USA

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Gone Blinky
(A Post-Modernist Love Poem)

Somehow all my plans unraveled
Order grows in small incremental steps
And well defined phases
Toward full disarray
In ways unanticipated
Each rational thought 
Withers and wilts
Choked by passion 
And threatening dark clouds
Of unreason that roll over the horizon
And congregate 
Like a crowd of board youths
Loitering on a street corner

My heartbeat is a bongo
Of a street performer
Playing for tips in a sunset
That paints the sky with the bright 
Color of Indian women
Walking together in traditional dress
For this is the fabric of a new life
Where old rules no longer apply
And the only things I fully understand
Are Saturday morning cartoons
Of villains bent on world domination

So I embrace a new physics
Where my past is a theory disproved
And I must draw up new principles
To explain myself
And the behavior of a body at rest
A body in motion
Where the only constant are
Discovered in magazines
At supermarket checkout lines
This is the strangeness 
Of me living in a world 
Without you

© Doug Tanoury, 8-20-00

Soft Honey
(An Avon Poem)

Her hair catches the light
And is a yellow dawn
That glows on far horizons
Softened by a haze 
That hangs on the lake

Her hair is liquid light
Bright as an August afternoon
With highlights of captured color
That glistens and dances
Like sunset on the water

© Doug Tanoury, 9-16-00.

Blue Muse

Sadness can be global in scope
Like the British Empire
Grand, regal and imperial 
All pervasive and powerful and
The sun never quite seems to set
On my regrets 
That crawl in bed with me to sleep 
Each night 
Like a poor family of five that 
Sleep crowded together in one bed and 
Rise with me when my bare feet 
First touch the cold wooden floorboards 
In the morning

Regrets take on a life of their own
And live like so many lines of verse 
Written without any hope of revision 
But that must somehow stand 
Just as they are 
Without any change 
Shaped just so 
In character crafted with a certain permanence 
With fatalism and finality 
Their future predestined and inevitable 
This is how regrets have come to live with me 
Permanently 
Like poor relations that move in for a short stay 
But somehow 
Never seem to leave 

© Doug Tanoury, 8-13-00.

© All Copyright, 2000, Doug Tanoury.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.