USA

Lost On Sunset

I remember
Being lost on Sunset Boulevard
Gazing down smog shrouded streets
At the homeless pushing shopping carts
Filled with bulging plastic garbage bags
Moving slowly
Haunting and indistinct
Their forms vanish in the haze
Like apparitions
Seen for a moment in sidelong glance
Then disappear

I remember
Reading poetry in the evening
Under a tree hung with lanterns
My voice awash with the noise of traffic
Bad mufflers and clunking transmissions
The sounds of surf on the shore
That ebb and flow that makes
Every day of my past
Like so much flotsam and jetsam

I remember standing
Haunting and indistinct
Like an apparition
Seen for a moment in sidelong glance
Only to disappear
Lost in the noise
And neon magic
Of Hollywood nights

Private Collection
(A Hollywood Park Poem)

In the moment
I saw legs and lower torso
Protruding from a cardboard
Refrigerator box legs twisted together
Toes curled

And I knew
A person no more fragile than
An appliance was asleep
In a cast off
Brown box like the hard skin shell
A locust will shed and leave empty
In the grass

That shelters in the shadows
That now serve as packing and
Shipping material for heartbreak
And rasping respiration
That sits along the sidewalk

And shelters the dreamer from
A cool breeze on a Spring morning
And from the first weak light
That rises softly above the
Low brick buildings

Agamemnon Has Aids

I met a man who wore
The death mask of Agamemnon
And he told me “That death
Like every other moment of your life
Is something that happens to you

I came in contact with the body fluids
Of Iphigenia without surgical mask
Or gloves and I had unprotected sex
With Achilles and made love to
Clytemnestra without a condom”

And all of Mycenae whispers
Every woman’s husband
And every man’s wife
In irony fitting Greek drama
The hero home from Ilium

To bedsores, lesions and conspicuous
Consumption ravaged now and stricken
With the strictly modern malady
That’s turned him suddenly old
Like King Priam and just as sad

© All Copyright,  Doug Tanoury.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.