MADE FOR YOU AND ME 3: hive Being (Stanzas 2018--part 3)
scent of the day: Follow, by Kerosene
Follow (2016, John Pegg)—a dusty-coffee fragrance that, while in the first blast not too far from a cracked bag of beans and at many more points in its long life evocative of spent espresso grounds, feels a bit too synthy and plasticine to read as delectable—
radiates predominately a spot-on (well, spot-on according to scratch-and-sniff standards) cup of forgotten (slightly stale) coffee next to an ashtray full of ash from a mix of coffee-infused and clove-infused cigarillos, a cup of bitter coffee that has been dosed with some spices (perhaps nutmeg, perhaps cardamom, perhaps clove) and no other cream but that from a double shot of Kahlua (sugar and vanilla-infused rum)—
the overall effect being a spiced-coffee fragrance that, although lacking the artistry of coffee releases like Little Song and although seeming unrealistic and cheap compared to Oud Luwak or Rumi or its near artisanal twin Kasturi Cola, fragcom widely regards as the most photorealistic of coffee scent (a semi-gourmand that is to Kahlua coffee what Black Afgano is to canna-oil), a scent that would be nearly identical (especially given its throat-tingly feel of burnt woods and toasted cacao and tin-can metallicness) to Akro’s Awake were it not for four facts:
(1) the animalics, although by no means prominent in either fragrance, stand out more in Follow, enough to call to mind Orto Parisi’s Boccanera (whether because the patchouli and its chocolatey musk is dosed higher here or whether there is something like synthetic oud in addition or even synthetic castoreum, which can take on a sweet vanilla nuance);
(2) Follow (due to the increase in animalics and smokiness and booziness) lacks the aromatic brightness of Awake, which comes with oil-expressed lemon peel in the opening and a citrusy-inky vetiver in the base (both of which lend a more perfumy appeal);
(3) Follow adds a (bigger) dose of maple sap, the same maple sap (almost like bourbon barrel-aged syrup, that its sibling Followed (more like Kahlua Frappuccino next to syrup-drenched pancakes) ramps up to benchmark proportions;
(4) Follow, although for these reasons darker and gooier, is less perfumy and slightly less long lasting than Awake (mainly because Awake has more vetiver, which is one of the longer-lasting natural fixatives and gives Awake a slight magic-marker edge pulling it more away from Follow’s more sawed-PVC edge).
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 3: hive Being (Stanzas 2018—part 2)
on your childhood bed after decades, the wake underway downstairs
a species for whom explaining is seen as losing, we were always anti-intellectual
if no one thinks they have an accent, what else does no one think?
suddenly better than everyone because you stopped drinking for three days
getting him back only to restore your chance to be the one to leave
too backwards for a divorce celebration
a package of chicken breasts abandoned in the magazine rack
when are we going to start banning human physiology textbooks?
resist less instead of trying harder
feeling sorry for yourself for the evil you have done, a full-on pity party in bed as if to entice some savior to swoop in with head rubs—even your conscience, no alcohol needed, can be a catholic school girl ready to grind that anal loophole
your tween daughter comes home from a sleepover with a new coffee habit, like she is in Sex and the City— perhaps just the tip of what the other daddy ground up
hypersexual and hyperviolent and tribal; remixing instead of being the ultimate wellspring; regarding explaining oneself as weakness— the black American shows us we who truly are, and we cannot stand it
doe-eyed projects of self-enrichment die come the terminal diagnosis, but why when our situation was always terminal?
cancel culture, while it masquerades as self-love, is but the vitriol of our self-hatred for being cripples hooked on coddling that cripples—and so to stab its heart is to lure babies into self-love by inviting home varieties of the unsettling for them to overcome
there is other porn out there, besides the one whose gaze gags with mascara tears
that version of yourself before the world became such a hard place to live
only ever touching your cold father after finding his body
are you really native American if you do not look like Iron Eyes Cody?
do you believe in life after work?
mole beards fluttering in the wind
Kool-Aid dyed prison garb
the addict mother asks the child “When you gonna get over it?”, where “it” means her past neglect
it is easy for her boss to rationalize blocking his ears to Lupita’s screams: ICE guns trump his baseball bat
if you knew for sure it was God telling you to kill the baby, your refusal to do it would amount to not understanding that the being in question—perfect—knows what is best
even if lions all of a sudden became peaceful, it would remain wise for finite creatures like us to stay on guard around them at least in the transition period—profiling them harder if their most popular music depicts them glorifying themselves as predators
do they want to show you off or watch you make a fool of yourself?
tomato-picking throughout the hood under the cover of night
convicted of a sex crime based on a diary entry stating mere fantasy
taking kuru, today, to show that nature forbids cannibalism is unpardonable ignorarrogance: many are resistant, and nature selects them as fittest in protein-low pockets where humans eat humans
it has been said that when we die we will be either some other place or nowhere, as if being at a non-other place were a nonstarter
how did liquidating yourself go, so suddenly, from unimaginable to the most obvious solution?
drawn together by trauma, the boy is down whenever his father is down—but this day a rollicking butterfly has drawn him away
parents, mom too, heckling their kids for reading: “Look at this pussy-ass nigga— reading a fuckin’ book!”
excising discriminatory divine commands may destroy the religion, but only for those who take it seriously (which is rare anyway)
interspecies music jams
in the midst of the shallow, callings still call
dysfunction makes for interesting
joy must be widespread for us to keep postponing dreams
harder to let loved ones go with the technology to extend them
so many extinct civilizations were “the chosen ones”
be dirty like the people and be welcomed by the people
microbiome really on point not just from kombucha and kimchi but from eating all that ass and pussy
deathbed dying tends to come in such doses that it is easy to persuade yourself, some moments, that you might just pull through
any being that we take care of, whether allowed on a plane or not, turns out to be a therapy being
the one-night stand not only disappeared in the morning, but took all the cans of tuna
non-practicing blacks
you happened to be dancing when it finally rained
dead quirks reanimated in insanity
pretty, but slow, is still okay
tending a garden to heal trauma
wanting to go to war simply for fellowship
waters only visible every explosion in the sky
hold on to the love, just let the relationship go
bubble-coat coke
compassion lassitude
high-schooler tugjobs
clean tracks down dirty cheeks
holy water pilfered—no, not for a child’s squirt gun but for a mother’s hallucinations
the knowledge—unspoken on all sides— that the Make-A-Wish teen wants pussy, not videogames and a trip to Disneyland
westerners overwhelmed by an oikophobia rooted in the effete boredom of having no real enemies— an autoimmune issue at a social scale
when the family tries to ease the dying wise man with reminders of how famous he is, they show to what extent they actually thought he was wise
in realizing you are pretty much stuck in the home underclass, for sanity you open to the beauty of those who disgusted you— and so too to yourself, since they served as mirrors all along
making by hand invites, in the meditative clearing it safeguards, ornamentation: self-amused patterns knifed into the pie crust and penned deviations from the mono-style of the internet age
