MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 98)
scent of the day: Overture Man, by Amouage
Overture Man (2019, Karine Vinchon-Spehner)—a spicy-boozy leather forever in my top fifty (however much it, like those first strange rectal-mucus-filled sexual experiences as a tween, once made me queasy and on edge, something I wish it still did) for the erotic way it blends herbal-citrus incense and musty-earthy woods with smoky-animalic leather and spicy-boozy amber—
opens its long-lived ceremonial gravitas with a raisin-plum cognac that—in part because of the suedey saffron echoing the chocolatey patchouli and sweet resins (musty myrrh, vanilla-almond benzoin, molten labdanum, animalic beeswax)—would be a torpid syrup of civetone-tinged funk (a syrup drizzled like Diddy baby oil between labia and collected in a snifter pressed into perineum ripe with pubescent funk) were it not enlivened into a Mike Tyson paradox (heavyweight mass and power but with featherweight speed and agility) by (1) citrusy brightness (tart grapefruit peel, woody ginger root) and (2) warm spices (armpit cumin, lemony cardamom, earthy nutmeg, spice-rack cinnamon bark) and (3) aromatic greenery (turpentine-like mastic resin, lemon-mint geranium, tea-leaf clary sage, burnt salted-butter sandalwood, coniferous frankincense),
the heady combination—pine-tarred rope charred long ago by flame, meets antique-musty Bortnikoff wood sticky with brown liquor spilled long ago (or perhaps even oak from a barrel that long ago held cognac), meets sweated-through skin flaps misted long ago with a perfume of soft florals—giving the impression of a Cohiba dipped in pissy pussy (Monica Lewinsky easily comes to mind) and then—in a strong resemblance actually to Burlington 1819, which also brings a ginger-zested grapefruit and brown booze—dipped in cognac-heavy grapefruit sidecar (Rémy Martin 1738 Accord Royal, pamplemousse liqueur, splash of grapefruit juice, cumin-cinnamon-nutmeg rim) and then (after drying) smoked inside a study (I picture one with a chair of cracked oxblood leather) small enough to preserve at least the ghost of all the fruity and licoricey and fungal elements released into the air—
the overall result being a resinous-animalic leather fragrance that splits the difference between Jubilation XXV’s fruity-mystical solemnity and Interlude Man’s smoky-operatic overload (only with its own oily brass section of leather, cognac, and cumin), which is one of the factors in it having climbed from low on my list to the number one position (although now, in part because its inclusion of the amberwoods-autotune chemicals I am developing an increasing distaste for and also in part because it is so heavily dosed in the same synthetic castoreum that I now pick up in so many fragrances, it has been knocked down a few pegs);
the overall result being, in other words, a spicy-hide amber fragrance that, full of tensions that go into old-man strength (weighty and light, syrupy and dry, sweet and bitter), seems like the more stoic and grave father of the more outspoken and jaunty Camel by Zoologist, the two close enough in aroma and texture (both capturing a setting of vibrant souks in Egypt or Oman or Morocco selling spices, carpets, antiques, leather goods) to warrant teasing apart if only through what amounts to hairsplitting:
(1) whereas Camel, like Aziyade (another similar fragrance), wraps its incense in a candied glaze of dried fruits (dates, figs, raisins) and lets its resins melt into a golden amber that tilts comparatively gourmand, Overture Man strips back the sticky sugar in favor of herbal-smoky resins (myrrh, mastic, frankincense) that give the amber base a darker color and a more imposing bitterness;
(2) whereas the jasmine-civetone combo of Camel’s boozy animalic funk pops more brightly against the fruitiness (a queasy contrast we also see in both versions of Zoologist Bat), the civetone in Overture Man (more sweat-drenched from the 3D rancid cumin) seems infused deep into the murky depths (baked into the molten core rather than floating above it) to create a more understated but more profound growl of hyraceum-leather ferality;
(3) whereas Camel uses honeyed florals (orange blossom, jasmine) to lift the sweetness and create an approachable sunniness, Overture Man leans into green-bitter herbs (geranium, clary sage) that add an almost camphoraceous sharpness and stiffen the leather (pushing the entire structure toward something more astringent and salty dry but at the same time preserving this sensation of gooeyness underneath, the tension between gloopy-gooey and dusty-barky masterfully done);
(4) whereas Camel does come with a leathery feel that could evoke images of saddles and satchels (indeed, of saddles and satchel soaked in cognac too), Overture Man’s leather—boosted by saffron and labdanum—is much more prominent and even more boozy (its spice combo, centered around cumin, lending the soaked leather a dustier side that brings it closer to Bel Ami and Sawlaj than Camel is);
(5) whereas Camel keeps its smoke mellowed by ambergris-like musk and the ghost of dried dates left too long in the sun, Overture Man drives its smoke to the foreground for an altar-bound-incense finish that seems more ashen and somber.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 98)
hidden-camera doggy-style peace signs—the garage-sale VHS labeled “Rectal Rooter”
farmer napes leatherized by their ultraviolet god—hide scored in bloodless diamonds
thankful no stars were out tonight, pointing to pointlessness
at least the house fire killed all the roaches—“mahfuckas wanted warmth, huh?”
fake like you are dead to eat the vulture
at the wrong funeral, give the speech anyway—ashes to ashes
countless whispers of “I love you” before even telling her the first time
that elephantine need to stroke the bones of your own—we have lost even that
any therapist not ready to recommend suicide is a sham
an unbroken chain of multicolored arms
all the spiders painted into sheds, tip the forty for them niggas too
the dead remember only for the living afraid not to
a trans man’s pregnancy came with hormones that unzipped his lived truth
more protective of what divides us than what unites us—that at least unites us
up to the tree zapper bugs rise in a slow helix seduced by glory, only to drop in a line
small comfort that the death was quicker than the speed of pain
brownberry popped by a band of subway nogoodniks
a stream of cloudy jade haunting the thirsty vision of the dying man
dreamwinds
unmaking a billion years of sex differences in one third-period microplastic wig out— that sounds dumb only if we forget how our ingenuity can topple redwoods with axes, and even Orwell the world into believing that meekness is holy and pride is evil
if college kids are traumatized by words, what is going to happen when they learn— after delayed childhood runs its course—not just about bukkake gangbangs, anal fists bulging the gut like Alien, but that they will soon die, likely losing so many before that
history steps outside for a cigarette break now and then only according to the same myopia—delusion—that would say the life deviation of identical twins falsifies determinism
a US political spectrum test, if it speaks from our heart, must call those failing to bow to either red or blue, the Holy Dyad, “idiot” if not what Charlie Bucket’s teacher took the boy for: “smart aleck, saboteur,” hellbent on humiliating math and authority alike
never discipline an artist for doing what an artist does: holding up hurtful mirrors— if anything, like a teacher redirecting troubled kids, placate the man, celebrate him as so exceptional that he should have space away from everyone else to do his thing
not being the person you were trained to perform is not a contradiction even if you are the one who trained yourself to perform it
sometimes the parental urge to tell the child to stop futzing around, and do chores or get a job or do something, has mixed inside—as even a core ingredient—jealousy over their free time to cultivate excellence
he needed to take off his shoes before he jumped off the bridge to end himself, and before that he needed to pee first—it never ends until it does
that the future is a recycling of the past— no more, no outside hand—can hide the fact that novelty comes from recycling
trying to assess your condition by seeing if the others in the hospital beds around you look robust enough to pull through
clutching your purse tighter around urban blacks who come on the bus, or watching them closer when they come in your store, such profiling is not racism, it is smart—and, well, can racism ever be smart?
child pockets bulge with rocks—not ones found too pretty to leave in the dirt, but ones that by some magic of youth will stop tanks
the NPCs on the curbs of the hood were interesting, irate with ceaseless mumbles that grew quiet only as you backed away and grew louder only as you stepped closer
just as we crane our necks to get a sight of it, the first response of some creatures—think about it— is to crane their noses, nostrils flaring, to catch wind of it
carpet boots
neonatal cock sleeves
your story lost in the fabrication
what wildness, beyond roaches and spiders even, has been trapped under a cake bell?
lucky charms do not work if you neither remember them as lucky nor have them on you
encouraged to find him doing so much better on the day that he died
if a law of nature really does get violated, that simply means the law needs to change
face like a candle melted in a whiskey flash fire
not seeing each other for so long—how did we let it happen?
a land that pathologizes sadness would have us ignore the truth: our finitude, our thrownness
reading once posed a threat to independent thinking— and now we cannot even do that
a woman clutching her purse is the response, quite reasonable, to a cultural problem only perpetuated by blaming it on racism
that he gave everyone encouraging words any chance he could would show anyone who traveled long enough at his side, tolerant to the pep, that he himself was struggling not to run out of heart
it is in total darkness, feeling some primordial lack of border to himself and the rest, that he can pee without clamming up—and the stream thickens, like in childhood, if there happens to be that timeless echo dripping of a cave
might the spouse have proven to be a false floor only because you construed her as a floor?
tossing in hand scoops of dirt alongside the backhoe, this way he can say that— although barred from the funeral—he buried his son
the nightmare of having the two worlds, that of your wife and that of your affair, meet
when your best hope is your worst fear: that your childhood molester has other victims to back your claims
children giggles hidden behind prayer hands would render even the priest’s sermon fraudulent piety were not everything, the pocketing of bills from the donation bucket too, an expression of God
if you have ever seen, or felt from within, the drunk person's compensatory rise in energy to get every step or motion right (his meticulousness), you can see why drinking and writing have danced with each other through space and time
through the years (a funny joke becoming creepy gibberish enough to change seats), the stutterer told everyone he was the man behind Phil Collins’s “s-s s-s sudio” lyric, Billy Joel’s “cadillac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac," and Elton John’s “B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets”
sticking yourself into the tribe so that what underpins that tribe stands out against what underpins you
hoping this time, this night sleepless, to remember differently that wretched scene long ago
the former pinup model hitting on young men in her eighties still with the old having way
only a new crab fisherman does not hear the siren call to see himself as just another crab washed up, like Earth itself, by time
Existenz über alles!
the healing power of watching dance even a crush unrequited
the song you love now always the song you skip
make great these years, someone else’s nostalgia
and then the rain eats away even your name in stone
ours, for always
you too are an I
