Sleep Fissures (ROUND 12)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Royal Barn, by Areej le Dore
A floriental chypre that reads like a green, and almost Prin Lomros, twist on War and Peace—only the War and Peace part is clear only in first 30 min. This, like War and Peace, has a huge plume—a murky mentholic musky green plume with a vinous fermentation, aged-cheese umami, and vanilla-tobacco straw—you can smell it from afar.
As if what Shrek might smell like when dressed up for a ball, this leads with a pine-swamp musk: sweet-halitotic civet plus various greens (bitter-snappy mandarin orange leaf; medicinal-herb artemisa; tart-stemmy marigold; geranium-leaf palmarosa). The anchor of it all is a sweet chocolatey earthiness: sulfurous-mulch black truffles, which give off a pheromonic musk that female pigs and dogs can register intensely, and barnyard-goat Bhutanese oud, which comes from a region right outside of Assam but whose elevated terrior imparts a cooling-camphor twist on the otherwise fecal-cocoa imprtession. The bridge between these two is a floral heart built around a rose accord (smoky-dark rose and ferny-rosy palmarosa grass) and various other flowers (musky-grundle jasmine, bitter-greet marigold, honeyed-tea champaka).
Memoir man style wormwood in here contrributes to the chlorophyll vibe of the scent (hints of AUGUST 7th 2088 by Rundholz) that matches the chlorophyll color of the juice. Cannabutter texture of Black Afgano is here. That plus the truffle fungul aspect makes me think of truffle oil more than Tom Ford’s Black Orchid. The smell though is more like a fungal marigold oil. The oud is barny—but with mint and spice: more of a forest hobo’s smell, perhaps one who stole rectangular bales of hay and built a little shelter to trap his heat in the winter cold.
This is made for someone who loves Boss Number One—honeyed and pissy—but wants more animalic growl and artisanal feel. This resolves into a dominanty byut aged civet—not sharp animalic like Pinoy Sirun’s Blue Civet Dream or Aton’s Murasakino (the fragrance it most resembles) and yet not as round-nonanimalic as Civet de Nuit, but rather a lot like the honey civet of Boss Number one—only the civet seems natural in feel, more alfalfa honey than toilet puck, and much creamier in a chocolate direction: the civet, in summary, I get in both Nightfall Neroli SE (which has Ethiopian Civet added) and in Civet Prestige. I love those two fragrances and that eureka connection of how close they are (Nightfall a civet-jasmine oud like Barn and Prestige, even closer, a civet-champaca oud like Barn) makes me love this fragrance more even as it add to the guilt of how full of redundancy my collection is.
The oud in her is really wild, menthololated with a faux but very believable kinamic cooling feel. This is another impressive second wear. Mixed in with the menthol is this starchy saliva impression, halitotic. Murasakino goes urinous-bright-sharp halitosis spoken into a leather pouch of honeyed tobacco. Royal Barn, in contrast, goes minty-poopy-velvety halitosis spoken in fungal soil mixed with pasture hay—pasture hay that got dosed with citrus-flavored supplements (cows love that) after being baled with various herbs and weeds (sweet clover, which is fragrant pasture herb that smells intensely of sweet vanilla and tobacco as it dries out; vernal grass, which is widespread in pastures and gives hay its vanilla-like edge; artemisia, which releases a bitter-sage aroma when the hay is tossed).
*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.
*Worked on first and last section today
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 every culprit:
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 also at the ass he thumbed and candled), now the real “fuckin big girl” can feel—
self-bruised cervix pigging out on every avatar’s load— the mewling child in the perp.
3
Ink cheeks in her care, claws too deep to slip—she spatchcocks the butterfly, purpling
that helluva hole where splay mattered most, and hisses frothed cruelty (“Spit in her!”)
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)
