MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 81)
scent of the day: Oudh Infini, by Dusita
Oudh Infini (2016, Pissara Umavijani)—a skanky-floral throwback fragrance that, wrapping a classic French skeleton in ladyboy silk, is made not for polite company but for those who like their indole-rich florals scraped across crotch-cricket haunch fur as if it were Charmin—
gives us two honey-sweet florals in petal-to-stem holism (dewy-peppery May rose, waxy-perineal orange blossom) lifted into an operatic cloud of vintage animalism (sundried-urine civet, ass-cheek sweat musk) and then twisted from the European boudoirs of romance novels to the Southeast Asian super-gonorrhea holes (a nightmare of sex-tourist consequences) by means of a Laotian oud that, so deep and steady it can easily be overlooked, here comes off as more metallic-mineralic and varnish-lacquer variety (even with some shitty-hay like vibes typical of Assam oud) than the scorched-bandaid and burnt-clutch variety of Laotian oud we get in Tauer’s L’Oudh,
this musky-sour ferality ramped up rather than toned down in queasiness (tonally whiplashed to the border of vomit tones, in fact) in virtue of being set upon a creamy-nutty sandalwood (the sandalwood-rose-oud combo actually reading like one of those minimalistic indian attars like Yaaseen’s Blaze) smeared with less a gourmand sweetness than violin varnish or staircase shellac (plasticized-doll vanilla and caramelic-glue benzoin)—
the overall result being an animalic floral fragrance whose spotlighted rose seems of the highest quality (green, honeyed, dewy) and whose co-star civet seems young like I like (sour, musky, pissy) and whose oud, despite seeming recessive in its bass-thrumming omnipresence (and perhaps also in the fact that it is neither super-barn nor super-cheese forward like many expect from oud), is up there with Bortnikoff in terms of quality, the vintage-style tartness of the whole (an old-age-home sourness, here more feminine and more poopy than pissy) persisting throughout the life of the fragrance even as it shifts from bright citrus (think: civet paste freshly rubbed by civet cat to mark territory on a tree) and then to lychee-like potting soil tartness (think: civet paste now covered in earthworm dirt);
the overall result being, in other words, a fecal-sour rose fragrance that, perhaps not only due to the civet and oud but to unstated skunk oil and hyrax, vacillates between whole roses (green-sour tilted roses) muddled in a diabetic urine (ketotic urine browned with a dollop of poop) and something more like rose growing through grassy cowpat, its putrid zoo tartness and pissy-poopy snarl never contravening its femininity but rather presenting us with a non-Disney primordial version of femininity (which involves perineal tears, terrible in their jaggedness, and inadvertent poop, both logs and spray, while infants and placentas get squatted out upon the earth);
the overall result being, to put it in a more comparative way, an animalic-floral perfume that (1) takes the central phenolic feature of Triad (a white-grape May rose that, because of the combo of vanilla-varnish benzoin and fertilizer-chip Laotian oud, feels as if wet with the 87-unleaded rain of a Mad Max post-apocalypse) and then (2) throws in the central fecal feature of Murasakino (a wildly urinous-sharp dirty civet, not the aged-sweet-round civet of Civet de Nuit, bent in a radically bright manure direction by not just oud but indolic white florals) to give me something more brutal than Beauty and the Beast and, although not as rich in animalics and although lacking the soap-meets-raunch classicism, even skankier than J-Musk: an impression of May rose, a whole gasoline-dewy bush of them, flourishing like a pig-in-shit butterfly despite growing from concentrations of fresh dung that would normally, I guess before the weird evolutionary pressures of this Mad Max world, burn through roots with its high levels of ammonia.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 81)
a housecat ambling across piano keys past midnight
describing the past in the future tense goes a long way to making a prophet
vulvic stank you cannot lick away—that separates true animalic lovers from the rest
their upper-caste power allowed them to control the narrative that they are powerless
cops busting their old school bullies
fish-out-of-water mouth gestures a full ten minutes into the lethal injection
so free of distractions, what better for our deep ancients to do but meditate upon a rock pile?
add in obesity, and a shower cap is grounds for a trunk search during the traffic stop
concealing intense feelings in order to enjoy her anguishing company
blindness recast as a mere series of practical challenges
unfolding the brittle letter once again to your eyes, for what you know is the last time
think of how Truman felt as buckstopping bomber to fathom the horror that slavery inflicted on whites— and also their desperation to justify, underplay, forget
the human in us cannot help but first see squirrel tracks in the snow as ancient language—and, at root, are they not?
the deaf lovers raging in the restaurant— hand flails, monkey grunts—startle us like lovers in Shakespeare raging in the purplest of prose
rogue planets still churning core warmth
douche-shaming and slut-shaming both with roots in the epoch of scorn for body, sex, and their symbol: woman
loving yourself means not beating yourself up even over how you ruined the relationship by posing, by lying—by not loving yourself
knee-deep in the autumnal creek, breasts pendulous in her scalp-lathering stoop— nipples disfigured as if by all walks of toothy entitlement, ringed by braille visible from within the bank’s giggling bracken, slice the mirrored sky like swallow beaks
who wants such a disgusting God?
paying to stay in comfy jails
such perturbation about how your family would feel if they read your work diverts your attention away from the reality that they would never read your work
the child in the starvation photo, not attractive (sexy) enough to awaken empathy
those who would have never stumbled upon the concept of God by themselves
knocking off the same corner store thrice
girls sucking the ends of their hair
eager to dissociate from the depressed you of the past, the you that you now—brazen enough in your truant empathy to make deities double over in laughter—construe as disgracefully weak
pretending to be straight, monogamous, or so on for so long, you might develop the attitude, the base working assumption, that hypocrisy is the norm
all by yourself, but saying something out loud even despite the awareness of having already said it in your head
to feast the prodigal brother’s return is also to feast what the dutiful brother only sees after the father tells him “You are ever with me; mine is yours”: namely, the oneness of him and his father—a oneness vulnerable to being spoiled by forthright feasting
from stamp licking to keystroking to erase distances
the lack of inflection in the voice of the lugubrious
keeping that secret of depression, regarded as a dishonorable failing, from those keeping the same secret
she read for the same reason she danced: not for a gripping form of pleasure, but for the later rewards of healthful exercise
is his genius lessened when we learn that his music was a conscious mimicry of the bird orchestra right outside our door?
