Doug Tanoury <dtanoury@ix.netcom.com> 

Doug Tanoury is an active Internet publisher with his own site at www.FunkyDogPublishing.com and now joins us as Associate Editor.

The founder of Athens Avenue Poetry Circle and Funky Dog Publishing, Doug Tanoury grew up in Detroit and still lives in the area with his wife and three children. 

Doug has been published by The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Eclectica, Poetry Magazine.com, Agnieszka Dowry, Savoy Magazine, Zuzu's Petals, Pif, The Blockhead Journal, Swagazine, Kimera and others. Doug is exclusively an Internet poet with the majority of his work never leaving electronic form. He has recently published two online collections of poetry: Detroit Poems and St. Mary's Cloister. 

The greatest influence on Doug's 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

Words

And in days from now
When this is read
With the eyes
Of another age

The form like fashion
Will be changed and
I will speak oddly
Out of style

My words breathless
And cold until
They are mouthed
And lips move

Every syllable
Becomes my heartbeat
Every pause my breath
That rises from

The wheezing bellow
Of my lungs and whistles
Up the chimney
Of my throat

On mouth and tongue
Through teeth and lips
To air to ears
To life once again

Moneychangers and Thieves
For Mary-Beautiful Teamster & Permit Dog

I saw a man who looked like Jesus
Running along East Jefferson
Kicking over news boxes
Sending them crashing to the pavement
On their sides with echoing booms
In the soft lit silence of a summer morning
He alone was motion and sound
White cloak flying as he ran
Robes waving as he raised his legs
To jump kick each box

“You have turned Detroit
Into a den of scabs
Where foreign financial empires
Place steel idols on street corners”
He'd shout to still and empty streets
Boom goes another news box
“No News”
Crash goes another
“No Free Press”
The anger of the Lord moves along
East Jefferson down streets not dead
But only sleeping

Cosmic Theory

I believe time and place bend and twist
And tremble and sometimes spasm and twitch
For poetry is silly science a wacky physics
Where consistency is pure illusion
Boundaries imagined
The big bang only the screen door slamming
On an August afternoon
And the universe at its very core and center
Is a corner house in the central city
That borders a busy highway
With traffic noise that never stops
And is ever present like radio static

Where randomness is the moving
Mysterious sounds from stream radiators
And each quasar the creak of wooden steps
That lead up and run parallel
To a long wooden banister
And all light is a prism projected
On a worn and faded rug
Through the beveled edges of glass
In windows that catch afternoon sun
And the radio spectrum plays repeatedly
A somewhat sad sonata
Of Beethoven as background hiss

Voice On The Water

I studied for a long while today
The texture of the lake
With waves pasted
Impasto across its surface
Built in sweeping strokes
Of gray-green stucco

Alive and animated
And I thought:
“The voice of the Lord
Is upon the water”
And my thought
Became a whisper

Just beneath the wind
Audible to me alone
In solitary speech
That spreads sharp and
Angled wings like
A lone sea bird

It floats and soars
Motionless for a moment
Frozen in currents of air
And dangles and sways
Suspended somewhere
Between sky and water

Morning

Each morning on my way to work
I drive the old section of the city
Along East Jefferson toward downtown
Through streets lined with gutted buildings
Window frames and doorways strangely dark
And missing like teeth from a smile
Where storefronts in various states of
Decay and stages of dereliction
Lay open to vagrants and vandals

They are tombs pillaged by robbers
Who leave only bones from a corpse
The timbers and beams from a roof
Collapsed and caved in still visible through
Windows without glass and entrance ways
Missing doors in a graveyard
That has grown to a necropolis
A city of the dead who still trudge
From apartment building to liquor store

With reluctant and rigamortised limbs
I see them walk slow and stiff
The dead awake and congregate
On concrete benches at bus stops
Before red brick factories abandoned
Except for the black water tower
That rises silently like a monument
From the ruins and rusts against the
Blue lit background of a summer sky
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Funky Dog Publishing at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6915/FunkyDogPublishing.htm

Athens Avenue Poetry Circle at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6915/