Tickle Theory Skepticism (ROUND 5)
scent of the day: Tropic of Capricorn, by Olympic Orchids
This right here is a star of the house, second in my book to the ultimate mitti frag and one of my favs of all (as well one of the most unique of all time): Salamanca. Tropic of Capricorn gives Fiona—even version 5—a run for her money, both operating in that same bubblegum floral (jasmine and tuberose) plus animalics over rich sandalwood. This one highlights hyraceum as the animalic instead of the lively swamp stew we get in Fiona. And Fiona has a champaca element, one of my favorite florals, that boosts the bubblegum impression whereas Tropic of Capricorn goes fruitier and more tropical: imagine 3 parts Fiona batch 5 and one part L’Heure Exquise. Despite these differences, Tropic—because of the balance between florals and animalics—could be said to have more in common with everyone’s favorite version of Fiona (Batch 5) than that version has in common with Fiona 6, which is more like Shrek in that the flowers are wilted and the animalics and oud have a hypertrophied place. Anyone hunting a bottle of Fiona need look no further than here. The price difference is remarkable too.
The Jasmine of tropic of Capricorn has a dirtiness overlaying it like how sometimes you have a salad and you can taste the dirtiness on the lettuce because the lettuce wasn’t washed enough, so a sort of parallel overlay to that.
*Let’s workshop this poem about how the high-pressure physical response to violation can eclipse vanilla intimacy in such hurts-so-good fashion that it multiplies the trauma into something unnameable.
*Big changes to the first stanza and made some to the second stanza. Proud of this one.
Tickle Theory Skepticism
Her unwanted arousal soon jackknifed into wanted enough for her command (“Get it! Get that shit! Get that fuckin shit!”) to leak out through the panties he stuffed down her throat (crotch first, glairy egg), past the arch—what would have been, even with the retching, at least some mercy. For this let her be loud, in it, but not quotable. It freed her from having to muzzle carnality into whispers, spiritual war, and yet it still—the runoff all guttural groan, gagged gibberish inadmissible in the court of fetal showers—cut self-stenography off from any clarity beyond the neck-bulging gravel of petechial wrath, snarling orchestration hindsight would readily neuter into “No! No!” even with all the incriminating marks against her champing flesh:
like how, hilt-greed gone hypercerebral, the cervical origin of “Balls to the wall” struck her for the first time; or like how the law “Hips don’t lie” would read the squelching testimony of her gyrations; or like how the bludgeon she swung at his head, sockets popping in her claws for the nightstand, happened to be the Hitachi Magic they took armistice turns, tender transfers, holding against her slop. But no, he stole back even this dangled grace: psychic deniability— yet not by pulling the panties out. Ass-fouled fingers lodged them deeper still, choking the say-anything-to-live loophole, and—eye to eye—he cut straight to decrypting that soul-tribe communiqué frothing—like her—beneath the torn dress of all that blubbering:
“Mmm, yeah. Knew you was a mahfuckin nasty pig! Huh? Huh?” To see herself shift like this—into bald grind work—after strokes too few—flaccid—for the alibi of orgasm, shift so far from the first pardon-window (as if this mom of two, jamming the wand button like a morphine pump until it—bogged down in the mess of lips— cycled, were less spectator, screaming to hearten the homestretch, than coach, screaming from the very first bungled drill)—how could that not square her trauma into a bucking self-revulsion unnameable even had there been no struggle to get in the mood, let alone juice out so many rounds of ceiling-fan PSI, no matter how much pill-hardened overtime her own husband put into it?
