Visiting My Wife’s Family Over the Holidays (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Beauty and the Beast, by Areej le Dore
Only fourth or so wear, so grain of salt here. Beauty and the beast is similar to Malik al-Taif. Malik al-taif has more of a strong deep burrowing, rose, rugosa Rose and a chocolatiness that is very well blended. Beauty is chocolatey too (and that realy comes out in the end), but with a golden gram vibe—almost like a diesel-dipped golden graham cracker and then allowed to dry, and then drizzled with a bit of honey (like a blend of rare rose honey plsu the molasses animalism of buckwheat honey, leaving you with the most indie-style Graham Cracker you could ever imagine.
Think of Beauty and the Beast with a more gasoline bright powerful oud (of bigtime bite), whereas Malik is a more earthy chocolatey round oud (of bigtime substance). What is cool is that there is greater tension in Beauty and the Beast. Despite this bite and crazy oud there is the antique sweetness—like the honey in Civet de Nuit. I think Beauty and Beast, while lacking in the rose richness of Malik (made creamy with sandalwood and benzoin), is a better fragrance. It is more balanced and the chocolate comes off more dusty than syrupy and the drydown is less generic. It speaks to me more personally too. Oudh Infini is one of my favorite frags after all this time and this has the edgy animalic sour brightness that Malik—sweeter and less spicy—lacks. Although I do love sandalwood creaminess, I think it was a good decision not to emphasize it here in Beauty and the Beast.
*Let’s workshop this English ghazal about what Western society would see as a profound moral transgression, sexual predation of a minor--the events taking place over the Christmas holidays in Trinidad.
*An old Ghazal I resurrected from about 20 years ago after seeing Sundar, on of my favorite perfumers, post his. I added a new couplet to bring it into the social media era and swapped my ClipHunter reference to PornHub.
Visiting My Wife’s Family Over the Holidays
Huffing hamper petites to PornHub mid morning (“PYT threesome,” “cake”), my niece in-law comes in whispering “You asleep?”—breath like creamy bundt cake.
She asks for the bottle of Caroni my wife sent her upstairs to take, our duty-free Piarco purchase (“There, dresser”) for Aunt Mimi’s rum cake.
“Come up here, girl.” I pluck her eye crust and do my trick, heart starting to quake. “He does pull off he finga!”—she leaps from the bed, flashed sashimi: cunt cake.
Not one day over thirteen and yet in Carnival she sure does partake— Instagram clips, hashtags under her wining those thong bikini buns: #cake.
Cheeky Soca lyrics like “too much biting insects” to her not opaque— giggly with cousins, she stares me down: eyes gaping like sleazy sluts. “Cake?”
“Huh?” I have watched her every day suckle on her thumb with a thirst to slake. And it is still wet as she walks over—cocoa buttered, greasy. “Some cake?”
I daydream, in the middle of this “fete,” what would be the biggest mistake: Daddy’d rather taste that thumb, Sweetheart. Instead I give a breezy “Love cake!”
“Here you go.” She sits on my lap and sings, rodeo unleashing my ache. “I want ah piece ah pork for mi Christmas.” Yeah? Get it then.—Free me, Cupcake.
She watches my mouth as I finish. “You’re trouble,” I say, kneading my nape. She gets up to dance, looking back to lick the brown off her gleaming thumb: cake.
Under my mosquito net she climbs, thighs too mucosal to call it “rape.” M. A. flies back to the States. In that oven bakes a mini-me lust cake.
“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)
