Doug Tanoury (2)

May 2001 | back-issues, poetry

[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]

Holes

March 2001 | back-issues, poetry

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.

Doug Tanoury (1)

March 2001 | back-issues, poetry

The Ghost of Madame Cézanne

Madame Cézanne
Haunts my study
In ghostlike apparition
She appears
Again and again
With cheeks painted a bit too red
And makeup caked across her face

Each time I see her
I think she wears
The countenance of strife
The shades of sadness
She never speaks but
Sits silently in a chair
Posed in resentment

Her eyes angry openings
Her mouth closed and pouting
Her jaw clenched
A face hard
And humorless
She is a model of domestic troubles
Wearing a green hat

Anna Kournakova

She walks in shadows
Comes in darkness
Like a spirit
Her movements invisible and silent
Like the first weak breeze of spring
Nearly here and half not

She wears the sheerest gauze fabric
That is spun by the phantoms of my fantasies
Who work into the late hours of night
Like the tired and weary women
That labor for low wages
In Indonesian sweatshops

She wiggles into my bed whispering words
And touching me like a Muse
To awaken a Disneyland of desire
Were I hang stappadoed
From the highest ceiling beams
In her most malicious dreams

Bad Weather

Whenever I saw him
I felt the cold
A kind of deep chill
That passed through me
Numbing my insides
And the ice that formed
On the outer edges of my words
Was skin tingling
In the same way
His kisses were snowflakes
Melting on my cheeks

I would always wish him gone
Just as I would hope
For winter’s passing
And long for a trace of color
In the pencil sketch landscape
That is February
And now that he is
A season past
There is mildness in the air
And a stirring in the earth
Of things ready to grow

Wings

Touching her in darkness
My hands fly
Across her skin like winged things
Hovering for a moment
Then gliding in sweeping motions
That rise and dive to follow her form
Aerial in their grace
Ethereal in movement

And when they come to rest
Like a bird upon a perch
They are weightless
And she feels only a fluttering
A brush of feathers
Across her flesh
On a night
When touch became sight

Precipitation

In these early days of winter
When drizzle floats weightless
And hangs frozen in the air
The wind in my ears
Whispering doubt
The damp against my face
Frozen fear and
The smudged grayness of sky
Deepening suspicion
That storms recrimination in the loud percussion
Of hail hitting the awning
And the downpour of rain against the asphalt
As I stand unspeaking and exposed
In a muteness like snowfall that
Drifts peacefully in quiet whiteness

Her words frozen rain and falling hail
And me silent like a snowy night

by Doug Tanoury (c)2001
(dtanoury1 [at] home [dot] com)

Author’s note:
Doug Tanoury grew up in Detroit and still lives in the area. Doug is exclusively a poet of the Internet with the majority of his work never leaving electronic form. He is published widely across the World WideWeb.

The greatest influence on Doug and his work was the 7th grade poetry anthology used in Sister Debra’s English class: Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse, Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966 by Scott Foresman & Company.