Cologne

Affable, brilliant smile, bespoke.
Handsome Persian.
Light pomade in gray-flecked hair.
Hair short and black on the back
of his manicured hand.
A genuine warmth,
Persepolis lilt.
He knows how to flirt
with boys like me,
boys who brandish sudden money,
who ask,  "May I sample
available iterations of vetiver?"
He rings me up and plies me with vials
of Tiare, of anything else that might
excite a silent ache, a private thought.

I was two in 1979,
when his family ceased
buying whiskey openly,
started dancing in the basement
if they didn't stop completely.
Picture his sister called out,
free thought and defiance
forgotten -- better to survive
revolutionary days.
"We, too, hated the Shah
but we are modern people."
Mostly baffled and resigned.
A dream of French University
deferred to a bachelor's efficiency
thirty years and more heartbreaks later.

He shares his home
with an indifferent cat
and a deceased aunt's coffee service.
As easy as incurring a flat
tire on the freeway:
all at once a citizen
of drowsy Northern California,
cocooned in an illusion of freedom.
Seasonless fog and sand.
A comfortable single man
Alone but never lonely.
He is enviable, I think,
and has matured into desirability.
He purveys for his keep aromas we wear
when what is ours falls short.

Tiresias Remembers

Sobering ache
_____silent sky
three stars in a line:

_____Orion's
belt is as distant
_____as new lives

to which we'll be born.
_____I have failed.
Like you I still cling

_____to this flesh.
I am negligent.
_____What torrents,

what eroding floods
_____shall kill us
should we survive now?

_____A voice, small
and unmusical
_____finds my mind

a void it wants filled
_____with echoes
of unwelcome pasts.

_____I am blind
now but then I saw
_____time grind down.

It spilled dust
_____of untold kalpas
behind us.

Dioscuri

Void it takes years to cross.
A nothing so pure
particles just
spring into being.
(Nature abhors much
but not, I guess,
our intuition of how she works --
centuries before
we could discern
the subatomic world.)

Haven't we always known
the meaninglessness
of the golden mean?
How many lives
did Galileo save
or render worthwhile
dropping shit
from high up
like some cranky
mental patient?

Alpha and Proxima:  suns
we sail towards
on Newtonian non-seas.
Intervening centuries
we spend as we would
on Earth, asleep.
Who cares what we find
upon arrival?
We are always our only goal.

Confessional

My old pops was a railroad man,
got busted up_____1986.

He always won the fights I picked.

__________I ascend concrete stairs
_____from the top
__________I survey

gleaming toy city tricked
out______chrome and lights
as if shined with spit.

_______Somewhere an old
Pac Bell payphone stand
ripped free of receiver and box

stands ignored
_____by pedestrians.  From it once
I called home

____________collect
while wandering drunk and alone
one cold morning

__________in 1996:
pea soup-thick fog,
after a night of ouzo at the Mix

(then Uncle Bert's.)