A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (ROUND 5)
scent of the day: Inverno Russo 2, by Areej le Dore
Second wear. Take my words with grain of salt.
Chai chocolate spices upfront, but then goes waxy rose chai tea (still chocolatey), and then goes into an ambery champaca-rose antibiotic medicinality reminiscent of Fiore Dambre—only here muck muskier. / rose body (similar rose to my Ottoman Empire) is big, bigger perhaps than Ottoman Empire, but the typical rose scent we might know from lesser perfumes (think: ELDO’s Eau de Protection, for instance) is recessive / great florals / This is one of the best in the collection—I woiuydl not rate it higher than War and Peace though /
l’huere exquise middle section: champaca bubblegum / dirty flowers plus pungent oud (gardenia benchmark in first version though) / buttery cream (pungent indian oud, indian sandalwood, sweet champaca) buzzing with incense-tinged musk and spices (clove, antique bark cinnamon) /
spicy-dirty-musky candied rose that seems toasted into a vanillic nuttiness/ calming—floral, non herbal/ vetiver nuttiness and smoke—chestnut smell almost especiall in drydown (vetiver insolent style) / sacre olibanum of sell 125 feel gives a lemon pine vibe. / salty maybe from ambergris / homebody coziness/ best out of luwak and antiquity and perhaps cuir—but not better than taiwan or War and peace/ all this laid out on antique eastern European wood. / sweet peachy frangipani / richer than mitsouko and might even be more feminine / mitsouko seems more spring compared to this while this is fall/ calls to mind antique shop of grandma and grampa in Wappingers/ Inverno has a Wesker connection, to the rose one (mystique? or is it deviant?)
rose-oud mitsouko with some Teatro-Opium-F’iore-d’Ambre flair/ has that richness of Zoologist civet and almost camel, might not beat either though especially camel—which increases my respect for the zoologist perfumers/ clove and cinnamon deep/ more buttery than even Civet de Nuit—buttery like camel/ black pepper creamy champaca/ osmanthus gives a great vibtage feel like in montabacco, but here it is even more musty and stale—it is perhaps largely why i think of grandpa with both scents/ musk benchmark wow /fluffy both alluring and challenging because of if the musk--amazing tension
deer musk pod skin wow. / this could vie with camel for a top twenty or thirty spot / makes me appreciate just how amazing camel is and how with talent synthetics can go so far despite their often bad representation/ chocolately leathery pod instead of fluffy powder from the grains within, the fluff recessive and the leathery hide animalic boosted / inverno has aroma in base similar to what we get in TSVGA dna / honey rose in inverno/ cheesy oud plus oregano
the plastic smell in inverno russo is from the frankinscence and pepper and vetiver just like in Honur Man—and you get a little of that in Oriza Legrande’s Oracion
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes —for my Grandma, Barbara A. Istvan (1939-2015)*
Anyone who has hummed beneath Becky on an escalator (“Mm hm-mm”), let alone bobbed and weaved for angles before her sarong drew shut (spousal slaps no deterrent to hunters of beach Bigfoot), has beheld—even if the blaze hides behind all the nasty smoke—traces of self-play taken too damn far: liver lips perfect for shadow puppetry (alien slugs, ET undulants), as much tuckable frill as Ray Finkle; a weighty number, deli-rippled roast beast of Dr. Seuss technicolor, that would have Georgia O'Queef herself rubberneck—and rubbernose even, can you blame her?— like a botanist before an uncatalogued jungle flower. It would seem a lie given her 5ft frame of bird bones—
straight insanity. But yeah, bitch gets real mean with it: The Gut Puncher™—that suction-bottomed black fist, its silhouette in the spook-the-shit-outta-ya shadows mistakable less for a rolling pin or a kitchen fire extinguisher than for a hatless lawn gnome huge for its kind, cornstarched like an 80s diaper rash and stowed under the bed quivering siren calls of elastomer stank with each Amtrak rumble. If only we could see it pummel that brown eye, that one surviving gullet whose involuntary “grip” still afforded a semblance of violation sensation (that hole edged now, whenever off duty at least, with little lips all its own: demonic slanders to God), we would believe. If only we could see
what—after each puckerless plop of retraction—reposes at such Beldar Conehead limits of sunlimned dilation, no time under the Cinderelli-Cinderelli glow of Disney would be needed to translate (or outright empathize with) the magpie’s mad chatter and Hitchcockian head smashes at the uncurtained window pane of exhibitionist kink: crazed pleas to come perch upon Becky’s perineal ledge, that calamari of scar tissue glistening even when dry; pleas to peck at intestinal breadcrumbs like an oxpecker, that scavenging symbiont to the Serengeti rhino—deeper and deeper like a child gathering flopping fish, or whatever slimy currency, in the majestic drawback of a tsunami sea.
* There is a deep tradition of bawdy humor in my family—the Istvan clan, the Last of the Mo’Beacons. Obscenity kept affection alive and distracted us from hunger pangs. Grandma—and old-school banger of pots and pans out in the street (which funny enough was one of many things that made my visits to Sangre Grande in Trindad, twenty years ago now, feel like coming home)—liked to sing, for example, the Istvan twist on the ditty uniting noncontiguous trashlands across America.
Of course, I have elevated the familial vernacular into something that would give even Cormac McCarthy pause. And it has come at a major price. It secured my alienation from my native kith and kin, who not only—like the rest of us—do not read (a fact that speaks to the Quixote-nature of my vocation, alienating me from most of the world) but also in several cases cannot read in the literal sense. However much I elevate the language into literary platinum, and however many degrees I have earned that might otherwise distract a populace so mired in genetic fallacy that they judge art by its maker, the humor does reveal my class position. And that—along with my insecure posture, and hand jazz while speaking, and eating like I am in jail, and using “sorry” as a conversational filler, and treating service staff as peers instead of ignoring them in good manners—was one of the things that alienated me from the academy, one of the things that made me vulnerable to cancellation even before the tides of TDS cancel culture put everyone with my options—yes, even the most kowtowing ally—on probation.
But I honor my grandmother by carrying forward, as my late father did before me, that torch. With them it was all oral. But I have taken the written approach. I have followed the lead of the great writers who have become—stuck in the overlap of various no-man’s lands, more and more hated, can you blame me?—my true family, if only out of the same necessity that makes people on a deserted island start talking to coconuts. That—along with a tad of Nietzschean self-mythologizing (yes, I am not blind to what I do)—really helps to take the edge off in a world where now even those who check all the boxes (politically correct, the right color, the right gender, the right cadence) are alone, everyone staring into their phones. It prepared me early, before the phones took over. I am grateful for that. And yes, gratitude—trite as it is to say—is another thing to add to the take-the-edge-off arsenal.
Chaucer is a good example of someone in my soul tribe, my astral family. It is sad that my people will never know The Canterbury Tales, even though their own toilet humor amounts to twists of what Chaucer already wrote there. Take The Miller’s Tale, for instance. A parish clerk named Absolon tries to woo a woman named Alison. Absolon comes to Alison’s window at night, begging for a kiss in the dark. Instead of her face, Alison sticks her naked backside out the window. Absolon, expecting a romantic moment, “kissed her naked arse / full savorly.” He only realizes his French mistake when he feels her pubic hair, which Chaucer describes as being like a beard.
When I first read that, back in my undergrad days at Stony Brook, I thought immediately of a story my dad often told me—I had to be no older than six the first time—about a guy who goes into a whorehouse. The mistress of the house says the man can visit every floor he wants, except the top floor. The man sees that it is getting sweeter—tighter, warmer (whatever)—on each floor. So by the time he gets to the last permitted floor, he knows he must hold out his jing for the musky paradise soil—what we might call Jannah in the language of Russian Adam—that must be one floor up. But when he opens the door from the stairwell, everything is pitch black. He feels around until he finds a hairy patch. He unloads in only a few strokes, like a horse—pent up as he was. When he is leaving, the mistress says, “You didn’t go to the top floor, did you?” He says, “Nope.” But then all of a sudden a midget with a beard runs out and goes, “Yes he did—ptuah ptuah. Yes he did—ptuah ptuah.” I tried to tell my dad about the Canterbury Tales. I even tried to get my dad to read the fucking thing. Part of me believed—with these totally naive eyes, the same eyes that would believe his promises to quite drinking—that he could.
Totally ridiculous, I know. But I have always been this way. And most of you who read my work, a rare few to whom I owe many thanks, likely feel the same way. That is what Obama meant by his campaign slogan: “the audacity of hope.” I talk to my cats like children. Deleuze would hate me for it. He would call me “disgusting” for it. But I do. I sit them down and tell them where they went wrong and where they went right and why they can’t get this piece of meat: “There’s too many seasonings, my men. Daddy can’t just wash it off this time.” I rationalize my continued way. What else am I going to do when, like Martin Luther said when he nailed the 95 Theses up in 1517, I cannot do otherwise? I rationalize my native style by saying that, in the case of the cats, some inadvertent good comes from the talking (same with talking to plants), even if they do not understand. Perhaps with age and disconnection I have grown funny, like Radagast. But I do believe the cats do get it, especially over time, more than skeptics might think. Deleuzian becoming runs both ways. Cats can be “lifted”—or “moved,” since “lifted” speaks to the arborescent-hierarchical model, whereas “moved” is the more Deleuze-friendly rhizomatic-lateral term—to a more human level. They know “no” and “chicken.” My cat Fille knows just what to do when I say, “Let me get that belly, babe!”
By the way, the Becky I have in mind is the character Becky, a woke white woman from my story “Arlo.” You do not need to know the story to enjoy the poem. Nor do you need to know that my writing is perhaps the only thing stopping me from de-mapping as many instantiations of her type before I de-map myself. In the early morning twilight sleep on the day that I wrote this poem, I had been dreaming of a bird at work on a rhinoceros anus—an image we all know. I realized I had no choice but to follow it where it led. So I took some of the imagery surrounding Becky’s use of The Gut Puncher™ and crafted a poem that would have my grandma laughing—and yet, tragically, would never have her laughing even if she were still alive.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
