Sleep Fissures (ROUND 10)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Gold Man, by Amouage
Gold Man (1983, Guy Robert)—a musky-floral Arabian chypre that takes me to Al Alam Palace in Muscat a few centuries back, particularly to the pillowy quarters where (under the watchful eye of eunuch slaves, pageboy throat sleeves, standing guard at the door) a sultan orchestrates various sexual acts involving not just the Type-4 nappy dugout of an African concubine but even (in what is considered harām, forbidden, under shariah law) the Type-3 curly dugout of his own daughter—
opens with sensual-fleshy florals (grandma-soap lily of the valley, carnal-anal jasmine, rooty-chalky orris, exotic-custard ylang-ylang) whose filthy-clean tension (almost like that of a cleaned corpse lipsticked and powdered for family viewing) is supercharged not only by sky-parting aldehydes (almost like how the clouds peel open like a curtain in Monty Python’s Holy Grail) but also by a combo of silken-soft woods (sweet-luminous cedarwood, milky-velvety sandalwood) and soiled-panties animalics (pissy-hobo civet, ocean-lightning ambergris) that seem to have just been hit with a scoop of laundry-powder galaxolide musk (too small of a scoop given the crotch’s fossilized crust),
this washer-suds-meets-dirties-hamper duality of an 80s mullet (business in the front, party in the back) rendering indubitable—especially given their shared jasmine-orris-civet combo of indolic talc, in addition to their shared earthy base of damp bark (muggy-musty oakmoss, leaf-rot patchouli)—a Kouros kinship that (even with its more electrified ash and lack of mentholated herbs) would have been sibling tight were its bitter-fungal myrrh to be deleted and were the other resins it has in common with Kouros (perineal-musky labdanum, citrusy-piney olibanum) more smokey and more honeyed as well as less Persian and less biblical in its stern solemnity—
the overall result being an old-world-aldehydic fragrance that, although from across the room giving hints of Muscat air (sort of like what I get from the sweet-talc combo of Siberian musk and New Zealand ambergirs in Prin’s Oqachol) laced with the mineralic musk of pounded stone (perhaps from the quarry pickaxing of slaves sometimes forced, like their palace-slave counterparts, to deep-throat kneel under a khanjar blade) and although from an arm’s length presenting the talcum regality of a sultan’s robe woven with white-gold thread and infused with white-floral ethereality carried through underbrush on a Boswellia breeze and although not dirty enough to scratch my deeper itches (something closer to the undertail of a monk who has not washed since the rains failed), up close and personal (like I like it, nose nuzzled enough to be a sexual tool all its own) it is straight palace-crotch eroticism during a more recent century of the testicle-chopping Trans-Saharan slave trade (a slave trade relatively neglected, compared to the less barbaric Trans-Atlantic counterpart, in what seems a grand effort, mainly self-mortifying, to blame the human-rights-ratifying enlightened European lines for all the world’s ills);
the overall result being a floral-animalic fragrance that, after some years of ownership and after having been blessed to smell the finest real musks most of us can only hope to access, I now frame in my mind as a successful attempt to recreate the fur-meets-sex smell and gritty-meets-silky texture of natural musk (not so much the chocolatey-lanolin Mongolian but definitely olibanum-cedar reinforced hints of the pine-powdered Siberian and patchouli-myrrh reinforced hints of truffled-skin and the jasmine-civet reinforced hints of catty-honey Tonkin, which have smelled in synthetic-accord form best in Musc Tonkin and in natural-accord form best in various Ensars and in straightup-real form in my late 1930s edition of Schiaparelli Shocking), the whole fragrance itself so much just a musk accord that it could be called the father of both the sly-and-raunchy Musk Tonkin and the anal-fixated Salome and (as I suggested in my review of Musc Tonkin) does evoke a pretty vivid harem scene in the palace of a sultan who has not only the decisive power of Vladimir Putin (one of the most famous users of Gold Man) but also the taboo sweet tooth of Marquis de Sade:
the sultan, powdered to all hell (and perhaps decked out in Persian headgear and jeweled rings) sits on a settee in his private chambers as he watches, never once having to raise his voice to orchestrate the freakoff, one of his daughters get sucked by a slave concubine before the “good little girl” herself crawls over, all on her own compulsion, to mount him while this time (usually the script is flipped) it is the black wench who tongues his perineum and sucks and slaps his balls, each slap increasing the speed of his cervix-bruising gallop, until his un-allah-ly number of spasms finish unloading the un-allah-ly amount of DDLG cream.
*This is a poem about a woman who, reclaiming abuse the way some reclaim “nigger,” carved into her skin a portal back into the womb-wrecking ravages of a man with one hell of a toddler tooth.
*Did some bonsai work on beginning and end.
Sleep Fissures
1
The mom—amoxicillin bottle four, baffled by what could keep doubling a toddler over
(foul olive discharge, frothy and fevered as her puke)— guts the home of all culprits:
scented soap, dryer sheets; junk food, synthetic panties too tight—all, save Mr. Malik.
2
Porn-pretzeled preschool self tatted below her tits (bald pussies converged, the overlap
plumb as his improv butt plug— her Gumby—and its plastic), now the real “Big Girl”
can feel—cervix pigging out on every avatar’s whimpering load—the child in the perp.
3
Inked cheeks in her care, claws too deep to slip—she loves to spatchcock the butterfly,
purpling that spot where splay mattered most, and hiss cruelties (“Spit on her cunt!”)
until lovers work up the balls to snatch the baton (“Lil slut ain’t never havin no baby!”).
“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)
