems be written and constructed
With long tradition unobstructed,
And built with blocks called foot or feet
With meter pounding out its beat.
And so he wanted poems to rhyme
With meter locked in perfect time,
And all my verse not to his taste
Was ridiculed right to my face,
And they were set aside unread
Like much between us left unsaid.
And so this poem so long in making
With all the rules it is now breaking,
The lines have taken years to craft,
A life long journey toward final draft,
And all the words now come so free
And sing in tethered melody.
So Father here’s a poem you’d read,
One penned by your poetic seed.
It winks, it giggles and it grins.
It two steps, tangos and it spins,
And as every word now tows the meter,
I hope rhyme wiggles past St. Peter.
by Doug Tanoury (c)2001
([email]dtanoury1 [at] home [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s note:[/b]
Doug Tanoury is exclusively a poet of the internet with the vast majority of his work being published online and never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and journals across the world.
Doug sites his 7th grade poetry anthology used in Sister Debra’s English class as exerting the greatest influence on his work. He still keeps a copy of Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966 by Scott Foresman & Company) at his writing desk.
Visit Funky Dog Publishing at:
[url=http://www.funkydogpublishing.com]www.funkydogpublishing.com[/url]
I met my first wife in an art gallery in Paris. She was an American girl who had carefully saved her pennies for a trip to Europe after graduating from college. That was my story, too. We spent a month together in the City of Lights. All we did was argue.
When we returned to the States, we went our separate ways, but we hooked up again later in San Francisco. We got married in 1962. We were often at odds, but our contentiousness took on a different pattern after we were married. Periods of peace and calm were followed by stormy disputes. We let disagreements fester, then released our feelings in a torrent of angry words.
Our marriage wasn’t all feud. We had some good times. Our wedding was a hoot. My wife’s family lived in Las Vegas. My bride’s sister was a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed reporter for a local newspaper. Her two brothers were blackjack dealers. They lived at the fringes of Las Vegas society, one foot in the middle class milieu of apple pie and church on Sunday, and the other in the glitz and sleaze of casino life.
We got married in my sister-in-law’s house. The mayor and the governor of the state were there. I got drunk the morning of the ceremony, and I didn’t sober up until the second day of our honeymoon.
I remember my brother-in-laws showing me some of the tricks of the trade in the gambling business the night before the wedding. They taught me how to play blackjack the way it should be played. Only players cheated, they said, but they showed me what a dealer could do with a deck of cards in his hands, and the demonstration cured me of the gambling bug.
One Thanksgiving, the whole troop drove up from Las Vegas to our house in northern California. When Joe and Raymond, my wife’s brothers, walked through the door, they were each carrying a bottle of booze as big as a cattle car. The bottle of scotch–good stuff, too, as I recall–had a cradle that you set it in. It operated like an oil rig. You tilted it to pour.
My wife’s sister and her husband were there, too, and my wife’s mother, a frail and terrified elderly woman. Her husband, a famous band leader in days gone by, had not been invited. He wasn’t at the wedding, either. He was persona-non-grata with the family. He ran a pawnshop in Palm Springs.
It was a memorable turkey day. We had two turkeys in the oven, and midmorning the oven blew a fuse. I couldn’t find a spare fuse. I went outside and lit a fire in the barbecue in the back yard, and we loaded one of the turkeys onto that. Joe and Raymond set off to see if they could find a fuse. They called a short while later and reported that everything was closed.
The problem with the barbecue was that I couldn’t regulate the temperature. It was one of those barrel kinds, and when I closed the top, the temperature climbed to well over what my wife said was the proper cooking temperature. I had to keep opening and closing the lid to keep the reading within a reasonable range.
Then it started to rain. I got an umbrella and held it over the barrel of the barbecue and watched the temperature climb to five hundred degrees. I took away the umbrella. The rain pelted the hissing metal, and the temperature dropped like a stone.
An hour later the brothers returned. Joe, a big grin on his face, held two fuses in the palm of his hand. They were the size and shape of shotgun shells.
Raymond told the story. They had walked into a Laundromat, told the customers that they were from the utility company, and said that the power would be out for a few minutes while they made some needed repairs. They filched the fuses and escaped through the back door.
Guess which turkey turned out the best? They were both good, but the one I cooked in the back yard was the best. It was as moist and tender as any bird I’ve eaten before or since.
My wife and I were divorced in 1971. She has remarried, happily, I hope. I have remarried, too; twice, as a matter of fact.
I lost track of Raymond but got bits and pieces of information about the rest of the family as time went on. The sister and her husband both died of cancer. Joe ended up in jail. Joe hated dealing; he was always hatching a get-rich-quick scheme, but his plans always failed. I’m not sure what he did to end up in prison; possibly robbery.
I’ll never forget what Joe said to me after his mother died. Carrie and I were still married at the time, and we had gone to Las Vegas for the old lady’s funeral. I was having a drink with Joe at the Flamingo. He was working that day, and I had moseyed around the casino, playing the nickel slot machines, until it was time for his break.
We were gabbing about this and that: marriage, work, life in general. I remember saying something about the funeral and Joe nodding his head. He didn’t like funerals, Joe said, but he wasn’t afraid of dying. “What’s so bad?” he asked. “You die, your troubles are over.” He wouldn’t mind going to sleep some night and not waking up, he said.
by Joe Kletz
There are 346 holes in the tile in the ceiling directly above my head. The next one has 283. It’d be easier to count them if they were all uniform, and I could utilize high school Algebra. There is no X, and I have no idea what Y is. I spend too much time staring at the ceiling. The television is on but the holes are more interesting. The glow from the box is warmth, and the noise is company. Soon I’ll be unable to count anymore, as I slip deeper into my alcoholic state. I won’t eat dinner again tonight. I’ll drink several beers and lay on the couch and resume count. Will I be productive? When? I can’t spend all night counting though. It’s past midnight and must be up early tomorrow to ride the train to the metropolis for my appointment. Five days a week I go there. Meeting the professionals who spend a minimum of eight hours (often 10, occasionally 12 or more) on their surgery. Delicate and experimental, they perform. Bit by bit, the routine surgery goes according to their plans. Every day, they remove more of my soul, more of my dream, and replace them with artificial limbs like worthlessness and inferiority. I fight the process with tooth and nail, but secede in favor of meager salary and promises of “growth”.
“One day you will make it.”
Perhaps then I’ll forgo my need to count tiles, fall into a stupor, and wonder at the idea that our calendar system is wrong and that every day is April first. And I am the fool.
Dad told me once that when he and Mom went hunting for fire agates
With their rock hound friends, Mom would not hunt with the rest,
But would walk alone beside the old dirt roads,
Looking for bits of old glass.
I asked him why she did this and he said he didn’t know.
At first I thought that he did not care about it,
But then I saw that he still keeps a bucketful of her old glass,
purple with with age and sun.
I think she looked for glass because she loves us.
It is her mystery.
Now she is ripe with love and mystery and sleep,
Beyond passion.
Look around you at the family; she loves us and affirms us still.
God made her sweet,
Plumbed for children,
Tough and fibrous, watchful of her family,
Which wings around her now like birds
Flocking in unison at her command,
Obedient, tranquil, charmed.
We revel in the wake of her passing
Because she loves us in her sleep,
Because God made her that way.
(March 27, 2001)
When my cousin decided to marry a Catholic, my family was horrified. Her parents tried to talk her out of it, to no avail. The wedding was in a Catholic church, of course, and on the appointed day, family and friends made the trek from my hometown to Fargo for the ceremony.
We gathered in small, uncomfortable groups in front of the wood framed building. Most of us had never been in a Catholic church before. We didn’t know what to expect. We conversed gloomily, making small talk, boring each other to death as Lutherans will.
I recalled the stories I heard when I was a child about the arsenal of weapons that the Catholics had hidden away in the basement of their churches, preparing against an attack, perhaps, or possibly a coup d’etat. Even then I doubted that there was any truth to the rumor, but growing up, I was as wary of Catholics as the rest of my Scandinavian brethren.
Catholics prayed to the Virgin Mary, for goodness sakes! How could they put a mortal woman on an equal footing with Jesus and God?
We filed into the church, escorted by ushers resplendent in their tuxedos and took our seats in the pews on the left hand side of the center aisle. The audience proved to be about equally divided between Catholics and Protestants, the former on the right, the latter on the left. The bride’s entourage gawked at the candles and statuary and eyed the Catholics suspiciously.
It was cold in the room, I noted, and I recalled hearing that the Catholics didn’t heat their churches.
We were all right until the service began, but when the group on the groom’s side began to stand and sit again and sometimes kneel at unexpected and unpredictable moments, the huddled masses on the left side of the aisle were thrown into confusion. We stood when we should be sitting and sat when we were apparently supposed to stand. Up, down, up, down. For a time, the service became a comic opera.
There was one couple sitting up front on the bride’s side that seemed to know the routine. Catholics obviously. It occurred to me that if I watched those two, I would know what to do and when to do it. The stratagem worked like a charm.
The ceremony was mercifully brief. After the vows, the organ rose in its throaty chorus of joy, the bride and groom promenaded down the aisle, and a bevy of witnesses, some grinning, some tearful, escaped into the meager sunshine of a midwestern spring day.
We milled about on the lawn for a time before the happy couple got into their car and drove off to a chorus of shouts and catcalls from the well-wishers. The newly wedded were spending their honeymoon at Big Pine Lake.
Before they left, I kissed my cousin on the cheek and shook hands with her husband. The bridegroom was a big, red-faced young man. His head was the size and shape of a bowling ball. He had a hand like a ham. I wished them both good luck.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and wandered back to the church. My father and my uncle, the bride’s father, were standing by the steps. My uncle looked spiffy in his new Hart, Schafner, and Marx suit, but he had a stricken look on his face.
“Where did I go wrong?” he asked me. What could I say? That he should have given his approval? Knowing my cousin, she would have called off the wedding if he’d done that. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make the poor man feel any better, so I didn’t say anything.
Food was served in the church basement a little later, and the company dug into the spareribs and chicken with gusto. There was jello, of course, and a bewildering assortment of home baked cookies, cakes, and pies.
On the way out, after the meal, my father’s friend Leland buttonholed me. Leland Foss was a real estate and insurance agent in my hometown. He was a fat, jovial fellow with a somewhat mixed standing in the community. He was a good Christian on Sunday, a pillar of the Lutheran church, but the rest of the week he was a businessman of the kind that gave widows and orphans nightmares. “Larceny Leland” was his nickname, although I never heard him called that in my father’s hearing.
Leland had just come out of the men’s room, and he bumped up against me and whispered into my ear. “Smells as bad in their can as it does in the one in our church,” he said. Leland clapped his hand on my shoulder and headed for the door, presumably to get some fresh air.
I don’t know if Leland thought of what he said as anything more than a joke, but to this day I consider it a profound observation.
