Phlegethon

Round rafts drift, onyx.
From above, sunspots.

Passengers on each
cloaked in fuligin.

Invisible, ghosts.
Though they stomp their feet

the craft do not rock.
How they bleat in pain --

the heat.  The raspy
voice of a choir boy

extinguished too soon
inks in wisps:  grace notes

fluttering above
red rippled magma.

Interminable
when one considers

__________the Styx.

Echo and Narcissus

She shrank to a fragment
of what I had said.
My sweet turtledove:
I struck her meat
from out her shell,
I spoke in her head.
In retaliation
she gave me hell.
I am a corpse for years
crying tears that run
into a cobblestone well
from which Jack and Jill,
toothless and grim, draw
as they hum Dixieland jazz
to themselves.  A voice
inspected me to death.
It found the hole in my head
we've looked through since '09.
She threaded a clothesline
through it and wheeled me
out to the middle of the alley
where I dry under a farther sun.
I twist in the wind.
I dream I speak to her
through the empty can
at my end of the string.
When the real telephone
really rings, the voice
who answers will sing
God's word in a golem's mouth.
Hear the crowd shout!
It's the amazing Mr. Inside-Out!
See how he doubts
this reality where everyone
is smarter than he.

Scoundrel In Paradise (Confessional)

Butchers with angels' voices
__________close in.
Response:  assume a form
_____no one
in this world wants.
__________False piety,
contrition, never uttered
by Becky Sharp in the beer hall.
Congenitally incapable of seizing
opportunity, my tears
complain that I am loved too well.
A perfect fit, the way ravens
cawing yonder circle
for years 'til they dive
towards my meat.
Dissipation,
___________les fleurs du mal,
aren't aromatic to me.
I was born to be crushed
_____trunk to feet.
Not an herb underneath you
but a salted root.

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.)