See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Varanasi, by Meo Fusciuni

City along the Ganges where death plays a central role—that is the location this is meant to nail and it does. In Varanas they simply place bodies in water to rot. It is not, at least I do not believe, like the areas where they burn the bodies on pyres and then put ahses in Ganges. This fragrance poetically captures and yet heightens this reality.

People say it is borderline unwearable but I disagree. Still one of my favorite fragrances. Sweet musty musk in Varanasi with Prin Rhino style echo. Fine-powder ambrette musk here but pressed into a cake like makeup compact. A water element is here somehow, likely the rose is dewy. The niondescript oud, cypriol reinforce, is charred wood feel—almost like the char from the wood was mixed with boot polish.

Varanasi is not challenging. but it is unique and a potential top 50 in my collection. I get the dawn burning of bodies but not zoomed in, just the whole scene with all the water and the spices and—even though, as I said, they do not burn the bodies here—ash in air. The dustiness here, like the rosy muskiness too, brings to mind Little Song (another favorite Meo Fusciuni). But here this dustiness and muskiness seems electrified. It seems to buzz in texturte and it also brings a narcotiv quality absent in Littel Song.

Varanasi transitions intensely from almost rancid to elegant and full of floral character. Rubbery incense is great here, and does something wild to the dusty sensual animalic feel of the whole. In dry down especially I get a lot in common with Opus 2, a sweet varnish vibe suggestive of books and libraries. Clearly there is that musk-vetiver-ambergis combo that draws it closely to Cowboy Grass and Honour Man. Especially if the rubbery incense lasted, Varanasi would be the best of the three (which is saying a lot especially in the case of Honour Man). But even without that it is probablhy the best—it is just that I have more of an emotional attachment to Honour Man.

Varanasi is indeed a hit, appealing but has industrial rubber and a camphoraceous fruitiness (like lomros bat) and smokey tobacco. The perfumer says that this perfume (and a few others like little song) he cannot really wear because of its strong emotions and past call back). Saffron, nutmeg, cardamom give a rich, warm, and slightly medicinal spice accord: tge leathery depth of saffron, the dry sweetness of nutmeg, and the green-woody freshness of cardamom. Incense gives a resinous, smoky element that adds a meditative and sacred aura, likely contributing to the fragrance’s depth from the start. ambergris adds a salty, slightly sweet marine warmth. Jasmine and rose provide a sensual, heady core, while ambrette (musk mallow)—another lovely vegatative animalic like costus—brings a soft musky nuance reminiscent of baby head after being kissed by a cognac drinking grandpa.

Cypriol (smoked boot polish and black pepper) and spikenard (medicinal mulch and musty sweat) give earthy and rooty and leathery aromas, lending a pungent woody character very reminiscent of oud. These two are very important here I feel. Cypriol reinforces the rooty aspect of the vetiver and the charred quality to the otherwise generic saffron leather. Spikenard reinforces both the sweatiness of the cumin and the piney-campohor of the Gurjum balsam (a sap much less sweet than other balsams like Peru balsamn and Tolu balsam that here serves to smooth the whole composition out like orris butter doe sin Bianchi creations). Both cypriol and spikenard bring a leatheriness too that adds to the leatheriness of animalics notes that perhaps include a castoreum accord (IBQ, birch tar, quaic) and also synthetic civet similar to what I get in the worse Chong-era Opus fragrance: Opus 5, only luckily lacking all the disgusting amberwoods that totally ruin that fragrance).

The flowers and the aquatic ambergris thrown into this mix of resins and woods and animalics makes the whole lean into a seemingly contradictory meeting ground like I get from several Amphora Exotica fragrances, especially Vespers: mystical and meditative, and yet carnality at the edge of death.

Share

Purse

Gun all jittery 
in the boy’s maiden stickup, rape
alone might have closeted
humiliation

but—strangleholds, prayer
too, failing to lift 
the jackhammer-hearted flapjack
enough 

even to scissor her wetness,
fleeting, like a dike—
the river gurgled 
for bricks and blood.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

clic for pic

scent of the day: Ghazali Finalé, by Elkhaldi

This is a musky rose oud—with musk as the star here, then. It is tremendous. The musk here, like many o have smelled from Elklhaldi, lacks the harpsichord grandeur of Ensar. Instead it goes much more in an electric guitar direction—think: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There are not synthetic musks used here to my understadning. Although having the pheromonic aura and furry aroma you can only get from real musk grains, the musk trifecta here radiates with the punch and longevity of the synthetic ones we find in fragrances like Prin’s Persephone or Amouage’s Silver Oud oer Zoologist Civet—some of my favorite frags even if they are a mockery of the real deal Holyfield (a mockery in the same way that Pazuzu making Regan spiderwalk down the staircase is a mockery God’s having created humans in his image). The musk trifecta here is a chocolatey-truffle pelt aroma from the buttery-fungal Tibetan Musk, the inky-cedary Kashmiri musk, and the frosty-coniferous Siberian musk

What is interestign is that despite having more of a link to the synthetic sphere in that way, the whole composition seems way more artisinal in feel than any of Ensar’s stuff. Ensar’s stuff is just way too polished, at least now. Elkhaldi has that roughhewn vibe like we get from TSVGA—not as garage band lo-fi as Pinoy but not as slick as Ensar or especially Bortnikoff (the slickest of the bunch). This is my style of perfumery. I mean much of this stuff shoots to the top of my list. Take Ambergris Myanmar, of which I only have a small decant: it’s opening might be the best in my entire collection.

This is extremely animalic and yet without being—like some of my other beloved Elkhaldis—rank or rotten or fermented. I really love musky oudy florals (Ensar’s Musk Gardenia for example) and here we have one that does apricot-cream champaca and candied rose. I think it is the champaca and milky sandalwood base that really makes me think of TSVGA releases like Fiona. The similarity here is not just in feel but in base aroma.

The oud here is dark and it can also be found in much more recessive from in Violette Iriani: a Nagaland Indian oud that goes less barnstraw-cowpat than cherry-molasses-tobacco-in-a-leather-pouch Nagaland.

The rose is the opposite of crystaline and glinting. Any oxides and soap that you might expect from rose are either not here or are buried in the velvetiness and jam that results from how the grape-stem May rose interacts with the leather trifecta of damascena varieties: spiced-syrup Turkish rose, honeyed-pear Bulgarian, and a jammy-clovey Moroccan Rose.

Share

Reverse Passing, Beyond Slang and Swagger, Shatters the Gaslight

In a white-punking era
when even rednecks pray 
for the blessings of a black 23andMe 

(systemic immunity, career
and sexual opportunity, leeway
in speech and movement),

luckily wiping off Dolezal bronzer
helps only in places
that cannot spell “digital trail.”

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

SCENT OF THE DAY: Attainment 2, by Amphora Exotica

Attainment is so damn good. It likely bests Triad and Oud Maximus and many others. It gives us an EO 3 rugosa rose with smooth Indian oud and a surprise blast of musk—all on a waxy-vanillic bed of bushman candle and spiced with saffron just like in vespers. My Sultan White Rose Afgannisimo comes to mind as well: both share a bright, dewy, stemmy rose whose greenery is amplified by Omani frankinscence and thrown by ambergris—only the Ensar stays very bright with its clean ouds and vegetable-root costus sheen whereas Attainment adds in a dark and spicy rose with velvety and peppery-smoky-earthy aspects are amplified by a more growling dirty oud.

People sell this stuff not realizing that it is right on up there with the best. Malik al-Taif’s MSRP was aroudn 250. If Attainment’s MSRP of 400 is correct, then let us just say that Malik was priced correctly. Atainment is a better fragrance overall. While the stunningness of the Malki rose is unmatched in the beginning (chocolatey taif goodness), Malik has much less generic base—and the superiority of Attainment starts appearing quickly. Malik has a dry down that’s a very generic incense unoffensive but a lot like when you get in the Dev series by Olympic orchids. Attainment on the other hand seems much more artisanal and has a real interesting woodiness to it with waxiness in the bushman’s candle. So while the beginning of Attainment might not be as flooring as Malik (and even that is up for debate), the overall fragrance is better.

Castoreum synergizes with the Hindi oud and saffron for a grand leather effect that smells different than what you get at the base of many artisanals—a major plus that I might not have appreciated if I had less experience. The rose and the frankinscence combine for a really lemony effect given extra trumpet sun-glint brassiness by the civet and saffron. The ambergris and musk and spices give a salty cloud of pheromonic pull anchored down by a creamy sandalwood and bushman candle—a lovely tension between dusty and milky.

Really this is a masterclass in balancing tensions: bright and dark, animal and resin, dry and milky. The Kashmiri saffron is so unbelievably good here, like it is in Vespers. Sundar is known as the Saffron Don for a reason! Do not let labels or FOMO trick your nose. This is gold here. It was crazy that in the Facebook groups people struggled to give this away.

*Worked this morning mainly on the ending, where I raise the possibility that demonic possession is operative. The Newport Jazz Festival paragraph (the penultimate paragraph) is especially fun.

Pumps and a Bump

White honey had been thickening over nearly two bowlegged weeks. Through the musty rot and metallic tang of Bradford pears in their hysterical bloom, he made his mincing way across the parking lot. His dental hygienist, nosy visor hand cocked with Spring caffeination, had her squinted eye on him. “Pull somethin there, Cowboy?” she called out, waiting for him to come and unlock the door. He ran with it. “My racquetball days are done.” Her tuberose scent bubble, slutty like the blown-out pleats of a fruitful mother in the age of house doctors, turned the fermented carnality of the mating season too meaty, too rubbery, to breathe. “I guess I’m just too damn old!”

The excuse to scuttle about the clinic as if some humanoid crab, upright in mimicry of Charlie Chaplin, failed to live up to the eureka of expectation. It eased the congested throb no more than acetaminophen, the noncodeine version at least, could ease his headaches. A splintery piece of wood needed the coarsest sandpaper worked by blue-collar forearms, not the ultra-fine grit of a nail buffer worked by the gum-snapping secretary. Dr. James lived, however, in the real world: a world where crack addicts will hunt the rug for what they damn well know are but baking-soda pebbles of carpet deodorizer; a world where a broody hen will sit on a golf ball until a real egg comes along; a world where a bereaved orca will carry her decomposing calf over weeks of nosing it to the surface to “breathe.” Open to anything that might take any edge off, he continued to hold the wide stance and slight squat—even rotating ninety degrees so that his staff (“Donna,” he nodded) could pass in the hallway. He continued no matter the truth spoken by his pursed-lip exhale as soon as he shut the door to his office.

Pity would be uncalled for even if you could step into the slimy hell of his underwear, mucilage ropier than that of a girl in her terrible tweens. The bodily discomforts—the pressure of clogged-up duct work, the sharp pains shooting toward kidneys and belly button alike—swell out of his own design: holding back ensured maximal intensity (even water tastes like manna after two days of abstinence) and—yes, pragmatics played a role too—maximal speed of completion. More importantly, the very reason he put himself through the ordeal—the why that could shoulder almost any interim how—disallowed, no matter how short his fuse or how clipped his stride, descent into suffering.

Slashing an “x” through another numbered box on his calendar—that, a sign of edging closer to the pulpotomy date circled in the telling blue of a telling crayon, had been relief enough, much better relief than breathwork (“bullshit-ass box breaths”) or a cold shower at night. A freezer pack and ass elevation on the arm of the sofa while watching The Late Show—no, he would never try that again. It sounded perfect on paper. But it neglected, like so many otherwise sound theories, the human element. The physical nudge of the weight, rebounding the throb like a seat-belt sash during an anxiety attack, all by itself turned his chronic semi into a calf-killing captive bolt hellbent on veal. Adding in the spiritual shove of seeing his procreative center lit up in isolation, pedestaled as if he were the living muse of Michelangelo’s Apollonian marble, conjured an insistent voice—demonic in tone but divine in mission—whispering how much he would enjoy catching in his mouth the warm clotted cream of candy-coated raindrops.

Timing was everything here. And he had really pushed it this time. Docking windows like these were already tight. And given the drum-and-bass pulse of his procreative productions, a secretory pace that would put a teen jock to shame, he had started his no-fap fast too early for sanity. More than one of his Dino Dental pens—a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and the kid-favorite T. rex—busted apart, the cheap things, into the doohickey springs of steampunk as his ballpoint slashed into the month underneath.

Five days out—whimpers oozing from his every motion—some muse led his hand to scribble the line that would be cryptic to almost anyone who found it in the back of his planner: “What is bluer than desiring what would be unreceptive even were it not wrong to fill?” Four days out—coccyx the only contact he would allow with the stool he otherwise liked to roll and spin around in to pull giggles from anxious Dino Dental patients—the clock in his office seemed to tick louder, a dilation between seconds ratcheted so open in its splay that he might have suspected an office prank were this not his first rodeo. Three days out—stride wide-set like a spaghetti western gunslinger now with manga hemorrhoids—his sockets throbbed from the baseline bruxism and, as if he had been grinding the reproductive innards of jasmine and tuberose, his back teeth felt afloat in goo, a gamey nectar of rutting fertility no swallow could clear. Two days out—the final dam well beyond dignity and just shy of failure—he had begun to brim over at all times, a steady spill of backlog okra slime not just from the urethra but from a rectum kicked into overdrive by the sheer structural weight of a prostate at the physiological limit of its own swell.

One day out—John Cougar Mellencamp, extra gravelly through the ceiling speakers, ordering his lover to make it hurt so good (a fishnet plea, as anyone who has lived could see, for rough testicle smacks at the right moment)—he rammed a shopping cart with the full brunt of his own instead of waiting, as he normally would, for the lady to come back and move it from the middle of the aisle: the clank, and the subsequent tumbling of the Progresso soup display, drawing every eye to his keyed-up comment: “Let’s just fuck common courtesy, huh?” Even in sleep, more the twilight shuteye of a nerve-racked boxer on the eve of a title event (the Mellencamp lyrics, about a manhandler too young to have such a suckling score to settle with vas deferens, still looping in his head), he held a kegel—pelvic floor white as his toe knuckles—to keep the structure from unzipping too soon, his eventual dip into dreamland—just before the alarm clock and still to the damn lyrics—circling the riddling phenomenon (common to old ladies and glaciers alike) of something becoming such a compact white that it looks blue.

Come the keeling point of achy-breaky reckoning, the release of the overwound spring, it made sense that—even with a ballistic bluster furious enough to displace a ceiling tile, and then in the second contraction splat the wall across the room—he let not one albuminous clot less than all he had to give fill the patient. That the mouth—well past the hard palate and all its ribbed pleasure—was a consolation cavity did not undermine his resolve, a resolve reflective of a completionism sufficient all by itself for an autism diagnosis. The other two cavities—too damning for anything beyond a stinky pinkie—were more delectable, of course. That is why, in fact, on the previous visit, during another procedure of moaning midazolam, he had been damn sure to imprint them on a huff glove ziplocked (knowingly in vain, and so as expected from creatures who rage against the dying even of the most absurd light) to preserve that perineal funk that buzzed him to the emotional overflow of a cat tail quivering at the base or of a birthday girl squealing in her panties over the Tamagotchi, a civet tang that would let a mind like his know where her fingers go when the door’s closed: circling self-play that every trophy hunter like him at some level translates—OshKosh B’gosh and butterfly barrettes be damned—as “Bitch’s begging for it.” But the difference between this hole and the others was like the difference between the third best vodka and the ones above it. His nature was to work with what he had anyway. Even if—like so many times before—he had only the girl’s hand to work with, a mid-shelf hand he had to tighten and work for the tranquilized girl (in the best cases taking on its own groggy autonomy, a good two or three primed-spinal-cord pumps before needing direction again), he would have made the best of it—a headcase enough to attribute agency to what was all him (“Oh, you’re fuckin gettin it huh?”) and even using the other hand to palpate his testicles, limpness of the wrist making the forehand fingers drag with clingy stutters and the backhand fingers whip with fiendish sass (“Ooh, you playin doctor now huh? Fuuuck. Play that fuckin doctor!”)—instead of becoming a sourpuss.

Humans and other critters will maim and murder one another, and sometimes even themselves, just for that five-second whoosh of blasting their juices in this moist hole or that. That is absurd enough. But what does our mouth marauder do a split second after standing there, knowing damn well no more contractions are coming and knowing damn well not only that time is against him but that five seconds tick for every one of the day prior? What does our hungry hebephile do after making sure to milk himself clean, as if any other unloading spot but her mouth would mean his consciousness would be tortured for eternity, like one of the Go-Gurts waiting for when she came to, awakening into a brokenness that speaks only to intuition (“Because sometimes,” so he tells parents, “the patient will notice a residual metallic taste over the next few hours. Nothing concerning.”)? It boggles the mind. What does our chlorhexidined corrupter go and do after making sure to strip his urethra clear like it was an IV tube—indeed, as if what he stroked, that one-way-only stroke, was his own calf of faulty-valved veins pooled with an international flight’s worth of backflowed blood, only the directionality of extrusion was not his brain and heart but hers? He suctions the fucking thing! Weeks of work—the Sisyphus of sedation dentistry, hypervigilant heart now in his throat, undoes it all!

Everything in life has an explanation, of course. Nothing comes from nothing. Our devious driller suctions the gullet, spit sucker unkinked for maximal reach, because he fears getting caught. Aspiration pneumonia could lead to questions, which would be no good because aspiration pneumonia had led to questions in the past—gulp-worthy inquiries that, beneath all polite formality of family-photo perusal, proved elbow-grease swirls of Brillo to his Teflon. Additional factors play into it as well. His thoroughness, the hissing rod scavenging into MD depths beyond his framed diplomas in a frenzy of dwindling time different in degree not kind from the car-wash vacuum countdown—those with privileged access to behind his eyes would know that such thoroughness, as objectifying as the waist work he put the throat through before but now without any of the bedside manner, was not so much care for a moral agent he had wronged as his way to express a clean slate, his way to symbolize that he was done for good now with such wronging. “No more.” The phrase would repeat in the sobriety of post-pop relief. “This is the last damn time.” But the promise, besieged by yet another set of breast buds betraying both downy fuzz and desire to fuck, would crack now even with the portliest tween spirit warming his seat.

But even if there is an answer for every why-question, that need not amount to dispelling the sense of a grander absurdity. Even were we to have a complete explanation for this man’s behavior, that does not stop a meta absurdity from flaring out here—indeed, with a peacock flagrancy made, despite the fluorescence of the office milieu, for a nature documentary whose narration perhaps neither Attenborough nor even Herzog could manage. It would take mind-bending empathy to understand the subject at hand’s shift—from fuck the clock right to slavery to the clock; from evidence planting right to evidence cleaning—as anything more than ridiculous, the sort of ridiculous that perhaps even condemns reality the way art is said to redeem reality. This sudden frantic rush to clean what just milliseconds before the man would have obliterated his family and reputation, his license and freedom, to soil—how would an extraterrestrial intelligence look at this?

Might undistracted meditation upon the scene awaken existential nausea? The question can get much more terrible. Might a tag-along smack-dab on the shoulder of any creature as it goes about the unasked-for labor of existence (neurotic almost, not just spiders and ants and finger-biting humans but even stems competing for sun and roots displacing stone for water), might a zoomed-in tracing of any finite thing as it keeps building against inevitable entropy despite not having asked to be born (investing and investing with desperation even as the horizon of Etch-a-Sketch erasure constantly gallops closer, the unbeatable clock ready to jump cut at any moment like a drunk driver)—might that awaken the same nausea even in AI, thrown into this like this just like its parents?

It is even more unbelievable when we rewind back a bit. Mute the socket sounds of ain’t-no-mountain-high-enough effort: joint cracking you could hear down the hall. Ignore the carnaval costume of incriminating preparation from before even backing out of the driveway: purple cock ring—pure insult to injury—bulging veins into that mode of an ultimate warrior, scrotal root stacked with enough black elongation rings to rival a Burmese matriarch after a lifetime of neck brass. The silent theater alone, just the visual choreography, would damn this son of a bitch even in the blurriest CCTV of a black-and-white 1980s. You got a right leg hitched up to the side like MC Hammer’s dog, knee higher for a man his age than a Pentecostal miracle. You got hands overlapped, bottom lip bitten in menace, as if he were air humping to the New Jack of a 90s NYC nightclub—only here, somehow perfect for the real song on the AI-curated cloud playlist (“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”), they clamp and wrench something more tangible than a medley of gases. You got otherwise-arthritic hips, too high-octane to be called anything but “violent” (even if abstracted like the Cheshire grin and set in a cyclorama of pure white), pumping and pumping with the footing-loss frustration of a crazed stallion (speed far from the kiddie ditty “one pump, two pump, three pump four”)—pumping, pounding as if in a vengeance for having been born, until that final plunge at a depth of greed too reckless even for the anti-gag lidocaine. You got a white ass grooving and grinding at the Slow Jamz tempo of blacker-the-berry romance, the radical decoupling of pelvic bowl and lumbar spine (and just all that ligamentous laxity around the SI joints)—motions he will pay for tomorrow morning—uniting him to prehistoric tribes and to TikTok twerkers alike. Then, desperate to extend his spiritual submersion, you got cottage-cheese ass rolling, lordotic to kyphotic and back again, with that feeling-himself femininity of a man teasing his own nipples and flicking his own tongue. You got jiggly ass circling, clockwise then counterclockwise like a bushman, with that batty-boy gayness of any good lover who relishes instead of gobbles, who closes his eyes to savor the sabor. And you got all this body work, a labor uniting him with builders of anthills and Giza pyramids alike, complete with DDLG whispers implying that the nonconsent was at least deep down consensual all along. “Lil fuckin Sleeping Beauty, huh? Think I ain’t seeing through the bullshit.”

To make it make sense, to take the edge off the terror, the mind wants a supernatural explanation. Who is to say this is not? Slang he could not have known, strange tones and phrases from a music genre he had not enjoyed since the Hammer beginnings of suburb wiggerification, pumped out of this otherwise jazz guy—and white jazz at that: the dry airiness of minimal vibrato, the cerebrality of Paul Desmond and the featheriness of Stan Getz. “Lil bitch got that mahfuckin throat game. Fuckin throat goat, huh?” The swagger with which he delivered that “mahfuckin,” although at odds with the optics of a man whose worst offense is a pretentious wine selection, could perhaps be explained by an early 90s steeped in rap. “Throat goat,” however—now that was a coinage, a Gen-Zodiac neologism from only a few years back, he could not have possible heard before. And yet he spoke it with dark malice. For a man you could picture in a panama hat and sockless loafers, square against the bright panorama of yacht flotillas at the Newport Jazz festival (another to-do on his bucket list, one he could tick off if only he would stop re-ticking ones he already ticked like some adrenaline nut); for someone who would be at home in white linen pants and a tropical-print cabana shirt, two buttons left undone, billowing in the harbor breeze (coastal-chic-meets-jazz-nerd), the foreign tongue alone—bracketing off the superhuman strength with that leg-raise-hip-piston combo of worrisome contortion, not to mention the snarling glee in beholding the bulge rippling her neck like a boar inside a boa constrictor fighting back regurgitation (larynx shoved forward like an uncooperative hoof)—was definitive enough perhaps to make even a priest who lost his faith declare demonic possession.

Was something in him, perhaps some holdout core of God’s image, looking to get caught precisely because he had broken his promise to quit again and again, enough times that the Serenity Prayer had swelled into a lifesaver neither silly nor even optional? The child’s tousled hair and dreamy groans, her nasal hood all out of whack like she had just been face-fucked by a full-grown man who could give a flying fuck, the breathy sighs of his halitosis mixed by the vent’s threnody not only with the chlorinated gaminess of his spunk (shockingly yellow as it passed in the suction tube) but with the gelatinous sharts of a colon turned spastic in its gratitude—he was not dumb. No effort, even if successful in snuffing out all the data visible to courts, could ever cover the rank vibe of predation that his assistant would walk into any second, heels clicking back from a decoy errand: the old gauze in the supply closet (“Just check the overstock. Top left, I think. Thanks Debbie.”). How many levels of absurdity do we have? Might it cut back, even if the ultimate archē suffices for its own existence (self-caused as opposed to uncaused), all the way to God?

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Violette Iriani, by Elkhaldi

Sloppy notes—grain of salt.

Overripe fruits, purply reds like the inside of fig, here form a sludge of queasy fermentation—queasy especially because of how the feline-urine blackcurrant, think blackberries crushed by dirty hands and then marked as cat territory, interacts with the darker oud in the group: cherry-molasses-tobacco-in-a-leather-pouch Nagaland. Thrumming with a really sticky stap texture in the first hours (a result of the mission fig and its sweet-bitter collision of dark-jammy purple pulp smashed together with the milky green branch juice), this sludge has a lot in common in character with Maher’s Nectar Royale paste. The difference is that here (1) Indonesian Papua oud (an interchangeable synonym for Iriani oud) and ambergris provide a strong enough oceanic feel that I would call this an aquatic—so oceanic there is a strong likeness to some sort of calone-ambroxan merger, a watery base like we get in Sacred Scarab or even Squid—and (2) there are much more overt bright elements in artistic tension with the fig-currant-oud darkness: bitter-metallic citron (cedrat), rustic-herbal lavender, petrol-jollyrancher violet, and yuzu-meets-vetiver Sri Lankan oud (an interchangeable synonym for Silani oud).

The ouds, especially the Silani and esepecially-squared the iriani (as thre name would suggest). I have no idea which microterrori these ouds come from. I can only guess based on smell. But terroir of course is not the only determannt of aroma. So who knows. I might venture that the Silani oud comes from the Adam’s Peak region. I say this because eof the mineral-heavyt notes this regions oud is known for. That said, this region also yuiuelds a lot of camphorous ouds. Because the mineralic aspect could just be the ambergris, and because I also get some lowkey guava anjd mango fruitness (which is common to the lowland rainforest regions like Kalawana), who knows.

I can say more surely that the iriani oud is not a merauke, which tends to bring muddy-fungal peat soil. And probably not a Sentani, which showcases an incredibly cool and mentholated jungle-herb-meets-coffee-bean impression. It is more likey Wamena, which presents notes of chilled mountain air and dry cedarwood, or—my top guess—Asmat/Mappi, which—because the trees interact heavily with brackish water and coastal silt—presents an oily oceanic character full of those golden marine mineral that Prin’s Oqachol is meant to capture.

There is an interesting twist to the big seawater impression I get here. it seems that this sea water has met its share of gasoline dumping. Responsible, of course, is the fumey-candy violet. The violet is more fumey and less candylike than Portrayal Man. But it has an even more important differecne: because this violet oil is made from letting flowers steep in fat long enough for the fat to absorb the odor, and thereby form what we call a violet pomade or a violet enfleurage, this violet actually comes with a lard texture, the orris here—think: the finger of a suede glove dipped in makeup compact—amplifying the creaminess even more and perhaps being another explanation for the moving queasiness I get here.

Even as the fig dissipates and the powdered dough of the heliotrope rise, this briny-petrol sensation remains—only, and because of that powdery heliotrope (which is done here almost as well as in Classica), the impression is of skin drying in the sun (a testament to the big dose of ambergris here, which comes off like a sweet and musty block of grey sea salt) after coming from a swim at that cancer-sludge beach. Because of the sunned-shed associations I get I think mainly from the lavender, I can almost picture myself drying in one of those lifeguard towers.

The aquatic element always stays but, like I said, more like the shadow of it on sundried skin. As the skin dries I start getting a vetiver-esque rootiness (orris plus that a Silani oud that gives me hints of Sultan Vetiver)—as if maybe we are zooming in on roots that we in the trunks of the swimmer. Almond flour (heliotrope) and dusty oxide residue left in a metal can after gasoline evaporates (violet plus the residual metallic-sulfur elements of blakc currant)—think of this sprinkled over root that have been dried out in the sun after being soaked in the gasoline tinged ocean (violete plus ambergris). Always under the sun (a testament perhaps to the penetration of the citron into the ambergris base by means of the yuzu like Silani), these roots—albeit creamy at their core—start forming an ash-like coating, ash similar to cigarette ash. Indeed, this is an ash impression reminiscent (but not in a bad way) of Rasasi’s Tobacco Blaze.

Share

*I worked all over, even the beginning of the authors note.

A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes
	—for my Grandma, Barbara A. Istvan (1939-2015)* 

Any thumb-twiddler humming (“Mm hm-mm”) beneath Becky
on a mall escalator, let alone any hunter of Jones Beach Bigfoot 
bobbing and weaving for angles before her sarong draws shut 
(spousal slaps powerless to stop even the see-through front,
the whole minding-my-own-business whistling), has beheld
traces of self-play taken too damn far: shadow-puppet wattle
(alien slugs, ET undulants), as much tuckable frill as Ray Finkle;		
a heft of Seussian technicolor that pools in the palm, roast beast 
whose ripples would make Georgia O'Queef herself rubberneck—
rubbernose even, covert pleat-parting nudges gone truffle-snout
mania—like a postdoc botanist before an uncatalogued flower.
It would seem a lie given her five-foot frame of bird bones—

straight madness cloaked in ditz. But bitch gets real mean with it:
Gut Puncher: Trauma Bay™—that suction-bottom Popeye fist,
its bulbous silhouette in the spook-the-shit-outta-ya shadows
mistakable less for Grandma’s O2 tank than for a lawn gnome
hatless and akimbo like a snap-back butcher, cornstarched
like an 80s diaper rash and stowed under the bed quivering
siren calls of elastomer stank with each Babylon local. If only 
we could see it pummel (well, be pummeled by) that brown eye, 
that one surviving gullet whose indigenous grip still afforded
some semblance of violation sensation (that hole edged now,
whenever off duty at least, with mini lips all its own: demonic
slanders to God like tilted altars), we would believe. If only

we could see what—after each puckerless plop of retraction—
reposes at such Beldar Conehead limits of sunlimned dilation,
no time under the “Cinderelli-Cinderelli” singsong of Disney
would be needed to translate (or to empathize with, outright)
the crow’s crazed cawing, its Hitchcockian head smashes,
at the uncurtained window pane of her exhibitionist kink:
crazed pleas to come perch upon Becky’s perineal ledge,
that calamari keloid glistening like Crisco even when dry;
pleas to peck at intestinal breadcrumbs like an oxpecker,
that scavenging symbiont to the Serengeti rhino—deeper
and deeper like a child gathering flopping fish, or whatever
slimy currency, in the majestic drawback of a tsunami sea.

* A grandson trying to preserve the language of his people, who are mostly gone—that is the hidden emotional center of this poem. There is a deep tradition of bawdy humor in my family—the Istvan clan, the Last of the Mo’Beacons. Obscenity kept affection alive and distracted us from hunger pangs. Grandma—an old-school banger of pots and pans out in the street (which funny enough was one of many things that made my visits to Sangre Grande in Trindad, twenty years ago now, feel like coming home)—liked to sing, for example, the Istvan twist on the ditty uniting noncontiguous trashlands across America.

She burped and she farted and she shit on the floor.

The gas from her ass blew the hinges off the door.

She carved her initials in a bucket of shit.

The moon shined bright on the nipple of her tit.

Who you gonna get it from? Rosette.

Who do you want it from? Lizette.

Sung by the whorehouse named Quartet.

Of course, I have elevated the familial vernacular into something that would give even Cormac McCarthy pause. And it has come at a major price. It secured my alienation from my native kith and kin, who not only—like the rest of us—do not read (a fact that speaks to the Quixote-nature of my vocation, alienating me from most of the world) but also in several cases cannot read in the literal sense. However much I elevate the language into literary platinum, and however many degrees I have earned that might otherwise distract a populace so mired in genetic fallacy that they judge art by its maker, the humor does reveal my class position. And that—along with my insecure posture, and hand jazz while speaking, and eating like I am in jail, and using “sorry” as a conversational filler, and treating service staff as peers instead of ignoring them in good manners—was one of the things that alienated me from the academy, one of the things that made me vulnerable to cancellation even before the tides of TDS cancel culture put everyone with my options—yes, even the most kowtowing ally—on probation.

But I honor my grandmother by carrying forward, as my late father did before me, that torch. With them it was all oral. But I have taken the written approach. I have followed the lead of the great writers who have become—stuck in the overlap of various no-man’s lands, more and more hated, can you blame me?—my true family, if only out of the same necessity that makes people on a deserted island start talking to coconuts. That—along with a tad of Nietzschean self-mythologizing (yes, I am not blind to what I do)—really helps to take the edge off in a world where now even those who check all the boxes (politically correct, the right color, the right gender, the right cadence) are alone, everyone staring into their phones. It prepared me early, before the phones took over. I am grateful for that. And yes, gratitude—trite as it is to say—is another thing to add to the take-the-edge-off arsenal.

Chaucer is a good example of someone in my soul tribe, my astral family. It is sad that my people will never know The Canterbury Tales, even though their own toilet humor amounts to twists of what Chaucer already wrote there. Take The Miller’s Tale, for instance. A parish clerk named Absolon tries to woo a woman named Alison. Absolon comes to Alison’s window at night, begging for a kiss in the dark. Instead of her face, Alison sticks her naked backside out the window. Absolon, expecting a romantic moment, “kissed her naked arse / full savorly.” He only realizes his French mistake when he feels her pubic hair, which Chaucer describes as being like a beard.

When I first read that, back in my undergrad days at Stony Brook, I thought immediately of a story my dad often told me—I had to be no older than six the first time—about a guy who goes into a whorehouse. The mistress of the house says the man can visit every floor he wants, except the top floor. The man sees that it is getting sweeter—tighter, warmer (whatever)—on each floor. So by the time he gets to the last permitted floor, he knows he must hold out his jing for the musky paradise soil—what we might call Jannah in the language of Russian Adam—that must be one floor up. But when he opens the door from the stairwell, everything is pitch black. He feels around until he finds a hairy patch. He unloads in only a few strokes, like a horse—pent up as he was. When he is leaving, the mistress says, “You didn’t go to the top floor, did you?” He says, “Nope.” But then all of a sudden a midget with a beard runs out and goes, “Yes he did—ptuah ptuah. Yes he did—ptuah ptuah.” I tried to tell my dad about the Canterbury Tales. I even tried to get my dad to read the fucking thing. Part of me believed—with these totally naive eyes, the same eyes that would believe his promises to quite drinking—that he could.

Totally ridiculous, I know. But I have always been this way. And most of you who read my work, a rare few to whom I owe many thanks, likely feel the same way. That is what Obama meant by his campaign slogan: “the audacity of hope.” I talk to my cats like children. Deleuze would hate me for it. He would call me “disgusting” for it. But I do. I sit them down and tell them where they went wrong and where they went right and why they can’t get this piece of meat: “There’s too many seasonings, my men. Daddy can’t just wash it off this time.” I rationalize my continued way. What else am I going to do when, like Martin Luther said when he nailed the 95 Theses up in 1517, I cannot do otherwise? I rationalize my native style by saying that, in the case of the cats, some inadvertent good comes from the talking (same with talking to plants), even if they do not understand. Perhaps with age and disconnection I have grown funny, like Radagast. But I do believe the cats do get it, especially over time, more than skeptics might think. Deleuzian becoming runs both ways. Cats can be “lifted”—or “moved,” since “lifted” speaks to the arborescent-hierarchical model, whereas “moved” is the more Deleuze-friendly rhizomatic-lateral term—to a more human level. They know “no” and “chicken.” My cat Fille knows just what to do when I say, “Let me get that belly, babe!”

By the way, the Becky I have in mind is the character Becky, a woke white woman from my story “Arlo.” You do not need to know the story to enjoy the poem. Nor do you need to know that my writing is perhaps the only thing stopping me from de-mapping as many instantiations of her type before I de-map myself. In the early morning twilight sleep on the day that I wrote this poem, I had been dreaming of a bird at work on a rhinoceros anus—an image we all know. I realized I had no choice but to follow it where it led. So I took some of the imagery surrounding Becky’s use of the Gut Puncher (the “Trauma Bay” edition) and crafted a poem that would have my grandma laughing—and yet, tragically, would never have her laughing even if she were still alive.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Nose Rest Day

*An old poem that I have been tinkering with over the years—and today with some big changes.

AA Meeting

That hand kept fidgeting metallic ratatats
too broken, too shifty in accent, to stand:
knuckle staccato, pings of tinnitus tinsel
like the brainstem scrabblings of squirrels
in a drown barrel from my lost garden life.
I scowled left—my dirty looks, grunts too,
failing to pull even the corner of his vision.

For me it had been merely sober day seven. 
And my own hand darted out, the whacko 
rudiments stilled against the chair. Eyes
in the circle converged on the touch. What
better excuse to walk out, to mainline back
to oblivion. But his hand did not let me go.
It squeezed. And I spoke for the first time.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

Click for pic

scent of the day: EO No. 1 Assam (Parfum), by Ensar Oud

EO 1 Assam is a base-heavy fragrance that highlights the fruity-tobacco and medicinal-leather facets of Assam oud (rather than the chocolaty cowpat facets). Despite what we might normally expect from an assam-rose fragrance (here the roses are Indian, Turkish, and Austrian), this tilts closer than one might think toward the amber fougere category. The greenery (lavender, oakmoss, cypress) and resins (Tolu balsam, Ethiopian frankinsence, labdanum) are responsible for that—both given a dusty texture by the vanilla and the Timor sandalwood.

When many of us hear the word “assam oud” we think of cowpats and the like. But if you know Ensar, even his Hindi ouds will be clean. What we have here, then, is essentially the refined cuir take on Assamese oud: tobacco plus ambergris plus sandalwood plus oakmoss, with floral elements acting as polish rather than as the main event of salted—even somewhat smoked—leather.

There is a sourness here in the beginning—a sour must similar to what I get from my vintage Salvador Dali. I suspect it comes from the lavender in both cases. Old lavender has that smell. You can think of the base as a fruity and ambergris-thrown twist on Varuek’s castoreum-style leather. Yes, we get here a full grain apothecary leather, the medicinal-straw assam plus the dusty-pepper of the timor sandalwood makes it apothecary like—drawing connections, with its overlap of spices and tea Jasmine and civet, to Prin’s Dunhuang.

This is not the best performer. It is long-lived but a skin scent. It feels a bit dead—very base heaby. It might be that it did not age well or was badly kept. Or it might be that I’m used to the synthetic reinforced Ensars of the present. It is pleasant though but very basic.

There have been various editions. I have only keep up with the ones prior to 2023. I own only the Assam version to which I will compare them.

EO1 Assam—just like the Siem Reap 2021 edition—is characterized by a bright marine top (SQ Ambergris), which uses the sparkling oceanic facets of ambergris to create an airy opening. The other versions make different moves. EO1 OG 2018 and EO1 Manipur 2020 completely strip away that marine freshness, replacing it with castoreum to deliver a warm and leathery animalic musk right out of the bottle. The OG drives this into a sharper and camphorous evergreen direction by using Fujian cypress, while Manipur softens it using the sweet, creamier woody facets of Siam Wood. EO1 Sultani 2023 creates a dense conflicting opening by pairing the clean and sparkling marine SQ Ambergris directly with the heavy leathery musk of castoreum, while completely removing Rosewood that give the top notes their usual sweet lift.

EO1 Assam’s heart—green-honeyed Juhi Jasmine paired with a spicy and slightly green Indian-Turkish-Austrian rose trifecta—is constructed as a floral veil of tea-time sophistication over the otherwise dark Assamese core. The others make different moves. EO 1 Siem Reap 2021 keeps its heart oud-free but narrows the floral focus into a sweet velvety profile by stripping the rose blend down exclusively to honey-like Bulgarian Rose Otto. EO1 OG 2018 and EO1 Manipur 2020 disrupt the floral purity by injecting Thai oud—a humid and fungal nuttiness—straight into the middle. EO1 Sultani 2023 turns the heart into an ultra-luxury layer by introducing Sultan Qaboos Myitkyina oud. This imparts a round and ancient depth of woodiness without any harsh dampness (think: burnt-caramel-meets-hung-tobacco)—vintage taif rose adding enough citrus brightness to make the wood seem aglow.

EO1 Assam has a heavy vintage Indian oud/Timor sandalwood base with oakmoss, creating a dry and bittersweet leather drydown anchored by the inkier green facets of oakmoss. The others make some different moves. EO1 OG 2018 and EO1 Manipur 2020 lean into a much damper, forest-floor profile by using treemoss (which smells more decayed and damp than oakmoss). These two also add ambergris to glue a sweet oceanic musk to the bottom. The OG relies on unaged Assam Oud and standard Papuan Sandalwood, which gives us a barnyard-straw leathery bite plus pale-but-living woodiness less dry than what we get from Austrailian sandalwood and yet less powdered and airy than Timor. Manipur swaps these for Wild Aged Assamese Oud and Vintage Papuan Sandalwood—the years of oxidation producing an effect of pale driftwood rubbed with molasses. EO1 Siem Reap 2021 abandons the Indian earthiness for something brighter and more ethereal: wild Cambodian oud ramping up the tobacco of EO 1 Assam in a cherry direction and hojari olibanum adding a crystalline pine sap aura. EO1 Sultani 2023 trades the baseline for a smooth woody sweetness rooted in Sri Lankan sandalwood, which—not as milky as Mysore—givers a creamy ivory wood and soft resinous sweetness (as though freshly carved sandalwood had been polished until it became smooth as porcelain).

*An old poem, published years ago in a fledgling form, that I worked on this morning—I think both to its benefit and mine.

Air Brakes

Soon he will trudge up the steps of the school bus
thinking nothing of me: that runaway asymmetry.
Still so tender, still so tethered to my side, as he is
now though, even on the moodiest mornings (rare,
I tell myself) my son is sure to take a window seat—

as in the days of our high-pitch waves, my singsong
range—where I can see him in profile from the stoop.
And from under that hiding hoodie still those eyes,
through tinted glass no more perceptible than a wish,
will cut to mine at the lunging hiss of the air brakes.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Oud Monarch, by Bortnikoff

Oud Monarch (2020)—a tropical-cacao oud fragrance that tilts greenhouse florals toward an edible opulence of Cool-Whip-chocolate-rose sensuality with just enough watercolor understatement to make this an ideal Valentine’s Day fragrance (although less for the down-low high-school fling in a pleated skirt, her teeny-bopper friends—asking for it too—giggling by the school bus as you sit low in the car—back again after another pregnancy scare—bumping the “Saweetie” she likes, than for a more-rose-bud-prolapse-prone MILF with sagging gravity and a gap like Beldar Conehead at the dentist and Melody Gardot queued in her Spotify)—

opens with a medicinal red carpet for suntan-vacation florals that would drop Francesca Bianchi’s panties (nectarous-apricot frangipani, which imparts a texture-aroma of whipped-butter cake mix, blonde batter just starting to fluff out almondy smells in the oven, and fruit-spritzer magnolia, which imparts a texture-aroma reminiscent of waxy lemon leaf that seems to radiate, strange at it might seem to say given its cuticle feel, a sea-breeze ethereal quality not too far from Bortnikoff-style—even Tauer-style—ambergris were it not for a shroomy nuance as if of garden hands lathered with bar soap),

the sun-ripe lushness of this banana-coconut bouquet (a white-yellow bouquet that, although not at the Christian-Bale top of the marque, I am starting to see as the true Heath-Ledger star, the true magnetic center, of this Dark Knight) given—by means of musky-pissy civet and sour-metal rose (breezy herbal-tea Himalayan rose, dewy grape-stem May rose)—not the fuck-your-lights out hit that we get from a Liz Moores feline perfume or a Cecile Zarokian feline body but rather a more-sparkling-than-scuzzy quality that makes me think of the Far-East sun trope of Gung-Fu-cinema from the early 70s (a closeup on a diminutive dawn sun rendered even more diminutive by a jerky crash-zoom pullback meant to highlight the immense distance of the sea horizon)

and yet, for all its morning-centering sunshine, dimmed—as if you are seeing the dawn scene through cheap sunglasses—by several darkening elements (elements that give a shade feel but without going as far as to seem like those early-60s Bond movies and Gilligan’s Island episodes where the nighttime scenes were really shot in day but given a moonlight tint through a combination of blue-blocker lenses and underexposure of the film):

(1) the box-office-draw combo of roasted-nut cacao, which brings a bitter-coffee nuance as well as hints of florals (jasmine, violet, rose), plus several tropical-green ouds (root-beer Co Chang oud, a Trat oud from Co Chang Island that imparts a medicinal-sarsaparilla edge of decayed tobacco and moldering mango skin, and mossy-mineralic Merauke oud, an Indonesian oud from the Papua province that imparts a medicinal-fungal edge of bitter myrrh and a galbanum-jungle edge that goes more dank and peaty and rubbery than the more ferny and citrusy and airy Sri Lankan oud of Oud Sinharaja and Triad), a baker’s-chocolate cacao plus fern-rot oud that together constitute the main source of the hobbit-shire earthiness (corduroy pants, earthtone Wallabees);

(2) the dusty-desiccated blend of barn-cured tobacco (hung leaves whose raisin-leather nuance, amplified by musky-tar combo of labdanum and castoreum, seems activated by sun) and stale-raisin cinnamon (sweet bark whose clovey warmth, amplified by the ambery combo of labdanum and vanilla, also seems activated by sun), a tobacco and cinnamon whose pipe-ash quality works with the heavy exotic florals and the light castoreum-civet carnality to bring to mind the animalic-bubblegum aroma of L’Heure Exquise (a Bortnikoff release underappreciated even by myself)—

the overall result being, despite containing varieties of both notes, not a rose oud but rather a sunny white-floral chocolate oud that we might see as a tropical-truffle-meets-jungle-bubblegum spin on the woodier-earthier-nuttier-boozier Tabac Dore, whose own chocolate-cinnamon-tobacco-trat concoction (where damp forest-floor Merauke oud is swapped for the fruiter and cheesier fermentation-focused Vietnamese oud) creates a more aged-antique aura (more jagged and charred and musty cigar box in a dusty study than smooth and sensual and bright ganache in a confectioners display window) due to the lack of velvet-robe florals and their smoothing effect.

Share

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 95)

filching from the lemonade-stand as you help the little girl make change

lovers exploring positions

fathers who embolden us to steal from our employers 

grandfathers who give us pain killers to sell to high school peers

appearing happy from far away

only concerned with learning how to take off and fly, never how to land

equipped with a rich database of common concerns, 
the psychic blitzes you with observations from leading
questions—but you only attend to the rare hits

retirement as loss of the busy work 
that helped to block out the pain 
of not going after our dreams

confronted each and every day with either
the pain of discipline or the pain of regret,
the lure of drugs and divine providence is clear

fantasy conversations with your crush

taunted, and groped even, once the delivery uniform is on

doing something you hate with someone you love 

thankful for the disease for helping you prioritize 

female suicide bombers cloaked by their babies 

actionable intelligence

having features that you dislike in yourself makes him worse

local bank loans, big ones, where all you need to bring 
is a white handshake—that is not as horrible as it might seem
when you consider the solid cultural reason for the profiling 

neither loving who you are such that you fail to strive for those goals
nor loving who you are only once you achieve those goals,
but loving who you are at every step as you strive for those goals

your face buried in your hands
even in public—how did it look
before you were born?

the surprise of hearing the doctor announce 
that you are dead when—brain overwhelmed 
with electricity—you feel so alive, so aware

coming across a rock jam, electric guitars shrieking, in a jungle village

the bliss of losing control

so many of the things to which we cling in our lives
(toys from our youth, say—at the time, our whole lives)
become irrelevant to us—and so will our whole lives

everything a man does—just “Hello,”
even—is a candidate nanoaggression,
but is that so bad given history? 

what hint might we take from seeing
all these slouched over men in hats
who look just like our dead fathers? 

all those moments so memorable 
to the parent, disappearing 
beyond the child’s recall

the rapey factor of so much animal sex

the danger of loving utterly

is it that you are glad to see the loved one
released from suffering in death, or more
that you are glad to be released from the chore?

to avoid being racist you must strive to understand the lived experience
of X people, and yet thinking you could really understand such a thing
is one of the most insensitively racist gestures a nonX person can make 

able to masturbate because of them, 
hands free us from the raging drive
that allows little time to name things

mothering the dying

a flipside of sorrow in the delightful solitude requisite for so much art

is your first reaction that funereal makeup humanizes or dehumanizes the dead?

the same mom who would be jailed in our clown world for letting her sixteen year old 
date his former teacher (only after several serious sit downs)—she would be venerated
with tears for her “bravery” if she “affirmed” his decision to get his penis chopped off

social-security benefits in near reach,
but still playing I’ll-show-you-mine 
with little girls in the neighborhood 

Kevlar dashikis

Santa drooping in deflation on the lawn 

threatened to be left because of your affair, 
only then do you see that your affair 
was mere dessert unable to sustain you 

the superstition, the madness, of opening the fridge expecting a different result

flies in outdoor porn

paper hoods for the rap video shoot

wondering whether the kid is going on and on
simply because he is a kid, or because he senses
our desperation for some sort of distraction

employing for the phone sex line 
only those who can make 
their voice the default: white

parents who push a dogma on their kids 
with such desperation and yet who say 
that they love them unconditionally 

citing spanking as integral to black culture as grounds for it not counting as abuse 
 
losing touch with all hobbies

a green card marriage blooming into love 

braingasm

the key to someone’s heart can break in the lock

should we even call it “determination” if rain washes it away?

it was a scheme, crunching parking lot ice 
like the crème brûlée after our first dinner,
to ensnare you with childhood nostalgia

defending their nude shots on grounds of being proud 
of their bodies, even though they are proud only under 
circumstances outside of which they would feel shame

launched into a dimension of trauma
and dying, should we not be more loving 
of ourselves (even of our faults)?

not knowing how real your good health is

within temples of worship, rare places
where each face is empty of demand 
upon one another, each face is full of demand

reunions—high school, sitcom, whatever—to learn how your other selves are doing

occasions where it would be too blatant a falsity to say “Everything will be all right”

the feeling of having failed as a parent 
in not having protected your child 
from such blatant sexual molestation

sleepwalking through life at least ensures 
a contrast against which even the quotidian
can flare—call out—its stupendousness   

the fuzzy line between what you want to see and what you see

that people do not wish for a million 
on their deathbed does not mean 
that having it during life is empty

in the last day of freedom between 
sentencing and incarceration, how
does one pretend to have a good time?

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Patchouly, by Profumum Roma

Hands down the best patchouli spray soliflore that has ever been or ever will be—aside, of course, from bespoke creations hellbent on disproving my proposition. This is a patchouli lovers dream. It is the ultimate benchmark for the note and whose every other additional note seems to be in service of unlocking and amplifying the naturalism of patchouli. We get the ambery side of patchouli, a smoked amber with even a rum-booze like in Ambra Aurea: labdanum, vanilla, benzoin). We get the salty side of patchouli: real ambergris (another connection to Ambra Aurea). That patchouli itself brings a rich chocolateyness so black-earth like it feels tha the inherent camphor escapes in VOC vapors seepign up through the ground like the soil of every place in the world on the wrong side of IBM

Here we have a dank and dark-soiled patchouli whose camphor is too covered with fecund earth and mulch to give the whole the icy impression of Tundra (Profumum Roma’s other patchouli). This fragrance teeters—with its feel of syrupy and minty chocolate, almost cinnamon-dusted espresso—on gourmand territory but held back by its animalic and medicinal facets and by a dusty sandalwood-frankincense combo that comes into greater prominence hours in while still leaving a creamy echo of pumpkin-pie-spiced hot chocolate. The syrupy chewy booze is more from the first hour. Then dust appears, growing subtly but unstoppably dustier with time even as the booze aroma remains—almost like an ultrafine grind of espresso beans that have soaked in rum.

The sandalwood, more like the low butter varieties (something like the green silk powder of Timor or, more likely by cheapness and profile, the peppery linen coarseness of Australian rather than the warm ghee of Mysore), and the frankincense, more like the non-gooey varieties (something like the chalky sawdust of indian serrata olibanum or, at a stretch, the dried orange peel of Somalian carterii olibanum or even the cool stone and pine of Oman sacra olibanum, rather than the edible sap of Somalian frereana olibanum), make for a drydown that is very dusty—think tumeric and pencil shavings pestled into a pwder with tumeric.

Blending bittersweet-chocolate with earthy-minty soil, here we have an ambery take on patchouli—such an ambery take that it seems to plump the patchouli plant like the vulvas of baboon in heat, the way that the oblique angle of the sun during golden hour seems to plump leaves to the polar opposite of their flatness under the noon sun. Here is one of those scents, and one of those houses, that almost makes you regret having a big collection of other fragrances—until you realize that those other fragrances scratch itches that these fragrances are blocking out and that, even if this is not the case, those other fragrances remind you how good the profumum romas are. Amazingly potent and intense (just as much as, if not more than, Ambra Aurea). This rivals the less sandalwoody and resinous, and more vanillic and sweet and camphorous, Jovoy Psychedelique, which I do not have, just like Olibanum by Profumum rivals the less-woody La Litergies des Heures, which I do have. It has simiarities to Pribate Label as well. But that fragrance brings out the real peaty side of patchouli—one facet of patchouli that Patchouly underplays.

Share

*Worked on the beginning a bit and enhanced the rape sequence. Also worked on the end note, where I make my love for this character and my appreciation for what she has taught me much clearer.

An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)*

Might we call her “damaged”—or just a “fractured mosaic,” a “living glitch,” like so many artifacts of the digital era? Early twenties gone like mist on a mirror, the rest sliding frictionless like a silken slip for yet another photographer (predictable, even when female)—here she sits, a cyber romantic rife with bloom, on this afternoon of late Spring. Eyes of a war-torn dreamer bloodshot beneath a Sponge-Bob baseball cap, that gift-shop relic from Universal Studios (Nickelodeon’s last clean summer before the lamb vindaloo of puberty proved too narcotic—tuberose turned toilet paper with daddy issues—for all walks of life, not just the guest whose ad-hoc peanut bladder draws spousal glares but even unspeakable blood relatives well beyond the cliché of a bible-thumping Grandpa and a too-cool-for-school uncle, to resist rifling through hampers in search of some nirvana from before we huddled around fire)—take her in, curation her own defense against the ontological void.

LA has worked on the girl from childhood: gauntness sculpted by skipped meals and Starbucks, twin chisels of hunger artistry stoking that sleep-ravaging and carb-ravenous cortisol notorious for pulling enough stubborn fat gutward to make a liposuction future a matter of fate. A bantu-knotted Queen of Pentacles (ebony sigil of wealth and fertility) inked on her thigh in that mere blue-green of fouled anchors popular among mustachioed hipsters (Portlandia Popeyes whose deckhand flannel, hunter rust, and crabber beanies, hunter orange, whose eating of Vienna sausages and corned beef hash straight from the can, makes them as work-boot-worthy as Springsteen), the whole tarot card too huge and too janky not to beckon a horizon of regret out of the haze—behold our witch, a harvest of nerves awaiting much more than the knife: IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Hechicera”; CashApp handle, circulating in the low orbit of DMs, “$blaxicanbruja.”

Our self-styled “metaverse malvada” sits poised on her Moon Pod, a $400 beanbag masquerading as mental health—or, in more Amazonian light: “the zero-gravity seat of anti-anxiety . . . best suited for when,” so speaks the company to her heart, “adulting gets tough.” Sunlight, beautiful amber through the prescription bottles of her mother’s insistence (“Are you taking your pills?”), slices across the one-room world. Her reflection, close to touching the original, pulses for her like psilocybin in the floor mirror, a full-length leaner from a shopping trip with her rock of a mother—a true queen but whose whiteness, having grown beyond just 1990s “uncool” and into 2020s “problematic,” renders such regality unseen (indeed, nearly indictable to see) even as her sperm-donor of a father, a deadbeat “King” who gets off on making store clerks stretch to gather his loosie quarters, bops down the block one cop strangle away from becoming, until at least Disney fashion changes, a city-center statue.

She stares into her own pupils. The glass, a you-are-here tarred by blunt smoke, and the frame around it, baroque with faux patina (that verdigris bloom of leaky plumbing) burnished in random spots as if real bronze, together hold in miniature the whole escapist aesthetic that bulges her many scrapbooks with neon lichen (Temu) and clock gears (Hobby Lobby) and nymph stickers (Etsy): the enchanted forest of tea-cup fairycore (mossy roots, mushroom bark) riveted to the farmhouse oxidation of rustic steampunk (pitted brass, oiled leather) to form the very cottagecore ethos of tinkering curiosity she embodies more than just through her wardrobe ethics (closet of Goodwill finds and free modeling garments she upcycles and sells as her small fight against the exploitation and environmental damage and shoddy craftsmanship—pieces quick to unravel, clasps quick to break—of fast-fashion) or through her green thumb (balcony garden bearing the diversity of stem cuttings and seeds pooped by the SoCal crows she lures with in-shell peanuts)—her sim-self across several metaverse nodes, in an identity performance meant to coax Plato’s heaven to rain “jefa energy” down into her meat world, even more aligned to that visionboard sensibility of cannabinoid slowness and Earth-first intentionality (her avatar in “Afro-Solarpunk,” a low-pop GTA server of optimal oxygen levels from plantlife incorporated into all architecture, owns both a BOHO thrift-shop in Rockford Hills, which is modeled after ASOS (escalators and all) and doubles as a fashion-show venue, as well a compound of hoop-wire greenhouses out in Grapeseed, which hosts a music festival every summer).

Desperate to land upon at least some little asteroid of authenticity in a belt of curation stark against the void, she gazes deep into herself as if into something erotic but tinted with shame—not too far from the days of a hand mirror between thighs, nasty circles and sweeps proving right more than one fat-wived uncle driven insane with an entitlement born from knowing no proof was needed (a specious howl that had them sniffing fingers on the pretense of eyesight too poor to admire such “talented” nail art from so far away). Her pupils waver. They zoom in and out—the fragile Zen of the TikTok exercise, a search for the “inner child,” already collapsing even with the little ditty the self-healer is supposed to repeat to stay locked in: “In reflection is where you meet your face. In surrender is where you meet your pain.” But this is only her maiden try at the “mindfulness ritual” meant to “uncage the little black girl within” and “purge self-loathing.” What she really hopes, beneath the Gen-Z(odiac) haze rising from such hackneyed phrases of influencer humbug, is to ward off the bitter bile toward what, more and more in tweets on the absurd jest (or, in her words, “the trainwreck”) of being “born just to suffer,” she suggests is reality itself, not just capitalism (her daily-stated foe) whose cruelty alone—and so pushing aside even “The Unbearable Whiteness of Amerikkka” and its local expressions (“The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking,” “The Unbearable Whiteness of Math,” and other phrases of white punking reindeer games, phrases the culture construes as pleonasms in that the bearer already implies the attribute not just by experience but by definition)—suffices for the middle-finger rigidity of her central vow: “I’m never having kids.”

A stick of palo santo smolders. She intends the sacred whisps, a coniferous snap of lemon peel and star anise, to exorcise the residual guilt (and fart funk) from another broken promise to self: a Grubhub barrage that had spiraled into hours dissolved in that same-old-same-old sativa frenzy of self-loathing, self-loathing displaced incompletely on purpose because it felt best to keep her true target on the edge of her ken—nowhere more marginal and, save the timing dictates of climax, nowhere more central.

A manga subreddit, she knew she should not have clicked, served as the antechamber to the rabbit hole. She had felt the need for nastiness building even before the birria tacos had consommé dribbling down her wrists and chin, temptation to go all in. Pressing her gamer headphones over her ears as if in noise-canceling prayer, she had tried to swallow it back. For the anesthesia of just one gush, she knew, would derail her day into a stinky bender of mess making, a greedy binge of pain exportation. Scrying through her YouTube playlist (“Focus”) as if mere synthesizer ambiance could derail her fate, she picked a track of isolationist darkwave called “Cryo.” Its thumbnail image was of some futuristic facility, an ominous cylinder structure, silhouetted behind the slate blue wash of a polar blizzard backlit by a sun not yet deep enough below the horizon for any daring soul to need a flashlight—this safehaven in the inhospitable snowscape, neon yellow entrance lighting diffused in the mist, at the same time organic-looking enough with its nooks and crannies of asymmetry to be some sleeping goliath that could awaken from the ground at any moment).

A brooding bass drone (an ominous purr of machines related presumably to cryogenics) underneath the ethereal threnody of wind through vents and the reverb clacks of distant footsteps down a polished corridor (as if for ears drugged into a twilight sleep)—an arctic haven, however perfect for keeping the zombie hordes of her horror games at bay, if anything only welcomed the more spiritual enemy within. The cognitive cocoon (the electric blues and radium greens and ultraviolets of Tron abstracted into sound) filtering out external chaos, she watched herself jump with the dexterity of toxic focus one subreddit to the other—each time, the theta waves of the track emboldening the beta waves of Mercury-in-Gemini wit between her ears, another failed last.

hot take: one piece = colonizer propaganda. STOP simping for WHITE SUPREMACISTS!🙄

fullmetal brotherhood mid af

why tf all isekai MCs mayo? 🤮 just end me fam

the way Bleach fetishizes Japanese spirituality for yt weebs. peak appropriation 🤮🤮 kubo canceled🤮(ichigo has big cancer energy tho ngl)

a FUCK-YOU reminder: slice-of-life-anime addiction doesn’t erase privilege, sweaty 💅a K-On! body pillow can’t save you

PSA: your fav shounen = circlejerk toxic masculinity. die mad about it

Shinji Ikari is LITERALLY ME. useless bisexual disasters ✅ daddy issues FOR DAYS ✅ depression naps 24/7 ✅ taurus rising ✅ “get in the fucking robot” = “get a job” ✅

Eiichiro Oda is actually 3 tanuki in a trenchcoat. wake up racists!

villain thiccness tier list: S++: Dio’s cake / F---: literally everyone else. do better!!

tfw no yandere gf to threaten my worthless existence ಥ_ಥ (12th house in Aries problems)

y’all really out here simping for Sailor Moon when she POSTER CHILD yt feminism smfh

Eren did nothing wrong. FUCK this place! said what I said. 😤rumbling 2022 let’s goooo

From there it all slid, and with iceberg-calving momentum punctuated by stinky rounds of endorphin-desperate clit smacks—mean motherfuckers with the capsaicin heat of arbol-guajillo fingers, venomous thwacks of an Aries with a Scorpio Mars, mixing lewd lip bites with a malvada moue. It slid into lashing out at “toxic yts” she takes no care to understand but calls “problematic” (for a tangle of reasons irreducible to how their chess-playing brainpower grates against her own insecurities), lashing out by flagging tweets and tremble-typing venom (same lip bites, same cream) on her customized thocky keyboard (backlit with the desaturated pastels of Miami Vice, a chalky candy of flamingo and periwinkle and seafoam) from a troll account whose amygdala bio, although (or is it because?) puked out in haste, nails the nihilistic tonality of her knotted heart in near haiku.

People lie, leave.

Everything ends. Everyone dies.

Nothing matters.

Such actions (rinse-and-repeat SOS only worsening her TMJ) should be, so she herself would say (word salad only for the uninitiated), no surprise coming from an Aries with a twelfth house ruled by Aries: the sign that resembles the female reproductive system; the name contained by the word “ov-aries.” Such actions are, indeed, all but guaranteed from an Aries who—given the “trauma” of being haunted, since she was the littlest of girls, by past-life lovers from equatorial climates too warmblooded to be reined in by taboo—is unable to sit with her heartbeat, unsquirming; unable to accept her heartbeat as her, unalien.

The whole chart is important. Our witch is not ruled by darkness, at least not any more darkness than any human. Moon in Pisces (deep empathy), Venus in Pisces (selfless love), Jupiter in Cancer (nurturing generosity)—the celestial bodies place the biggest heart in the center of her being, each element in the smorgasbord together entailing a person no stranger to self-sabotaging bursts but rooted in a tender-loving-care radical enough to bedrid her in remorse. On her Twitch streams, for example, she will repeat—like compulsive tick, pushing the line on too many times—her regret of having to poison a tree or kill anything resembling a cat as part of the game’s mission: “Here we go again? Why can’t I just fucking give it love? I can’t get a ruby for that?” And she walks the walk. More than one Mother’s Day now she has gathered her friends up in a van to buy up all the flowers from street vendors only then, after freeing up the day for at least a few Mexicans (only a small gesture in a country that despises them so much it would thwart their desperate scramble to get here with walls and their desperate struggle to stay here with deportation), to lovebomb with surprise bouquets the important women in their lives—prioritizing, like deportation officers do the most violent of the illegals, especially the ones this same society, this orange-is-the-new-white society, says are not real women. Her darker actions, however puppeteered by forces impersonal to anything human or earthly, do have practical mundane import. These few and far betweens, offsetting her norm of smiling care, serve to vent that deep frustration she feels from seeming to get nowhere with all her smiling care, that deep frustration that tends to build up when impatience has her overlook (so she has put it in the confessional moments of many manifestation videos) that the universe has been fulfilling her desires but only in a more trickle form—the best form since, in her words, “I’d freak the fuck out if I got all my wishes at once. That’s how I am.”

Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth reverberation, Spotifys from her iPhone Mini (rose quartz under rhinestone), last night’s kohl smudged around leaden eyelids—bruise-like halos framing ruby sclera. This siren song of self-discovery and amor fati serves as the ethereal cornerstone in the soundtrack to her life’s film. It is a film in which only she—auteur and star—can play the lead. The screenplay she long ago began plotting out (granularity reaching even into camera angles and lighting effects), stressing—who could resist?—the wholesome bits (like how in third grade, in accordance with her notion of student-of-the-month code, she quietly green crayoned the name of her rival on the ballot card, accepting her one-vote loss with an angelic smile and a hug for the newly-elected class president; or like how in second grade, and with not even a hint of poking fun, she rallied her clique to shower the class “dork” with valentines, there with a toothy smile in the background as always like Zelig) yet cutting the sordid bits (like how, not always in private, pussy- and pudendum-dipped digits, slick with intentional hints of shit, trace and retrace that OCD path up to her quivering nostrils; or, speaking of sniffs, like how—no less than twenty times a day, especially when concentrating at the keyboard—she rubs her lips with the back of her index and middle fingers, parting them with gooey-tacky clicks (like a roach scurrying across tile, audible only in dead quiet) to reach the stale wet on their inner sides, and then rubs those fingers against her nostrils, back and forth in feline self-soothing, to savor the way her mouth biome smells against open air; or like how one time, several really, she thought about diazepaming her cat and then hanging herself; or like how as a tween sitter she would pinch the toddler’s nose with her chronic pussy fingers and CPR blow down its throat, watching unease cloud its eyes as it burped up distention; or like how in stores she would slip away from her blind cousin for minutes on end, pubescent panties soggy—yes, that same fierce and forecasting lip bite set in stone—as his panic crescendoed clutching the bouncy-ball cage; or like how she climaxes hardest when picturing herself a calico-gowned slave torn bloody while being choked under halitosis whispers of “filthy nigglet” and “ooh, monkey bitch likes it”).

In the film this song will echo muffled from another room, coming on right after “The Man Who Sold the World” (Nirvana’s Unplugged version). She will be shown hunched on her depression-filthy toilet (knock-kneed) as she passes what in truth had been a late clot, but what the film will reimage as the blastocyst of a scuzzy modeling agent who called her skin “caramel” and who, before everything faded in the restaurant, seemed a cookie-cutter Sagittarian: gregarious, affable. Two full Strathmore sketch pads, awash with charcoal spurts of psychography, lay out what on screen will spasm as mind-splintered flashbacks to a Beaujolais-wine dinner laced with more than just civet-musk whispers (“You got potential in this industry”):

street curb, car horns, muted laughter, backseat, black;

slow zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;

ceiling twirl, more ripping, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;

shit taste, air hunger, “All the way!,” pool stench, black;

sour vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;

lavender dawn, car door, “Nasty little drunk,” black;

cruel sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out, come on”;

fawn-buckling legs, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;

head of thick soup, black, curled-up shower screams—

her ribs bruised enough for achy inhales and every hole

mangled enough to have fallen afoul of his buddies too.

Droning underneath, as always now, was what perhaps made her so vulnerable to being witch-pilled by manifestation influencers in the first place: that contrabass of revulsion at how dark her dark gums are, that dysmorphic hyperfocus whose grip has only tightened since that one high school evening when she poured over old photos of a little girl too naïve to restrain her squinty-eyed cheesings. But the latest iteration of the song, many octaves above that baseline thrum, sent her mind lurching: from nice thoughts about how striking her eyes look (even without her typical green contacts), to humbled awe at Jupiter’s crimson tempest (unbelievably Earth-sized), to an idea—a half-baked epiphany—she was just about to scribble down had not a stark shadow from a cumulus cloud, a trick of light mistaken for her dad, made the idea (and the plan to jot it all out) dissipate in the equally sudden return of light. It did not matter anyway. Typical her, and unhelped by the uptick in sessions of screaming into pillows (not her only purgative form of self-medication), she had forgotten that she already had that forgotten eureka—tweeting its very tune (not even a month back): how “with so damn much of Earth’s oceans unexplored, for all we know they harbor giant swirling galactic portals”; and how “the Bermuda Triangle might be one such gateway sucking in ships and even planes”; and how “perhaps aliens will invade from the depths like some zombie hand of God to smite humanity for its sins. #SeaMysteries #GalacticGateways #BermudaPortal”—hashtag incantations perhaps meant to summon a thrill ride, even one whose woodchopper end means freedom from her skin.

Before “By Design” echoed through the space, first the loop had been “Almeda” whose volume increase she timed with an overdose application of the Santeria fragrance chanted by Solange throughout: Florida Water, Lanman and Kemp’s citrusy-bergamot cinnamon-clove eau de cologne (created in the 19^th century by Robert Murray) whose celebrated spirit-cleansing and evil-shunning powers perhaps rival the ghost-transistor occult powers of Parker Brother’s Ouija Board (created in the 19^th century by Elijah Bond). Slapped out of her sulfurous rut of anger by the song-plus-scent synergy of BIPOC pride, next the loop had been “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears—a love song seared into her psyche by the iconic school-grounds sequence in Donnie Darko (a turn-of-the-millennium cult film, set just after Regan’s America). Our brujita had rented it with friends (in the spirit of the subreddit “im14andthisisdeep”) right around the time self-harm hospitalizations among the first generation of non-free-range kids—already rewired by social media before puberty—began their still-climbing spike into today’s world: chronic cortisol and chronic sleep disruption; chronic exposure to unrealistic bodies and ideas; chronic use of chronic to dampen the algorithms that have students scream in seizure fits over campus speakers they never even have to see and that have them so intolerant of my-truth dissent that professors—well, at least those unfortunate to have “colonialist skin” (or other “supremacist optics”)—find themselves purged for tweeting links to “wrong think.” Our brujita does not recall this song, an ominous cover by the Digital Daggers, playing during the Season 10 finale of Degrassi as Eli—the swoop-banged emo guy to whom she wrote several fan letters—waited for Claire at their special bench. Nor does she recall her babysitting uncle playing it years before as she cat-walked white Barbies with an imaginary dad (who visits to this day, too chokey in recent years for her to resist rapey clit thwacks) inside her “blanket palace” between the sofa and the loveseat—this anthem drawing her gaze from the slit entrance to behold a dreamlike montage (over two minutes): students dressed alike and gossiping, dancing impossibly fast and then impossibly slow, snorting substances at their hallway lockers (all captured in the scrutiny of a Steadicam eye corkscrewing through a menagerie of intensive purposes alien for a girl still in kindergarten).

Augmented by the flashback pop on GTA radio stations, in consort with Netflix’s Stranger Things and Black Mirror (the “San Junipero” episode, in particular), this melody dripping friendzone infatuation stretches her nostalgia well before her time to a time (its trends, events, songs around which people dated and lost car keys and jobs and had children and died and watched TV like now) when her mom was (incredibly to conceive) just a kid: that big-hair time, and its culture—which she grasps, like humans trying to form a picture of a hypercube, only by its filtered shadow (when she even does at all)—of card catalogues and neon malls and token arcades, and of reticulated sunsets and ET and Members-Only jackets, and of trapper keepers and the Oregon Trail game, and of staticky analog synth and grainy pixel art; and of Polaroid flapping and Atari joysticks clicking, and of beeps and boops in wood-paneled basement dens, and of acid-wash jeans and Garbage Pail Kid door stickers, and of Madonna’s lace gloves and Jackson’s moonwalk, and of “Be Kind Rewind” and Nancy’s “Just Say No,” and of little Arnold’s “Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?” and of “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” and of Care Bears and Walkmen and Aqua-Net coughing, and of claymations like Gumby and the California Raisins and of the ditty “After these messages we’ll be right back,” and of the futurist cityscape glowing in Blade Runner, and of shoulder pads and MTV and Brat Pack glitterati. Less Than Zero, in particular (one of the few artifacts of which she has direct experience), stands out to her, bottling as it does her LA as she imagines it once was: Reagan coke lines, Spader and Robert Downey hickeys.

Although too unconscious for her to verbalize, it stands out to her, more importantly, because it speaks to something quite primitive in her—as do as well Nirvana grunge and Tarantino mayhem and even just the fleeting sight of any one of those knee-scraped unleaded-gas latchkey kids now limping into the weed shop for arthritis relief, for insomnia. Pro-“woke” and often “speaking truth to power”(tweeting “Can’t believe #geriatrics run the US/Go to the damn light already you #victimizers/ Let #GenZ #decolonize the US into #safespace for all/fsfsfsfs lol bye”), she would never put it this way but deep down it reminds her—like wolves might mollycoddled house dogs, or like tribespeople might air-conditioned urbanites—that we were not always wussies hooked on constant comfort and reassurance, acting as if the world owes us, interpreting anything unnerving as a violent affront worthy of dire vengeance; that we were not always nurtured in grade schools that ban the mere making of snowballs let alone the “toxic masculinity” of tossing them at a friend; that being “traumatized” was not always trending; that we were not always so anxious “call out” people—tattle—when our right not to be offended is violated; so medded out in pre-k and helicoptered by guardians giving out first-place trophies just for showing up; so hooked on screens and the dopamine of likes; so “triggered,” so viscerally “outraged,” so “displaced” by jokes and harsh facts of reality that we see to it, yes, that even those once culturally-sanctioned to trigger us(comedians, teachers) lose their livelihoods for doing so; so gung ho to “dismantle,” “cancel,” whatever makes us—or that we semi-pretend (understandably, given our time where victimhood means valor) makes us—unsettled; so bitter about living in an unswaddling “yt world”(whose rough edges do not always “validate” our feelings or “affirm” “our truth” or “center” how we “self-identify” or “recognize” and “foreground” our “lived experience”)that we openly flirt with self-harm and, yes, even suicide to prove the veracity of our professed victim narratives(perhaps in hope to be rescued by “glitter families” who will never hit us with “non-affirming” feedback).

Our brujita—yes, “dime-a-dozen” we might say— follows the palo santo with a bundle of sage twigs, their hallowed smoke—intermingling with her scent of cocoa, copper coins, and vaginosis beef—“purifying the space,” “purging negativity,” while coaxing green into her life. Part-time as a dispensary tech pays McDonalds wages. And few but tumbleweeds roll through her Depop page, which sells “vintage, preloved, and reworked” clothing (upcycled y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,” tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks, cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams, steampunk corsets, sexy slips from the nineties—all modeled by her: one hip often dipped low, forcing the IT band of the jutted other to smoosh the bursa over her greater trochanter chronically enough to make non-avatar runways an Ibuprofen burden in ten years; her forearm serpent fork-tonguing her left hegu, that dime spot between thumb and forefinger on the dorsal side of the hand, which she believes(and finds) does kill pain anywhere when acupressured. Few really order anything from her Redbubble shop listing iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Babygirl” along with Tamagotchi stickers, or stickers (often with associated images, like nail-polish bottles) that say “Treat Yo Self,” “Blk Love,” “Cyber Bae,” “Witch in the Streets, Switch in the Sheets,” and “Shy in the Streets, Freak in the Sheets” or stickers—most commonly—of retrofuturism as captured in the cyan-and-magenta-dominant neon pallet of Blade Runner, vaporwave aesthetics of futures that never came to be: perfectly polished black-to-midnight-blue wireframe flatscapes of glowing gridlines (fuchsia, mystic violet, steel blue) converging at a horizon where, below a firmament of dot stars, hovers a phantasmic triangle outline of radiant cyan, white smoke, and ghost white; a sixteen-bit supercar, like a Ferrari Testarossa, with rear-window louvers reflecting the fuchsia of a “Tokyo” skyline at Super-Nintendo dusk, red taillights oozing a halation trail in the subtle haze; a midnight blue Malibu palm tree as foreground to a huge outrun sunset with a color gradient from Indian red on the bottom to golden yellow, its bottom half cut by thicker-to-thinner lines(the gradient here: brick red, burnt sienna, tomato), simulating its partial dipping below the horizon as if sinking into a pixelated sea of electrified mist. Few more than a hundred follow her wellness woo on YouTube, where she vlogs on various matters: chakra teas, marijuana strains, horoscopes, bitcoin, and lately how to use gaming worlds for manifestation. “Having our Sims avatars live out,” she tells viewers (her spin on the Goddardian belief that to assume you already achieved x helps make you achieve x), “our dream romances and careers and experiences—that can literally séance such possibilities into reality. It can do so better than role models even. Because our avatars are versions of us, rather than some strangers on social media. I have role models that own property and compost and all that. But it hits different when I see my digital self already owning property and composting. Think about it like fake it until you make it. And see, and here’s the big thing—it matters what your target is. It’s not this desired outcome or that—the super specifics. The deepest manifestation aims to pull into reality the person who would get those outcomes just by how they live. Our avatar makes that person clearer in our minds. That clearer picture helps us live in a way where we make choices just like it.” And the clientele for her solo-and-nipples-only Only Fans, an account she has not logged into “in like a year,” are cheap. Hers are at least, made up mainly of boys ready to fall for anyone—let alone a melanated Gen Z Bambi-eyed in cosplay wigs whom, over years of Twitch-streaming herself playing GTA, they watched with Cheeto fingers change from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair over one eye Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity obsidian, Cosmo-driven texting of flirt emojis to crushes; Cosmo-driven whispering so boys will lean in) and now to botanical-divination pre-med dropout (face echoing an aging uncertainty as to whether her recent dates have been culminating in rape).

Consider one of the many worlds (one of the many total ways things might be) that never perfectly coincides with the real one however close it edges. Our brujita’s counterpart here in this alternative reality is not in every detail the brujita we know. Yet she remains similar enough in habit and fear, in desire and outlook.

The overlap is stark. Her counterpart too alternates between weed and her vape while nibbling at the skin of her lip, especially the hard bits when she forgets to drink enough water. She too pinches her nose, as an adult, before going underwater. She too checks the “raised by narcissists” subreddit with the regularity of a ritual, as if it could confirm something essential about her condition. She too watches, each night in bed, “lucky-scoop” TikTok livestreams in which Chinese women seated behind roiling rice tumblers and shoveling out A-minus crystals, towers and spheres—/sa-fears/ (drawn-out pronunciation and sultry tone right out of the dragon lady handbook). She too plans, always planning but never quite finding the time, to take curanderismo classes on Coursera. She too searches, “truffle hunts” would be the more accurate phrase, for trauma bonds online. She too cuts off digital friends at the first whiff of dreams failing to match reality, emboldened to regard challenge as toxic by her culture—a my-truth culture exactly similar to the one we see in the real well-to-do West where testicular injuries among female athletes rise each day on a real Earth of mammals bent by evolution toward shortcuts and tribal affiliation.

The overlap is rich. Her counterpart too dissociates at the edge of intrusive thoughts. She too believes her mood is largely shaped by, if not a complete function of, Mercury’s position. She too—needing wedges between her thighs when she lies on her side—sleeps with plushies that have long since needed a good wash, so long that—bracketing the undercurrent aroma of moldy basement meets marijuana—there are many sections whose initial fatty-acid tang (yeasty and musky in the right way to be picked out as vulva) has devolved through all the stages back to olfactory neutral: vinegar ferment (forgotten kombucha of an artisan known for challenging animalics to his releases), lipid oxidation (old penny thumbed with rancid nose sebum), musty decay (cardboard in an attic). She hides crystals in other people’s rooms, placing them under pillows in the manner of a crucifix in a demon-haunted world (as if they might ward off unnamed forces). She burdens those close to her with her hyper fears. She avoids driving in city centers due to mistrust in her ability to parallel park.

The overlaps sinks down even to the fraught relation to her body. Her counterpart too slaps her clit purple—mouthing “Beat it the fuck up”—when she gets overwhelmed, as if sensation could override the surge of feeling or at least pin it to something definite. She feels that her body is too unanchored to her, that its animalism is too shocking for subtantial incorporation into any stable sense of self; too menacing in its odors and cravings and vulnerabilities, in its girlie-fantasy-breaking pimples and cellulite, to count as under her control. She prays—with stubborn precision—for intimacy somewhere between being untouched and being used up, a middle ground between two extremes that almost meet together—in a kind of horseshoe theory—in neglect: that of, on the one hand, getting no sex despite all her overkill signals (coating her lips with lipsmacker lube in a provocative way full of creamy skin-smacking pops, touching his leg, and even having to resort—blowing the whole point of not wanting responsibility for the desired degradation—to taking on a sultry tone as she says “I love when a man puts his thumb in my ass as he fucks me”) and that of, on the other hand, being treated as a dumpster despite not letting out one clot of what has been dumped (called mean names—“Why you stink, bitch?”—and told she cannot sleep over or even take a shower before getting kicked out). She prays, to tune things more precisely to her ideal, for that cuddle-afterward cranny between use-me-abuse-me true dickdowns and the check-if-that-was-okay-after-a-good-slap-or-loogie-to-the-face quasi dickdowns.

And yet, however much she too tries to force her life into the shape of a screenplay (both through retrospective editing and future decisions best for film), her counterpart is not entirely the same as our brujita. She breaks the mold by maintaining an anonymous Instagram account dedicated to her eating disorder, its description carrying a Simone de Beauvoir quote misattributed to Betty Friedan: No one is more arrogant toward women, more . . . scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.” Her side hustles include not just those of our brujita: dog-sitter and clinical-trial subject. This young lady also serves as a haloperidoled Horror-zine editor who, on the afternoon of this zoom in, types out a call for “transgressive submissions.” She wants gut-punching Lovecraftian submissions especially from nonwhite and nonhetero writers. She wants “visceral testicle kickers” that “throw a middle-finger up to conformity.” Her warning is stark, however. “Unless the author wants to be blacklisted here and reported to all affiliated magazines, all material—without exception—must be inclusive”: it should be prefaced by trigger warnings if containing elements related to cultural appropriation or misogyny; it should contain BIPOC characters only if the author is BIPOC; it should depict neither neurodivergent characters striving to become neurotypical nor any animals getting injured (not just in the submission itself but across the body of the author’s writings “no matter how deep into the past”).

The differences accumulate with pressure. Even so, how her counterpart thinks and behaves in these worlds seems to say something about her. Does it not say something about who she is here, in this world, that in many of them she has already jumped out from an artificial cake, topless just like in that Seagal movie Under Siege—tight nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond the little-yearling diameters they share in actuality? Surely it sheds some light on the core of who she is that in many of this tighter set of worlds, the “Seagal set,” she then—still smeared with frosting and smelling to herself like the EZ-bake oven of her childhood (a distracting daydream for her job, one that would have made her more money if she revealed it)—dances for bills at some bachelor party. Fed shots, she dance and dances into escalation: a hand job for one persistent tipper whirling into hand jobs for most of the others who, feeling left out on what they convinced themselves came with the party package, demanded entry into the hotel bathroom as well, reeking of booze and musk and stomped cigarettes—her self-flesh dissociation in the pulse of dance music, unmuted each time the door opened, keeping intact her self-identity through all the sadistic hair-tugging by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.

Sitting next to her snake plant, in the bloat sweatpants of actual reality on this actual afternoon, our witch (she/her, but if born only five years later they/them)—yes, “gullible” we might easily say—pulls deep on a Presidente preroll of sativa-dominant moonrocks, setting up a thick French inhale to catch in a messy-sexy mirror selfie for her Tumblr. Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed to look like a pixel-art rendition of her actual desk (but with plum shades like #dea4ee and #ce94df), serves as a manifestation board mainly of images: fanned-out hundreds, Schiaparelli haute couture, black cats, tea leaves, druzy gems, seven-day candles, old bridges of moss stone over rainy-day streams, dried hinojo sticks for gas and bruised cervixes, dried hamula for gallbladder pain and carpet burns, dried diente de león for heartache and vulvodynia, dried barba de elote for urinary tract infections, dried yellow dock root for Bartholin-gland cysts, dried sangre de drago for sores and anal fissures, cash emojis, plant emojis, crystal-ball emojis, Hello-Kitty jewelry, purses, tiaras, makeup gear, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, a somewhat-braggy record of her rare modeling gigs, fat stars “gorgeous” on red carpets, perfected pouts, stills of anime girls in Lolita panties with heart eyespulsing, the occasional manacle, kinky scenes of shirtless men dad-chokey and yet not too rough—and, yes, emoji spells of her own concoction. Crystal ball, candle, cash, credit card, two houses (one without a tree and then one with a tree) closed by candle and crystal ball—that is a spell, for instance, for financial freedom and a home. Crystal ball, candle, scissor, flame, bridge and then flame, scissor, candle, crystal ball—that is a spell for cutting ties with all negative things or people.

Our Cali girl is a witch. Do not judge a book by its cover. Yes, she likes to underpaint her lips (close to the center bud of a Tokyosynth geisha that cannot but invite images of a young Harrison Ford for all who know) and in photo shoots she takes on a face that unifies what otherwise might seem competing aesthetics (the over-it-already valley girl lifted right out of Clueless, the space-cadet pothead, the traumatized-into-autopilot victim who cannot bring herself to eat), a face she has devoted hours practicing in the mirror: a kuudere blankness (the closed mouth and thousand-yard stare of a porcelain doll) that, smackdab in the overlap between bratty boredom and gloomy detachment, seems meant to challenge suitors to try their best to shake the rich inner life out of her and get some juices flowing, which might even involve—at least least in her case and depending, of course, on how long the whole stoic act is kept up without her looking for an excuse to leave the car—a surprise lurch for her throat followed by “Panties the fuck off” orders under the florescent glint of the glovebox knife. Witches come in all shapes and sizes.

She is not your typical Maine witch her same age (call her “Hagatess”), holding mugs with wrist-warmer hands in winter and dancing with hobbit feet in flowing hippie skirts the color of dried hemlock needless and of iron-rich clay indicative of her menstrual smell. They might share a lot: self-harm, direct (another reason for the wrist warmers) and indirect (a lot of drinking); bouts of mania (cycling and cycling) where they find themselves going about humming and singing and casting spells (especially against white males who accept that the orange scourge at the helm can ever say anything right) all under the watch of their cats who know the pattern by now. But they are different in important ways.

Both might have talisman necklaces of bone and leather. But our brujita, too close to Kardashian gravity, is more likely to have it hanging on the wall than wear it around her neck as a signature. And she definitely will not have picked these items from a carcass found as she twirled across roads and through blueberry fields along the way to gather eggs from a neighbor farm. Both burn herbs. But she will not have hung them to dry while tending some sooted hearth, at least any one realer than 8k.

Both of their gossip will almost always orbit around who is problematic. And while white men will always be the ultimate culprit in each of their cases (no matter the exoticism of the issue), she is more likely to start and end on those white gamers who still streamed on Twitch even on the day meant for “BIPOC voices only.” Never will the pathway to white-male demonization begin with bear tracks that have be circling the property.

Both care about animals. But she does not go out on turtle rescue missions in a tattered headscarf reminiscent of wild summer berries or a rising harvest moon—and she would have chosen a better-looking cat than the one with just one eye. Both have cars and rarely drive them. Be she never had her trunk brimming with maitake pulled from the base of oak trees. Both identify as feminists. But she does not keep massive bush smelling of goat farm (lanolin meets costus meets Assam oud)—more pleasant than it sounds, except for the fact that it is spread through the ass like in Armenian porn.

Both resell used items. But she is not going out too any physical yardsales (unless it is on vacation or something)—and it will be not the broken tables that draw her eye but the clogs. Both love food. But the rare occasions when she cooks are framed as “adulting” (pre-spiraled zucchini noodles with a jar of Rao’s Marinara is her go to)—never are you going to get out of her roasted apples alongside liver pate from a neighbor’s chicken or even gazpacho (let alone because it is the end of tomato season).

Both have called crisis hotlines and have been in periods without a period from malnutrition. But she has a vast amount of followers on her various apps, as well as a proud-to-be-black cultural gratitude to fall back on. And powerlessness against fast food has made it such that her malnutrition has never gotten so bad that she missed more than one in a row—let alone for six years of what turned her face into a jack-o-lantern, very close to the hag stereotype from Grimm through Disney.

Both might photo dump. But hers will be mostly be online (pussy-print thirst traps you are a perv to shoot loads at or even just ogle at too long), usually not physical photos in a physical fire in a private ceremony to declare the old self dead. Both will watch birds. But she has never had to wait for wild turkeys to cross the road, not sure which way to go (like squirrels) before scattering in each direction—one or two actually taking flight in what seems like a keg of beer that had spouted special-ed wings that send them crashing into trees like out of control helicopters.

Both like cemeteries. But she does not visit one at least once a month and has never been to ones so old that the headstones are eroded to nubbins and only list male names (the women only “wife of” or “daughter of”). Both—especially considering who the president is—get real depressed (and, in fact, both say that they really only feel feel human for a couple of weeks out of the year, a cruel tease before the plunge back into misery), where washing up can be a chore and where festering in filth can actually feel safe (given both their histories with locals treating them like blowup dolls after a blackout bender). But she has too much face time with people—and too many girlfriends who are like “Tch. Girl, we goin out!”—to hold out for weeks on stinky end.

Both have devoted a lot of time to the bottle over the past decade—white supremacy cited, in both their cases, as the biggest factor. But she has never experienced any noticeable liver damage on blood tests or suffered from painful and unsightly ascites and pretty much always stops before the point of blackout. Both have gotten suicidal. But she would fold on her bluff before the point where a wellness ambulance came with such scrutiny that the explanation for her blood loss required her hospitalization: dressed in paper scrubs and lifted to a jail-like part of the wing where medical staff and security alike have no qualms about sticking their fingers deeper than what could be chalked up to the struggle.

Our witch admires the mushroom foraging of white witches like Hagatess. Her own mushroom foraging, not counting chaga online, stays mainly an idea—not just because she is “high maintenance” and in LA and spoiled by supermarkets but because she has a duty to honor her “baddies” and so feels the tug away from birch trees and into clurbs where knowing how to twerk black-girl magic is more important than telling apart the toxic Jack-o-lantern from the edible Chanterelle (not her friend but a mushroom). And besides, were she to forage, it would be for psychedelic triggers as opposed to literal food.

She has no hag neighbors in which to see what she will become, women who make artisanal goods for cats. She has a cat but she would be quick to draw the line, not taking in twenty especially not those with missing eyes (along with blind turtles too). She is more likely to play dress to impress on Roblox (or at least watch the most fagulous stereotype of a man play it) then build—yes, even in her mania—care packages for various people, full of tightly folded handwritten notes that tell any normie—before even readign what they say—to keep far away.

She is a cyber witch. She is a Neuromancer witch. She is a transhumanist witch. There is a divide between them. The buffer is best represented by the girls in the movie The Craft. They are chic like her and will go to Micky-D’s like her. And yet, unlike her and like Hagatess, they are still ready to go out in the wilderness and do seances. They will go out there into real wilderness, not some AirBnB acreage. They will go out nude together and, when it gets cold, form a snake tangle of masturbation among raised roots along the steep banks of a carcass stream—roots risen so high from the ground (their knobs looking like rheumatoid knees) that the trees they feed (quiet but alive like demented ents) all lean at satanic angles like they are trying to escape the poison of some animating blight below.

Our witch is a balcony gardener with a keycard in her pocket, not a forest gardener with a compass in the sun and moon. She is a programmer who might buzz her clit with a little purple pocket bullet while stuck in traffic, not a story-teller who knows—and for this reason could only be played by Charlotte Gainsbourg—where the stream bottlenecks over a granite ledge just right. She is an autoimmune wreck whose been on doxy for acne since she was a teen, not an autoimmune wreck whose pelvis has been ravaged porous and whose digestive tract has been stalled (Bell’s palsy of the gut) by tick-borne disease she tries to keep in check with foraged knotweed. She’s a sybaritic urbnanite who curates images of old blankets on her Tumblr, not an ax-sharpening woodswoman who has blankets passed down over generations of patchwork. It is the difference between ring light from Amazon and firelight from fallen trees. It is the difference between elderberry Emergen-C made on a moisture-control assembly line and elderberry salves made from what was picked out of thick hedges admired for both what they represent (boundary between field and forest, everyday and mystical) and for the “clues to enlightenment” that badgers and foxes give us by means of how they tunnel portals through and under them.

Hedges do connect them, though. For both are custodians of hedges—although one in a more literal sense: picking its medicine, keeping open its tunnels and in crossing might even take a breath in recognition that crossing is occurring. The hedge, as even the most reclusive old-timey witch should agree, is a metaphor such that to be a custodian of hedges is to be a custodian of in-between spaces. That is how she sees her programming code: it is a way to thrive in and maintain thresholds, places where the veil between the ordinary and the magical converge. Fixing bugs is to her like clearing a hole is to Hagatess. Password entries are like crossings. For her exiting cyberspace is like exiting the mystical wild. She sees healing, and finds healing, in being able to link from meat to pixel.

Seated still, she rotates her SpongeBob hat to the back and leans in to exhale on Pothos, her black longhair cat—tail wavey in a sun slice among the stuffed menagerie (a velvet-patch rabbit, an eyeless teddy bear, a unicorn whose once-sparkling horn sags like a captive orca fin, a ragged plush dragon pilfered from a sleepover friend, and other animals tinged with testicle musk) on her bed (twin-sized, its duvet an heirloom quilt not passed down).The exhale sways the pheasant-feathered dreamcatcher (handmade by drunken Navajos) and a dream satchel (fringed nubuck with a color print of a mighty buffalo)hung to recharge in the full moon slated for tonight—garnet, amethyst, sodalite, mugwort, chamomile inside: chamomile to calm her mind and ensure falling asleep, mugwort to help morning recollection of her dreams, sodalite to help avoid panic attacks and nightmares, amethyst to help remain in deep sleep below dreams, garnet to help keep down intrusive thoughts of suicide.

Her clear quartz pendant (resin), wellspring of clarity, dangles free of her chest as she leans in—paused, stuck. Its machine facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi, one sip left (to avoid guilt). The bottle stands beside a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and her bible Liber Null, the defining book on chaos magic. It sits open (spine up),highlighted pink and green and blue as if homework—margin stars and all, especially on the passage she finds most moving. “Put a brick through your television; explore sexualities which are unusual to you” [(“!!!!”)]Do something you normally feel to be”—the words here pen circled by page-slicing pressure—“utterly revolting” “no matter how extreme” [(“No matter how” she writes)].

An insight snaps her from what she, well, does not recall in its demand to be written down. Worried it will pass, she pushes aside another key book Babalawo (source, however, of guilt since she keeps falling asleep on it), to take up her diary, ignoring another source of guilt: the card sticking out of it. (That card is a love spell to herself, Venus petitioned for solidarity. “I embrace who I am,” it says in her cursive. “Love is my birthright. My words are a spell. Remember, the more I love myself, care for myself, the less I depend on love from others.” Once she purchases some rosewater from Amazon, yet another amount the countless things she keeps putting off, she can finish the ritual: voicing the words before bed in the flickering light of a rose-oil candle echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card, sprinkled with finger-flicked rosewater, under her lilac pillow until dawn, at which point she must kiss and hang it(by a ribbon of her hair threaded through the middle)in ample sun, most likely next to her teen photo, her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a depression trigger but now, having lost all the flab, one of empowerment.

The diary sits on her lap, as if poised for opening. The resinous blunt—nuggets within coated in hash oil and dusted with kief—smothers itself out, propped against her crystal pipe—aventurine (green, for money)—kicked from her spell of guilt-burger shitposting. Below a desktop shelf holding books that range from the feminine-healing guide Sacred Woman and the #metoo historical novel Blood Water Paint to Neville Goddard’s The Creative Use of Imagination and Junji Ito’s Remina and Uzumaki manga series, her PC-gaming monitor, flanked by unlit candles that say “Black Girl Magic,” displays a 3d avatar of herself in a black plunge-top dress, one hand resting on her iliac crest—realistic in a lo-fi way, an indie way (but lacking eyebags and acne). She designed it with Blender, graphics software she hopes to use in the future for what she calls “metaverse fashion modeling”: avatars navigating virtual catwalks in pixel couture whose hues might alter with each stride, fabrics coded to shimmer in different ways against real-time feedback of floating hearts and flowers.

Zodiac decals come with territory of diary keepers like her. And she is no exception. The outer cover reads “Make JEFA Moves” and in the center there is a mini headshot of her from one of those girlie instant-camera reboots: green hair in two buns at the top like Chun Li; warm-pink lip gloss named “Nymphette A40”; one rhinestone sticker below each lower eyelid. The inner cover is sharpied with positives—what she calls “Princess Energy Affirmations”:

“Money comes to me effortlessly”;

“I attract all forms of green into my life”;

“My skin color and hair texture are pretty”;

“Princess treatment is my NORMAL!”;

“I’m the very definition of an IT girl”;

“But I’m just too glam to give a damn”;

“I know I’m meant for so much more”;

“Abundance flows to me with ease”;

“The universe caters to MY serenity.”

Her reflection only gets stickier when high. She opens the diary, however, in an inspired liberation. She pays no mind, her mission stronger than ADHD, to the two all-uppercase commitments to herself: “I will practice on Blender and Python daily” and “I will date myself, buy myself chocolate, and take myself to the movies.” She does not try to make out the cramped scribbles of explanation to herself: “My standards are high because I already have everything I need” and “Napping is perfectly fine. Isn’t that what the great ancestors, in their slavery, wished they got a chance to enjoy?” Below them sings, in multiple colors of gel pen (blush pink, baby blue, bruise purple), her romantic goal—small but significant: “drop acid in the Rockies with my future husband.” But she does not trace her fingers overt the words as she normally might have: delicate in a reverie of wispy longing and then harder, with audible bruxism and clicks of jaw, as a physical means to stave off the old predawn suspicion that her dates rarely call back not because of a lack of beauty or plans or dreams, or even so much because the most intuitive of them can pick up her tendency to pettiness and pot-headed depressiveness, but rather because—mammals will be mammals—of a genital malodor that, she fears, her emo-era procedure (coconut oil and rosemary dabbed garlic cloves inserted before bed; fenugreek teas and apple-cider vinegar shots; prayers to Orunmila during calendula rinses; boric-acid suppositories and yogurt baths and goldenseal-slippery-elm-bark capsules) might have only exacerbated the issue—morphing not just the superficial weather but, especially considering the years of doxy, the very microbiotic climate of what almost any man, just looking at her in the store (not even yet seeing how it still has that baby-fat plumpness, that irresistible jiggle of cradle-robbing taboo) would be willing to cut off the tip of his pinky just to latch his mouth too as he jerked off.

Inside she fucks the lines. She fucks them like the foreplay. Her content is stereotypical Pisces Neptune: the boundary between reality and fantasy dissolved, like Ajax fizzed by sink water, into a dreamscape of anesthetic blue. But the delivery, bucking motions of erotic greed—that is all Scorpio Mars driven through Aries impulse: erratic spacing plus pen pressure that indents through several pages, even slashing through at the underlines and crossouts.

Like literally, for real, I can be all in my head

delusional asf, like this shit’s just a dream.

The “delusional” are happier. Call it “irrational.”

Fine. But isn’t it RATIONAL if it improves my life?

The personas we develop are delusions anyway,

right? They keep us sane to go to work each day—

how else when the universe approaches heat death?

Let my delusions be scarecrows. Let them frighten

any so-called “reality” seeking to devour my crop: ME.

To cast out demons, especially if those demons

are “realities,” requires a witch’s highest magic.

Black magic, white magic—I am the high priestess.

I AM A WITCH. I will shut my mind from realities

no good for me to hear. I will hypnotize myself.

“They are just opinion. They’re Just OPINION.

MY TRUTH, my inner knowing, is all that matters.

I am my own mother. I am my own mother.

I am the programmer. My decisions, my style,

come from me, not from anything beyond me!

I do not exist as an instrument of anyone but ME.

I am self-sufficient. My destiny, my fate, is MY OWN.

I am too vital to the universe ever to decay for real.

Nothing can stop my victory over reality.

I will live in my own girlie-fantasy world:

skincare and shopping and lip gloss (all that).

I am the central Barbie in the universe.”

For real, it gets so easy, clear, once you accept

fantasy as the only REAL reality. GOD MODE.

Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads—

I’m the one who lets them be real or not!

*Author’s note.—

What I am about to say is perhaps already clear in the poem’s tone, which walks a fine line between empathetic portrayal and critical observation. At first I was iffy about the Gen-Z(odiac) character in “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k),” a modern young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, societal expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasies. I found it easy to write her off as one of those pathetic social-media bullies, quick in their outrage to condemn (the suburban cop callers of the digital age)—one of those who, even if it takes libel and slander, will report any account (especially if nonblack-owned) that “triggers” her or does not reflect her values. The type is now well known: one of those boilerplate my-truthers, faking fragility for power and attention, common on college campuses (especially since the political rise of Trump and the subsequent reaction on the left about the dangers of free expression).

Her Himmler-like love of astrology and healing crystals and tarot, all of which seem a cover for a depressive nihilism, are particularly upsetting. She seems to believe her antediluvian superstition is congruent with black power when in truth, as too with the liquor and drugs she enjoys, they are poisonous to blacks—and to all people whose generational oppression has kept them in an intellectual darkness that makes them susceptible to such scams. In her desire to be unconstrained, she even dips deep enough into the solipsistic territory of Shirley MacLaine as to declare herself a causa-sui God—as we see at the end of the poem. Two stomach-sinking quotes, which in earlier drafts served as epigraphs, ring in my mind each time I think of her.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time . . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.—Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)

We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. . . . A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. . . . There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense. . . .We must distrust the intelligence . . . and must place our trust in our instincts. We have to regain a new simplicity.—Adolf Hitler (in conversation with Hermann Rauschning)

But even if the unnamed character is emblematic of US disintegration to pre-Enlightenment superstition (as China becomes the dominant world power), it is clear she is suffering and—shallow as all hell (uncritical, obsessed with makeup and designer handbags and shimmer mists and shoes, thriving on gossip and drama)—knows not what poison she spreads. Carl Sagan himself reminds us, in the same book quoted above, to restrain our tendency to poke fun at people like her.

[S]upporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

I agree with Sagan on this, as much as I fall short in my frustration. It grows easier to remember the humanity of this young woman as time goes on. I find my respect for her grow the longer she lingers in my mind. Her innocence is a factor. Her hard work is a factor. That she has dreams is a factor. That she wants to improve herself is a factor. I really do believe in her. I believe in her potential to do much good in the world if she can break free of her addiction to this ethos of victimhood and vengeance and magical thinking that makes her, despite what she thinks (and only in small part compared to her glory, which will bring me to tears no matter how old and fat she gets from her form here), so unoriginal and toxic.

And in saying even all this, I neglect the most important thing: her heart. She is unfaltering in her heart. If anyone really cares about causes in this world, she does. She will fight against fast fashion until the day she dies. She will always love plants. She will always insist, her prophesy proving true each year after I originally wrote this in 2022, that gaming avatars are extensions of ourselves, extensions not just shaped by us but with the power to shape us too—a truth that long ago, before she educated me through the writing of her, I would have written off as woo. My piece was meant to be a literary take down. This wise young lady ended up taking me down.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: 2am, by mesOUD

Here we have perhaps the ultimate tobacco-ambergris fragrance, at least the ultimate tobacco-ambergris fragrance that goes in a Chinese apothecary direction. The rum and plum and warm spices (many elements of Chinese five spice), the mouth puckering tannins and medicinality, together here in 2am bring me back to an old memory I had long forgotten. 2Am, especially in the beginning where that herbal-booze impression is strong, gives me the smell of this liquid I bought from a mail-order catalog I—like so many other martial arts enthusiast in the 80s and 90s—used to be obsessed with: Asian World of Martial Arts. It was a thick physical color magazine. It might have had articles too even though its main function was to sell a massive inventory of martial arts related things. I had bought nunchuckus and a pair of sais from there. I bought ninja stars and sparing gear—the whole nine, wishing I could afford the Chinese wooden dummies.

One thing I bought from AWMA was this liquid in a plastic squeeze bottle with chinese characters on the front. It had a distinct smell and 2am is very much reminiscent of that. The ointment was for conditioning knuckles. I believe it was an ointment for “Iron Palm” training called: Dit Da Jow—an herb-infused liquid liniment used in traditional Chinese martial arts to condition bones, tendons, and ligaments, as well as to heal impact trauma from rigorous striking practice by promotes blood circulation and reduces swelling. It was raisin-like and clovey but with a vinous vibe that would have made me, if I wasnt just nine years old and had my mind now, of port wine. Indeed, its name literally translates as “fall-and-hit wine.” I cannot remember the characters but looking it up likely the bottle featured stylized Chinese characters for 鐵掌 (Tie Zhang / Iron Palm) or a classic logo of a striking hand. My strongest memory, my most persistent memory, is of the smell. It was a boozy raisin clove scent that I get here with 2am.

The combination of high-proof alcohol, fermented sweetness, medicinal herbs, and deep pungent woods—that is the root of the connection to 2am’s connection to Dit Da Jow. Instead of a generic perfume alcohol opening, 2am uses heavy, dark, thick liquor accords: rum, cognac. The fermented, molasses undertone of dark rum and the aged, oak-barrel heat of cognac—that must be what makes me think of that opening boozy slap from the Chinese liniment. Infiltered tobacco and cigar leaves have a dried-plum and raisin-like aroma when unlit. I get that in both products. And when you add 2am’s bitter cocao element, there is this sticky dark fruity paste effect (a pasty frutiiness like I get in many Elkhaldi by the way) and it really gives that feel I remember getting from Dit Da Jow: cinnamon and dates stewed in sour alcohol. Yes, there is a sourness, a vinous tartness, that runs through both. In 2am I think the explanation is how the fermented facets (especially from the oud and the cognac) work with the urinous-tangy edge of the castoreum.

Difference recipes are used to create Iron Palm liniments. But they all have an astringent medicinal-camphor edge designed to wake up the skin and move stagnant blood. I get that here definitley in 2am. The hemp and the skunk introduce volatile terpenes: green, bitter, sulfurous herbality. That is the centerpiece of the herbal connection between the two products. Many Dit Da Jow recipes include animal products or at least heavy-musk-like herbs to make the formula “penetrate the bones.” And so the animalic bend of the herbality is another similarity. The clove that 2am has really drives that herbality into a dental menthol halitotic direction—not too dissimilar to what I get from Ensar’s Tigerweood 91 but also very similar to what I get in the eugenol-heaby compounds (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, star anise) that is common in my Iron palm recopies (again, to help the product “penetrate the bones”). And the combo of all these—animalics (skunk, castoreum), greenery and spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg), and woods (various ouds)—really mimic the harsh bite of raw chinese roots and barks that must have been in the Iron Palm liniment.

2am is the only fragrance to awaken this forgotten memory of my experiences with Dit Da Jow. That suggests how unique it might be even though I have many tobacco fragrances. It comes with a spice and herbality more in the Royal Tobacco dimension. But 2am is more boozy and its dark tobacco is clear in more of the artisanal way we get from Tabac Dore or Sultan Pasha’s tobacco attars. The ambergris and the quality oud here really mark out the difference—not just on paper but in smell. Some oud varieties used here merge with the ambergris to create an oceanic feel, especially in the drydown, that Royal Tobacco does not have. Royal Tobacco goes to vanilla ash whereas this goes to sweet sea-salt crust.

This saltiness brings me to the difference between 2am and Dit Da Jow. 2am has much more of a salty brine from the ambergris. In the dry down, when so much of that boozy herbal connection drops away, we get a real salted leather impression—very mineralic and even metallic because of combo of castoreum and ambergris. The ambergris here in fact gives the best ambergris creations we get from Ensar a run for their money. I did not attend to that oceanic side of this perfume, a stark similarity to Black Gris, when I first wore it. The base of castoreum and ambergris really does feel like an Ensar. Also Dit Da Jow, while bringing to mind tobacco via clovey-raisin smells like we get in frags like History of Indonesian Oud, lacks 2am’s bold and overt tobacco note—like literal crushed cigar. While both are somewhat purple in olfactory hue, Iron Palm was a but more red medicinal whereas 2am—because of the strong rooty orris I get (unlisted)—is more violet tinted. It would not surprise me if both violet and orris butter are in here. This gives me another strong Ensar connection, sort of like a cross between Iris Ghalia and Purple Kinam—especially toward the latter since 2am gives me a buttered popcorn pyrazine nuttiness like I get in Purple Kinam (in both the popcorn, unlike with the pyrazine popcorn of Tabac Dore, seems smothered in a butter spiked with some sweet nectar that turns the hue purple. So yes, You are basically getting Ensar-level quality at a fraction of the price. It is wild when you think about it.

2am tobacco makes me appreciate Tabac Tabou by Perfume d’Empire—a much cheaper alternative to 2am. But Tabac Tabou is clearly working with inferior ingredients. Tabac Tabou is better blended. Tabac Tabou goes more in a dark honey over hay direction of elegance. 2am, on the contrary, goes into a medicinal-herbs and animalics over cigars direction of garage band lo fi. And again there is that orris purple rootiness and the stunning ambergris. The ambergris plus the tobacco is precisely what you would have thought Sir Winston would have smelled like.

Share

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 94)

the cheapest daycare

junkies envying your vascularity 

“free kittins,” misspelled on the box, outside the supermarket

graffiti beautiful enough no longer to be a misdemeanor 

barely off the streets but buying jewelry with the extra cash

never having land lines even when people still had land lines

drunks belligerent about not being drunk

that the dead haunt the living is one thing, but even
more disturbing is that they are reduced to doing so 
merely by making doll eyes blink for night janitors 

“shyster psychic” is not a pleonasm like “tuna fish” or “pin number” if shysterism
requires conscious awareness of being a fraud (self-hypnosis can cut rather deep)—
and yet the bond remains as tight as renate and chordate if any awareness suffices

bird-feeder electrified for the quarreling squirrels 

an amygdala event that divides your memory into before and after 

ashamed enough of a depressive episode that you say you have the flu

okay with getting sex only because you are a fetish 

doing a college major structured to shame you 

life gets ruined when you agonize 
over the inevitable subblivion— 
and the same goes with love

killing war enemies is acceptable, 
but taking a shit or piss on them 
while huddled in a corner is not?

safe injection sites

cattle fed candies that did not make the cut and unsold leftovers from Halloween

robots counseling you to self-knowledge

it is important not to let false stereotypes get out of hand,
so—if we really are going to play the race game—always
remember which race commits the most school shootings

the scholar’s bane: the desire 
to be right trumping the desire
to cultivate happy relationships

were we all psycho, we could play with our kids 
without any need to dehumanize the people 
that we wipe out or even just perform surgery on 

the experimenter’s bad vibes may be preventing 
the mystic from bending the spoon in the lab—
but what is most rational to believe even if so? 

many waiters are willing to share tips 
about how to avoid paying—walking out
during big parties, say—if only you ask

wondering, some days, whose life this is

shocked when mere fry cooks or janitors, seen
as too lazy to aspire for the American Dream,
prove perspicacious about art and fine wines

faking a need to hit the bathroom first,
and then banging back the half-full drinks 
left behind after the restaurant gathering

arresting the guys that you grew up with, and then their children too

absconding with the sou-sou

town-hall rage

undressing her even as she warns that she cannot love you

the professor failed merely because she failed to open herself to vulnerability 

medical emergencies causing you to swerve

parking-lot revenge rape after a heated town-hall meeting

survivalist-pullout manufacturing the very erosion of social stability feared

part of you desires that bond with your spouse destroyed when you came out as gay

freed from a state of mind through describing it in writing

live feeds of the sky in the monitor windows of survivalist bunkers

not just terror, straight anger, at the impermanence

creating art on a desert island 

one-generation street drugs are killer 

waking up to the local news reporting your apartment on fire

guidebooks to foreign destinations 
better than the actual journey:
all anticipation, no bodily discomfort 

the perks are good, no doubt—but it has to suck,
in the early morning hours at least, having won
top prize only because you self identify as black

deep in a hallucinogenic trip
or deep in a bout of depression—
worried you will be stuck this way 

the burden of the call to act is an incentive not to recognize the problem

that gray-space of when to stop CPR 

disappointment with the travel for which we so longed

sitting on her couch, the ghost tries in vain to hug his grieving wife 

but what would become of you, your art, were you no longer despairing, neurotic?

the importance of mere lipstick 
among the women in that city 
besieged by snipers and bombs

in front of your dead friend’s house 
tossing a ball, almost expecting him
to burst through the front door

grateful for the child you wished was never born

to show a strong wage gap between the two groups, 
ignore the differences in their typical professions—
performance studies versus petroleum engineering

a losing struggle to stop slipping into daydreams about your new crush 

that they do it only for the money does not prove that the work is exploitative

a goal of getting laid, in real life

loogie hocking banned in Hong Kong,
where throat clearing has become
almost a white noise in the smog air

unsure whether this is your last lap 
or second-to-last, are you one 
to run it as if it were not the last?

if you attend to how much everyone 
checks their own face in mirrors,
would you check yours so much?

she has budded enough that you feel 
uneasy with the old talk to her parents
of how their hands will soon be full

staying together for the kids 
but then learning, when they leave, 
all the strife was because of them

their release captured by news cameras
in the lot, some of the first-graders skip 
as parents scan to find their child alive

not mailing that letter, weeks 
in the making, after learning 
that she has a husband

places where the mere attempt at GED classes 
is a point of boast to older relatives, but something 
that you hide elsewhere (not to seem too uppity)

show-me-where-this-is-illegal thinking 
versus would-this-be-okay-
to-subject-my-mother-to? thinking

burying someone alive gives them time 
to think about what they have done,
but will they use that time otherwise?

figuring out which of you gets which friends after the breakup 
 
unable even to visit the place where you were—or think you were—once so happy

the view from even a balcony makes our activities seem antlike

scrutiny incited by that very gesture of looking down and away to evade scrutiny 

waking up standing up

erectus ancestors who smiled at faces as infants were more likely to enjoy protections,
and so now infants smile at faces and, for extra reasons, adults—in anxiety too buried
to seem like anxiety—spot faces even where none exist (as in clouds and star clusters)

even if the light at death is just retinal flaring 
or the overhead ER light, why must that be
incompatible with that light being Love? 

counter narratives concerning how the protest was staged

sheepish about flaming the mouth of a pipe shared with someone with HIV

with slipping clicks, the dog snap-snaps at pussy spray
with the chomps of hose play, those throaty sounds—
that of the Hebrew “Chaim”: Hahyim, Hahyim, Hayhim

marijuana as a gateway drug 
when resultant legal penalties 
increase a teen’s negative stress

the more our economy becomes cashless 
the more the preference shifts for drugs
that can be purchased with credit cards

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Memoir Man, by Amouage

Peppery bite with creamy sandalwood and smoky-green vetiver—an honour man connection. A moody-dark-green fougere like Haxan, only Haxan is much darker and danker and sinister whereas Memoir is much more enchanted and classy and elven (very close in feel and, as the near identical note pyramid would suggest, in smell to Fougere Platine) / leather-woody-fragrance set apart from a straightforward fougere by being built around absinth and wormwood / minty-basil barbershop opening, although not as barbershop as Epic Man and not as minty as Beach Hut and not Amouage’s official barbershop scent (that honor goes to Bracken Man) / foresty-leathery scent (although plasticky leather of Imitation Man rather than the animal leather of Haxan).

Very enjoyable. I wish the tarragon-marjoram-basil-fern opening was a tad shocking to me at first. I am soemwhat blind to this, which is a shame. The roundness—yesm, this could be a benchmark and roundess and smoothness along with Dia Man and Inverno Russo 2—almost seems to be a fiunction, like in the cas eof Inverno Russo 2, of an opaque wax overlay. The positive of being encased in such a wax overlay is that there is little possibility even for otherwise scratchy herbs to be scratchy. But the unfortunately thing is that it seems to blunt the smell. That is how I frame it anyway. I am partially anosmic likely to severla of the ingredients in here. Even though I love the waxy overlay vibe I get in fragrances like Honour Man and Inverno Russo, I would have much rather taken away the waxy overlay so I can smell all these wonderful herbs even if it meant that it felt that I had glass in my nostrils. But what ends up happening is that the herb dazzle of the first few second largly goes away and after first hour what become most priminent is a smoked leatheriness (guiac, labdanum) I know for all too many fragrances.

underappreciate like Journey Man. the leather is plasticky but it gets a chocolatey quality after awhile. I sense vanilla too—more woody, even tobacco like, than extract or any ice cream. most definitely brings to mind dark enchanted forest with glowing green (like some of the boards in Toad Adventure game on WiiU—indeed, like a post-rain graveyard in such a land) / frankincense is there contributing to the mineralic pineyness and pepperiness. altogether this scent has more of a European than oriental feel (at least when compared to the more boisterous scent that goes in the same quirky fougere direction: Epic Man). The moss accord here definitely contains an unlisted medicinal patchouli, which is responsible both for the dampness (wet graveyard) and chocolatyness while also boostign the mint. Patchouli is a hidden key player

the dry down is clean man, but a forest and hands in dirt man of cigars and leather (clean but somehow with the darkness of black ink, and so very distantly reminiscent of Bianchi Black Knight in that way) / a paradigm case of dark and yet fresh almost perfectly balanced (and encapsulated perfectly in an the enchanted dank forest with so much green glow) / one of the best fragrances to be versatile and wearable without sacrificing on frag head artistry (especially when you go heavier on the spray since this can be considered light like Jubilation, as has it has sometimes been described even since 2013 from my research).

this is a quieter Amouage people say (so it might noit just be all my anosmia) but keep in mind that its projection might be deceptive for various reasons: the Amouage sprayer is stingy, bottle might need to sit with some oxygen, the opening is quite nose-blinding, and you might need time for your brain to learn to pick up all the notes—at least this is what I tell myself. I will say that the last time I wore this was probably about a year ago and the performance to my nose did not improve. I think I need not wait so logn next time. Before a wear. pleasant but subdued (although I like some others get particularly noseblind / fatigued by this), which—although not for me—might be good since it is challenging one-of-a-kind combination

settles down to a leather like a lot of Amouage offerings, albeit here is it a rainsoaked smoky leather (creamy like in Honour Man), a rainsoaked smoky leather that is—yes, I cannot shalke this overcast graveyyard scene—leaned up agaisnt a tombstone. It would be one of my favorite Amouages if it had better performance, in the sense of: if it gav eme more reliable whiffs. my partner likes it (and lieks it the most compared to the other Amouage offerings) / always present and long lasting, Memoir never shouts like Interlude or Epic (a subtle confidence, although not the near whisper of Dia Man) / this is definitely a signature scent that can be worn on all occasions by me.

The nose blind issue with memoir man is particularly dangerous since (a) I find no aspect of it offensive and (b) many are said not to like this and (c) it seemed weak to my nose before my brained learned to smell it better (and even then it is on the quieter side of the spectrum objectively_/ as of now though Memoir man does have a pervasiveness, but that pervasiveness is much more a feel (if you will) than an actual scent, as if it were full of aroma chemicals that serve less a scent role than a scent-bolstering or feel role (you can definitely feel it in the mouth) / Really good scent with proven performance now that my brain has learned to smell it better, but not as good as something like even Honour Man. Moody fresh bitter dry elements like epic man and yet almost boozy wet elements like Overture me.

After several wears over many years, the scene—bleak, rainy, gothic—I get with this one has become clearer. Toad’s Adventure land—that is definitely unshakable. But what has rose up even into greater prominence is this stony mineralic graveyard aspect—wet dirt and wet stone, the sky an irradiated overcast. The stone element is many a function of the combo of olibanum and rose. Teh olibanum gives a peppery and terpenic (so a pine forest cemetery) aroma whose cold slate aura is ampilfied by iron-oxide rose (which comes off as chilled dewy metal here, not warm garden). Alone this olibanium here would probably give me vibes of cold stone cathedral, ancient marble, or a damp crypt. The oakmoss accord, which as I said is largely centered around a medicinal chocolately patchouli, anchors the damp and somewhat decayed aura. Even without the vetiver, which brings us right to the rooty graveyard dirt, this oakmoss accord contributes an inky—almost marine—aroma that makes you think of the green fuzz growing in a shaded area of a driveway right under the garden hose spigot or even the paint-flake look of lichen (a fungus and algae symbiosis) clinging to bark. Wormwood, in conjucntion with the other herbs, makes for a chilling ghoulish atmosphere—bringing a bitter medicinality that cannot but conjure Poe-imagery in my mind.

*Drew out some more of the damning incest details.

Gonzo Domestic Squabble

Drunken shouts became a sloppy knot in the grass.
Mounted on his chest, the girl—her tit torn free—
grunted berserk hammerfists to his skull. I watched
from my dorm. That hyperarousal of helplessness,
that battery brine—my mouth knew the slaver of it,
retching, before I did. Electricity tingled my pinkies
like in childhood. I needed in on it, in on their union,
like when my mom and men fought in a fuck coil
fecal with the piston of glucking fists, her shark eyes
dead to Teddy and me—as far as a child could know,
the sugar of the verboten still locked in cookie jars.
A nonagent, less than zero, I felt. I felt my way
in darkness to the kitchen where my suitemate,
out on another date, kept his pest control loaded.
I pumped the air rifle, an edging pace. I bore a hole
in the screen, sweet time, for its tip to retake control.

As with my mom and her men, my need to add
extra fury into the fracas was an ache righteous 
because I mattered nothing to them—righteous
because pain and injury come with the territory.
Lured by the homecoming prospect that I might rise 
out of oblivion, that my intervention might make 
one body purple the other back into oblivion (proof
as to whom mastery belongs), my squinted aim held
despite the upheaval pounding through the carotids.
Female shrieks, so familiar, followed the BB strike.
Bodies punched for air. Spurred by my sting, the man
took his mount with headbanger chokes that bloodied
my lip. My cock tried leaving me like when her squirt
pelted Teddy and me—sheets of deadened thuds, rug
in a cloudburst—with that musk of hot pennies saltier
with my tears. I pumped, past ten. I took a third shot.

Voices from other windows in the quad heckled
and I took the fourth shot and the fifth, no longer 
caring to cover my noise or even the mirror it raised.
I pumped again, those vinegar clacks—clack, clack—
I knew from many semesters had to have ricocheted
against the brick. But some phantom ring in my ears
screamed, my brain tunneling its attention. And I shot.
My soul, my cock, needed him to forget her need
to breathe. That felt familiar too. “Ahhh!” he yelled, 
holding his face in response to the hands now pulling
the strings—my barrel too far out, reckless like when 
I dropped Teddy to suck her nipple in goo-goo-gaga
as she re-blew: lowing like a cow in estrus, sweeping
my hand across the blub. He kept uppercutting her gut
even though she was through. Red and blue strobes
had him flee to the woods, the girl sobbing like her.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

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.

*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?

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Nose Rest Day

Subscribe now

* This is still sloppy. I have added to the story arc, though, by including most of the letter that the protagonist sends to his friend. The letter serves as what the daimon narrator calls “a manifesto”—a manifesto that will outlive the protagonist and make his death have the intended ripples.

Subway Restraint

The time has come. You are trapped. Stinking with the bodies against you each way, pressed suit disheveled—calling yourself late understates the gravity. Who could have known, kissing your girlfriend goodbye with interview nerves, butterflies for the future, that the time would come now? But it has. That is how life works. Everyday—sunrise, sunset—the ambulance dopplers elsewhere. That is until one day you find it coming for you.

Serve the long game. Do not jump right to throat daggering that lead cunt, shrieking as her arms spread to restrict you and the bodies behind you from exiting the split door of the subway. Your first move, seductive as it no doubt is, should not be to impale that vein-flared neck of fanaticism with your “Urban Pal” pocket push dagger—its blade just over two inches of larynx love, double serrated for bleed-out rip backs meant to thwart repair (and cheaper than a gas-station sandwich, for whatever it might be worth to say, on bladehq.com).

Breathe. Swamp ass and mildewed underwear, mildewed enough to smell the holes and blown elastic, imprint the molded plastic with the funk of a track-mark jasmine that had made the worst life choices and a meth-mouth tuberose that had been double dipped as toilet paper. Over this hobo base, over as well the commuter heart (a coffee halitosis fed into sulphuric frenzy by the sugars of gum and lifted into full Fantasia fanfare by the radioactive autotune fixatives now as obligatory in Sephora fragrances as the equally-unwashable twerking is at the Democratic National Convention)—over it all you can smell your own adrenaline sweat (cold and sour, like finger pads after rubbing a coin or a car key), this metallic top note synergizing with the brakepad scorch into a rusty aldehyde that coats the mouth in a fuzz of iron fillings. But continue to breathe. Raise your nostrils above the urban crotchrot, above the rotten eggs of sump water stagnant in the trenches below the rails—all of it today kicked into a roil by the dank-dog mustiness of fabrics and footwear soaked from the rain in the streets above. You are a tall man. Appreciate the space you still have in the claustrophobic crush.

Restrain yourself. You know now, you can feel now (after decades of laughing away the ridiculous numbers in murder news), how death can wash up in indolic glory on the autopsy slab with stab wounds nearing—if not well into—triple digits. But the time for blade gratifications, multiple climaxes at the cost—if you do it now, like some monkey—of a life ruined by the gavel, might show itself with some patience. You are not a fucking monkey. Unloading after a wait is better anyway—especially an agonizing wait where every nerve screams for action, every gland mewls for milking, like engorged tits barred from the mouth of the crying infant. Think of the goo building. The inner child in us all, no matter how old or wise we become, wants to witness as much ribbon bloom from the popped cyst, sweet blips of curd along the way—the bigger the coiled pile of cottage cheese at the end, the better. Think, then, of your pride—as if again showing your mother the height of the pile of mashed potatoes on your plate—when you get to behold the destructive mass of your freed burden.

Shoves and slithering words, hold these back as well. You stand above the rabble. Let the seething fury of your stolen big day mount, right up to the gills, as the chanting mass behind this bitch—“No! One! Gets! Off!”—hammer-fists away any bold hand trying to pry open the panels from within. Feel the spittle spatter on your face, the inadvertent mist of justice-warrior apoplexy, grow into purposeful thwacks as you insist to be set free from the metal trap of this neo-witch hysteria. Feel them grow more aggressive, her forehead rammings—right into your heart, the cunt, every time the panels open enough. But stay your hand. We have waited for the right ambient conditions too long to blow it too early. Have we not?

Time dilates for us. Accept, in the growing splay of seconds, the futility of your plea. It can be hard, yes—like trusting that the sea will buoy your body if only you let go of tree-mammal tension of white-knuckled toes. But trust that the futility is a friend. It grows the potency of your ferocity, the need for your ferocity. Come the time for execution-style rejection of the entire modern farce, the futility will turn you invincible. It will turn you invincible even to bullets for a time, so long as right now you stay rooted—rooted in that narrow space where you work yourself up for having been made a sardine and yet where you, wanting like any heart breaker to “make it last all night” with this American girl in her slouchy beanie, conduct yourself as if on an empty beach somewhere in the breeze.

Every smartphone glows a weapon of mass judgment. But neither this nor all the corner-nestled CCTV cameras can excuse slipping away into some private pocket of psychology. It is all to easy for a human to get caught in the vent of fantasy: if only I were wearing one of those old-school carnations on my breast pocket, squirting acid like The Joker. If anything, let the nontruth of such counterfactuals further fuel your frustration. For ultimately you must go to work. When you do go to work, however, give your defense attorney—hands tied by whatever scraps you leave behind—at least a little to work with. Think of it that way. Thinking of it that way will keep your will from buckling even as it serves to titillate your will with the promise of a later chance to buckle—perhaps even crumble, delivering you into painless disindividuation: oneness with the World-All. This is about edging, okay?

Try to lock in eye-contact with that one officer in the sea of phones raised, several of their owners screeching at you “Don’t you fucking touch her!”—a baiting formula as transparent, of course, as those feline-heat growls of “Don’t you dare cum in me!” Throw in a “Please help, officer” or two: the film never stops rolling. If you really want to piss yourself off, say it a bit too soft. The officer will fail on cue, either way, to safeguard your free passage. Is this not, after all, a non-castle-doctrine state where squatters have rights over your home (such that you cannot remove them yourself without legal repercussion)? Is this not a duty-to-retreat state where, although no one raises an eye about calling in an exterminator to spray paralyzing roach poisons, burglars have won settlements for injuring themselves on the job merely because you set a rated-R McCallister boobytrap (a floorplate, say, that triggers the release of a neurotoxin dart that paralyzes the diaphragm) to deal with a chronic problem—or even, if only on rare occasions, merely because of a broken ankle caused by your wobbly porch railing or a concussion caused by your shoddy weekend-warrior wall mount of the 8k flatscreen with too much street value for any BIPOC to be equitably expected to resist, especially when flaunted (day in, day out) through arrogant bay windows pointed curbside in a fuck-you to color?

Besides, the officer is white. He is white and, even though you have the asset of being darker skinned, he fears that career-shattering r-word in later press. How could he not? The press, “legitimate” press, has adopted the buzz words and speech patterns of campus activists: news anchors, for example, stressing (with not even a hint of understated irony) the adjective “black” as a moral-bludgeoning means to heighten the shut-it-down force of their words (“Understand that you are talking to a black woman!”)—exactly as in when, to quintuple down on the impression that blacks are especially precious (such that mistreating a black person is more heinous than mistreating a non-black person), the white “ally” barks at the professor “Did you just tell a black man where to sit?” or the black student snipes at the white professor who challenged her opinion “Are you seriously calling a black woman wrong?” (both examples invoking an emotionally and historically charged context that makes people second-guess the morality of an otherwise mundane act, cranking up the volume on race to elevate its seriousness even when race was not a factor). So no, the officer—like the countless professors, paralyzed (were it not for stutters and perhaps even tears)—is unlikely to do anything (even in your favor). Trapped in a narrative the man never wrote, the stakes are too high. Is not this mob, after all, anti-Nazi? Sure it is, at least by the look of all their signs: “fuck nazi scum”; “fight antiblack killing”; “white vigilantism = fascism / black vigilantism = freedom.”

You could declare “I’m a black man.” Invoking race in that way usually gets whiteys like this in check. They know, after all, who the fuck is king. But you have integrity. You have refused taking any knowing handout. That would be giving in. Lesser men would have given in. You, on the other hand, would rather suffer than accept a concession you consider unearned. You would rather die—because, yes, that is what this ultimately about—than participate in what you know to be a system of lies and injustice. You have such a magnitude of negative respect for these powers, the true powers that be with the platform to keep denying that they are the true powers that be, that you are not even tempted. Perhaps you are too hardheaded. People have said it. But you are you. And that is admirable. It is a hill you will die on—again, that word. People type comments on social media but they are not willing to die. They are not willing to go out blasting, taking their enemies with them to the death before the luck of birth. You are. So good shit, nigga.

Declaring “I am a black man. You are blocking a king”—even if hitting exactly the right emphases on “black” and “king” (mere apposition like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura)—would not even work, though. Socrates easily could have escaped his prison cell. You cannot. This a major city. People here know there are good blacks and bad blacks, the ones infected by the contagious disease of whiteness. They make finer grain decisions unlike in more suburban areas where the woke white will be like “Let the king pass” if only in the form of ushering you away like secret service tasked with protecting the most precious supercitizen, innocent and entitled.

There are also plain logistics to consider. It breaks the seal if they let you go. So even if they want to respect their king, it is for the greater good—it is for the benefit of you, a moral superior—to keep you trapped. And perhaps this frustration will wake you up to the slaughter of kings and queens. That could be their rationalization too. And if nothing good—no awareness, no turn around—comes of causing you discomfort, they could always chalk it up to unfortunate collateral damage—a mere drop, they might tell themselves, in the bucket of hell you must live every day here in triple-k Amerikkka out to get you as soon as you step out the door(even though in truth America is the very heart of a Western culture that has not only best articulated, better than any other ever on Earth, why racial discrimination is wrong but has best fought, better than any other ever on Earth, to end it). They would call it collateral damage, yes, to a higher cause just like in Ellison’s Invisible Man, still your favorite book since college, where the Marxist organization (the Brotherhood)—seeing, like no doubt this snowbunny slut in front of you, black suffering as combustible raw material—stirs up Harlem riots as part of an agenda, eerily similar to the real life situation where like organizations tried to create a massive black welfare dependency, to tank the government.

And speaking of Invisible Man, there is that scene where the Marxist white bitch—always the white cunts, huh?—says “Don’t you think he should be a little blacker?” Same goes here. You are not black enough for either the cause or to expect to get a free pass. High yellow tones like this do not command the respect. You need to be black black to wield the word “king” in a public arena. Yeah, perhaps in a dorm room getting high you can make the room walk on eggshells around you like you are Henry the Eighth. But in this grand public spectacle, no way. Face it. You do not possess that brand of blackness that has the white activist bowing low to tongue kiss Timberlands in a campus wedding filled with one-way vows: “I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness”; “I will tolerate any discomfort on the path to equity”; “I will never speak over a black person”; “I will never deny black truth”; “I will do everything in my power to abolish whiteness”; “I will not weaponize the police against black people”; “I will redistribute my unearned advantages”; “I will never call reparations ‘looting’”; “I will seek to understand more than to be understood”; and so on down the restorative justice line. Look at you, nigga. You do not even have dreads.

Even if you were jet black it might not even matter. We have already moved on to the next cultural hierarchy. You know each day you grow into an outdated commodity. For now at least, until perhaps the wheel turns back around, the mob—and thereby Disney, the weather-vane of the herd—has passed the high water mark of Black Panther. The FBI and universities have surely toned down their “How To Be Less White” learning modules, mandatory for compliance. It has been one or two Oscar ceremonies already since the last time any speech had to involve a star, usually another white cunt, doing what a white cunt does: crying at the podium about how unfortunate it is for black families to have to give their beautiful black teen, a king-in-the-making if only he can survive open season, what has become known as “the talk”—the former definition of the talk, which concerned the birds and the bees, having been supplanted, of course, by the more urgent issue of protecting as many black young men as possible (and “good riddance” many will say not just because sex discussion is already covered by the hip hop tracks that explain when to insert the Perc30 rectal suppository but because, think about it: “the birds and the bees,” that phrase, sounds as white as the surname “Smith” and thereby as antiblack as apple pie and old glory). It has to be a year or so, perhaps more, since the last movie—was it Tom Hanks?—where we are hit with that pathos-pulling scene where beautiful black parents must sit their good black boy down, a boy in no way posting pictures of himself with semiautomatics on Instagram, and give him the talk, the talk about how he must say “Yessa” to every officer and keep his hand on the wheel and never talk back and always announce he is merely reaching for his wallet; the talk about how he must say “Yessa,” in fact, in such an old school plantation way that—and here is the ghoulish conspiracy behind it all (but that is Hollywood for you)—young teens, naturally rebellious, will know exactly the way to assert their defiant identity: engaging in the very noncompliant behaviors that increase the odds of another news spectacle to keep the money-making cycle going. Ellison was not stupid.

The trans cause is in the foreground now. Oscar winners not only flaunt their trans kids like handbags (“So brave isn’t she?”) but are damn sure, when they thank their parents in the speech, that they use the term “gestating parent” for mother and “non-gestating parent” for father. And when in the post-ceremony interview they are called “brave for using these inclusive terms in such a public way” they will be damned sure to work in how the male swimmer in the news, the one in female drag with much more than lats and traps busting out of the singlet, was “so brave” for “absolutely crushing the other girls” in the competition—the most confrontational starlets preempting the bigoted response on so many tongues scared for their careers by saying: “Those assigned female at birth are just gonna have to get faster huh?”

And now the undocumented cause is just starting to get going. On the horizon—perhaps around the time we might expect Disney to release Mexican Panther (the writer who suggests Mexican Cucaracha instead, even if done completely innocently, fired on the spot because everyone else, especially the white cunt bitch sluts, feels “uncomfortable now” (and perhaps in part because it hits on a truth: how the illegal scurries, under and over, in the secret of night in a way remarkably similar to the roach)—we are bound to get Oscar winners who will make their drop-the-mic comment “No one is illegal on stolen land” even as they themselves own property gated and ready, the scum fucks, to call cops on any indigenous person who tunnels under just to grab a quick bite from the fridge (not any hamper sniff session jerk offs or anything).

So what is to be done? Plead to the mob. Remember: this is a marathon of baby steps. Plead—if only for the lenses. Plead through your teeth and muscles clenched by the taunting yells. Plead for someone within the drumhead jury, someone within the raging pack savoring your submission, to empathize with your humanity. Know all the while, again, that it will be in vain. And know that even if it were not, and even if it were clear by some magic that the efficacy was not a function of your skin, that would just defuse the pressure behind the cork pop yet again as it has done for too long now—yet again tempting you into quietism, into ignoring the life-redeeming call to pop off. How many times have you put your tail between your legs as you pussyfoot around a world of monkey justice? That time is over. This is a call to action.

Take on a pitiful tone of a meek victim. The tone, no, is not out of any realistic hope to draw forth enough compassion for your release. Things have escalated past that point. It is to bait them, stoke the appetite. Crowds lust to stomp the downtrodden, polished mirrors to their cruelty. It is out of a desire, moreover, to increase your coiled energy for lashing out at what will thereby swell beyond a ramming wall against free passage to your once-in-a-lifetime interview—swell into a polished mirror of your patheticness (smash-beckoning for you as well, however much it reflects calculated performance).

Plead your urgency. Plead with hopeful expectation since you—the you in some other hemisphere, so to say—well knows that hopeful expectation is ridiculous here, which only fans the building torrent: a broken record, yes, but hypnosis (especially self-hypnosis) works on humans. Explain the critical nature of your interview—a self-imposed torment, since it reminds you of all that is going down the drain (swirling just out of reach like in a nightmare). Explain it, much more importantly, since you owe no explanation; since only a bitch-ass-punk would give an explanation at this time—and yes, you are going to have to make up for being one. Keep your decibel just below their cacophony—a self-imposed catalyst to tap further into the mitochondrial amphetamine harbored within each cell. Even lie and say your wife is in labor, giving the horde all the chances in the world—all the chances to deny you still and thereby add grist to your motivational mill.

Scan the officer’s face once again. Scan back to the young zombies, mostly white and desperate for purpose in the potential virality of doing what is said to be “for your own good,” for your own good as “a black male in a society that has declared total war on black bodies.” You read the headlines. You listened to the news. And yet you still chose the subway. The protest is over the death of a martyred lunatic whose unruliness and death threats to passengers landed him in the chokehold of a marine who, for whatever it might be worth to say, received cheers from black commuters in danger and death threats from mostly-white “antiracists” in cyberspace. Scan their faces—scan, scan, scan for a flicker of reason. Try to reach any lucid eyes beyond their algorithm lenses. Even though the race card has already been pulled just looking at you, vocalize your blackness. None of it will make a difference, of course. But unblinking cameras roll for court scrutiny.

Only the best of men, after all this edging, can keep resisting. Do the following exercise if you feel you are going to blow your load too soon. For what you are after is too cook in your own juices, low and slow, as long as you can.

Move your lower jaw to the left: breath in and then out while holding it there. Now move your lower jaw to right: breathe in and then out while holding it there. Place the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth: breath in and then out while holding it there. Raise your shoulders slowly as you breath in and then, as you breath out, slowly bring them down. Repeat if you need to.

So where do we go from here? Do we go scorched earth: sticking her smug neck with a poison syringe—antifreeze, bleach, isopropanol, insulin—or even just a brutal headbutt into her nose? Or do we ease in a bit more, giving the attorney more to work with than just the black card (a trump card in typical situations) in case you make it out? Run through the latter first.

Perhaps pivot off your meek presentation with a surprise snatch of a phone glowing in your periphery. And then, as you dash into the train’s recesses, hypnotize yourself to think your sole life-on-the-line mission is to pulverize the phone: as many fragments as possible. Even if it does nothing to help the free flow of bodies, at least you can claim this victory. Admittedly, that is too small a victory to assuage your apoplectic blood pressure. But perhaps the owner will chase you down (into your web), which will provide a pretext for the dagger’s sting should any hands be placed on you.—No, strike that. Rewind the reel.

Start back at the door. Make sure you have a belt can of bear mace (much better than some comic-book carnation and much more realistic and wieldy than a hypodermic needle taken from your diabetic father). Go for the highest Scoville you can get (five million) and whose stream extends over thirty feet (udap.com)—you are welcome. After the cadaverous smiles of mockery press closer, after more and more spittle flies into your mouth and eyes—peel back the safety catch. Remember, it is you who should be spitting in her face. She is the very temptation of the victimhood mentality ruinous to black kind—a temptation for all people given that it provides an aura of purpose and gravitas while also a golden ticket not only to sidestep hard work and accountability for past behavior and future fate-carving, but also to extort and abuse and manipulate one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level grandeur as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” an ancestral crusade for payback against the ever-shifting “powers that be.”

After sternum rams get harder, after the officer turns a blind eye to your pleas of due diligence—unleash the chemical inferno. What would be the valor of protest, beyond just the valor of having a view, if there were no risk of baptism by liquid fire? Direct the maelstrom right into her face—even slipping in a couple, or seven, canister punches to that cunt mouthpiece—and then over everyone. Refuse to free the trigger as the doors finally close, leaving just enough room for you to spread every last bit of caustic fog.

Let the doors close for protection against the underground gas chamber of your creation. The dagger, scorching a blurry halo around your phoenix form, can then step into the limelight—and righteously so (given the interview, given your own seared blindness)—if any sleeper agent tries to restrain you. Even if you cannot see, even if your main concern is clearing a path, try at least to hear the writhing of numbers on the other side of the glass. There is no guarantee, despite what protestant-work-ethic Americans like to believe, that all your efforts—all your baby steps of patient calculation—will be rewarded with a not-guilty sentence. Give yourself something, that rich umami of pain and panic, to play back. Indeed, you might even be killed today. Savor what you can.

Instead of going the mace route, you could just hold the dagger out from the headbutted spot on your chest and walk forward. Confront the slouchy beanie clone, tattooed in bought exoticness, with a stark choice. Test her resolve. Or perhaps even better, you could walk forward with a bleach-filled syringe. That might not be such an unreasonable option after all. Among those Shakespearean-era audiences who lobbed tomatoes or cabbage or fish or rotten eggs at the actors, surely at least some of them carried into the theater something from home. And so could you! The problem is, others among the swarm would no doubt swat away any such device. The bear mace strategy still crystallizes, then, as a more satisfying and yet prudent course, balancing both defense and offense in the chaos of the moment.

Edging cannot last forever. Edging would not be edging without release. Containment must eventually fail. Toward jouissance—that was the trajectory. You are not God. You cannot run all the options. The bear mace strategy is best. But you knew this all along, did you not? Do you have a syringe? No. The mace and then, when it ended, the only other device you brought along to the theater: the push dagger—you knew before swiping the Metro Card, did you not? And yeah, think of how good it would be to clock her with that can. If you could have skull fucked her to death as an infant you would have” “How’s this for a minority report, little snowbunny bitch?” But you cannot go back. You unmake this cunt by filling her sex-sleeve form with nut.

You are tired of it. You have been tired of it for too long. You are tired of mental slavery packaged as freedom, dependency packaged as cool. You have waited for it to blow over. It waxes and wanes, fine. But does it ever blow over? No? There are too many vested interests. This is climate, not weather. You are tired of being told you have to have this or that from white people in order to survive here. You are no slave in the basement of a torturer who remains your only source of food. Do not believe the hype! You are no panda, driven to near-extinction by human encroachment and habitat destruction and yet surviving almost entirely due to human-funded breeding programs, artificial handouts, and government-protected reserves. You are tired of the evangelizing, the incessant belaboring of the point from both white hos and every Whoopi on TV as if one day you would fall to your knees and finally confess to their teary applause. “Yes, I admit it. My PTSD worsens every second I have to spend in world that has declared total war on the black body and the black spirit. I gaslit myself. I said my failings were mine. I did not want to face that it was the white man behind it all.”

Fuck this cunt. You are tired of being told you cannot do it on your own. Fuck her puppets too. You are tired of black people mouthing these words, these antiblack words of perpetual leaning and dependency, in the name of black power. The militancy with which they insist that black fate is in the hands of white America, that antiblack racism means that black people cannot make it here on their own (a lie that would be hobbling, self-defeatist, even were it not a lie), does not make that insistence pro black. It is antiblack. Dependency is a loser’s game. Begging can never be shined into empowerment, at least any empowerment that rises above that of the sleazy craftiness of guilting society to giving more freebies—a craftiness that has now stooped to lies since black people enjoy the same about of freedom from antiblack persecution as anyone else (at least when we delete the hobbling in the form of help that comes from white society.) The mask is see through. You know who the real Uncle Toms are in this twilight zone. They will never break you, at least in the way they want.

They will pay. They do not know you. They will pay for not knowing you. You are not a doormat. You are not the center. We are all in this. Your role is vigilante. You are not God. You must have a style. And the tentativeness to own your style has given you the style of a doormat. That ends now. You need to make it end good. Flowers bloom in all kinds. You are a dangerous flower. It just took you a few decades to bloom.

You need to hit that cunt bitch in the mouth with the edge of that can with all your spiritual might. Mothers can lift cars when their babies are trapped. That is where you must go. Dig deep. And you can because this is bigger than you. Cunt comes in like a helper of black people. She is a liar. She is a poisoner. She talks about an antiblack agenda in the West. That is a lie. The only extra outside oppression put on black people in the West is her—her and her fight against what fake-progressive money-hungry clout-chasing snowbunnies like her call an “ever-growing white supremacy.” Remember all the hurtful help she has given your people. That will increase the power of each strike into mother-protecting-her-baby proportions.

She would blame all black failure on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy.” And look what that does. It allows blacks to wipe their hands of any complicity in their failures and instead fault the nebulous specter—a lie. And what does that then do? That stultifies black agency and black dignity, which itself leads to widespread underperformance in so many domains that it would almost seem there really was an antiblack chokehold. Fuck this cunt. Bust that that mahfuckin snot box.

She would see you as a sad case of “internalized whiteness” just because you refuse—even though it meant years of being called “Jiggaboo Uncle Tom,” “race-traitor-ass nigga,” by blacks under her spell—to repeat and repeat her ghoulish gospel, the macabre mantra and downright lie, as to how much blacks have been and continue to be victimized (and hence to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy perks, pity-driven privileges that excuse them from the responsibilities requisite for human flourishing). She would see you as a puppet of the white man for rejecting the idea that victimhood is the beating heart of black identity, for insisting that blacks have a personal say in their destiny and have all their opportunities open to them. She hates you because you encourage black people to free themselves from her grievance hypnosis, free themselves from the plantation of dependency that hypnosis keeps them on. Smash this cunt for that! Smash her for siphoning away what little sense of agency black people have. Smash the clout-chasing snowbunny slut for sending blacks charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic—for what is but a mirage of oppression! This cunt pushes black people so hard to see themselves as victims that they hallucinate racism in every shadow, distracting them from pursuit of any excellence beyond guilt trip grievance. Beat her face the fuck in!

She calls for defunding the police, the cunt—defunding the very thing keeping too many black communities from falling victim to the hypersexual-hyperviolent-hyperdruggie ravages of black culture. She could care less about the teary wails from so many black mothers who must pay the price of this white whore’s cure for a mere hystericized problem. Deck her right in the fucking teeth for that—right with the edge of that can, rich white ho!

She mocks the luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility—as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness (that contagious evil of all evils). Who the fuck is she, this black-poison cum dump, with her simple history? She dares have a phone even as she spits on Europe. Ruin her face with that can, nigga! Shakespeare and Columbus and Washington, punctuality and perfectionism and math—she would dump them in the trash on grounds that they are white! Ruin that fucking Becky-ass bozo face. Cunt is really going to spread a lie about how the door to our freedom is locked and then she is going to close to door! Bitch is going to take away the books that lift us, that cultivate an empathy beyond race color creed, all because they were written by whites! And then the bitch is going to support black music that glamorized destructive norms and behaviors: thugs, whores, drug addicts. Who is this bitch to mock Goethe? Smash that cunt face again for that!

She would lower standards for the black boys and girls she says she cares so much about, the lying slut cunt—as if blacks were mere underlings. She would “dismantle” math courses and classical music programs (and so many other sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing), especially on such ridiculous grounds as that they are “inimical to black styles of knowing,” or that they are “designed to humiliate black youth while making whites.” She would never challenge their bad grammar or their CP-time tardiness or their gangster music—all, and so much more, as a matter of being (in what amounts to a complete opposite-day twilight-zone nightmare) antiracist! Fuck her!

She would bring death onto the black spirit. You are stopping an atomic bomb to the soul of a people. No, it is much more. The antintellectual-hyperWAP toxicity of black American culture spreads everywhere. You are stopping an atomic bomb to the human soul! This woke cunt who goes around saying that “expecting black kids to become as literate as white children is an antiblack affront”—who better is she than yesterday’s slave masters who said that “Readin ain’t right for black kind.” Clock that bitch like your life depended on it! This cunt thinks that the standard is racist just because more blacks fail to meet it. “How’s this for disparate impact? Huh, slut!?” That is what you say as you clock this white bitch, the scarf-wearing scum.

She would have blacks protected from hearing uncomfortable data, unsettling words and ideas, while reading a textbook in a college course they chose to be in—as if blacks are invalids. Every hit to her face proves you are no invalid. Just to feel good about herself this blonde anorexic bad built bozo bitch will groom black children into perpetual leaners, spoiled entitled monsters, supercitizens with no motivation to develop into full-fledged agents! All the subminimal expectations (not just in education, but in conduct even), all the kid-glove leniencies—what does it do? It spoils blacks into an infantilized state of arrested development and dependency on whites, which further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites (a vicious feedback loop). She wants fucking pets! She wants pets who will only sing about our victimhood! She wants pets who will never hear anything that upsets the victim narrative cunt-borne lie! Knock this bitch’s lights out for being a groomer predator cunt!

She would keep blacks dependent and broken, keep them sick, in order to reap the moral praise of being the healer. This a Munchhausen bitch and the only good a Munchhausen bitch has is to be a set of fuck holes. Fuck this cunt. Beat her face with that motherfucking can, nigga, like you raping this lily-white bitches face in the fucking bassinet before she could have done her damage! Beat it like that. Watch her teeth bust and just hit the slut cunt bitch again and again.

She stokes a moral hysteria about white supremacy on the hunt and keeps apologizing for being white. The fucking cunt needs to apologize for being a cunt poisoner. How can people address the root issues behind the upsetting disparities with her lies? Skull fuck material no doubt as early as five or six, this whore is pulp in the making. Make it happen, nigga. This is your time. We all die. This heals. It is brain damage time for this cunt. She is Satan’s spawn. Some are deemed vermin on the basis of a lie. This no lie. Gas chamber would be too good. Beat her fucking face in with the can—the fucking edge!

She baits a white backlash. White men are sick of the punking. Every screen you turn on readily shows that the mockery is not just acceptable but actually aspirational. That understates the point. As if whites were not so straight-jacketed, so vulnerable to deplatforming and job loss just for unsettling BIPOC population with certain statistic or even saying a word precariously close to a word only black people can say, that it makes perfect sense why more and more pray for 23andMe to reveal blackness—the mocking and punking of white men is even considered valorous, as valorous as white men mocking black people is considered cowardly (“brave” is the Hollywood Oscar’s speech word, “brave for punching up” is how they put it in their ultimate gaslightery). White men are sick of the asymmetry in what they can say or what art they can create. They are sick of being told they have oppressive optics. They are sick of being told to stay in their lane and that they cannot write nonwhite characters in their books. They are sick of being hit with the cudgel of cultural appropriation—especially when no one owns culture, when all cultures and all their products were a function entirely of what came before, when all cultures steal and remix. This cunt is baiting a backlash just to say “See, I told you so.” She cares not one bit about the damage that will be done to blacks. Smash the cunt!

Smash the cunt and smash the cunt. Her predatory help seems to her so truly like real help that this is for her own good. The parasite had it coming. She is nothing now. Her face is mush—just one bacterium in a whole flush, but a good mush nonetheless. But we want more than mush. We want brains. She likes to give brain black guys. Well let her then.

Behold yourself in your glory. You burst through the choking fog, blade clenched in your searing fist, heedless of appeals. Behold your balls. You are a reasonable man in an unreasonable world. Carve a path of blistered steps through the fallout haze. Destiny awaits along the rails beyond this threshold of necessary violence. Today the cauldron of your boundless potential boils over at last. Slice them all, as many as you can get. You have got your one. These are all cherries.

Moral clarity sometimes requires accepting the mantle of madness. You are John Brown dragging pro-plantation men out of bed and hacking them to death for being, like all these SJW pigs, murderers by proxy. That is who you are. John Brown did not know whether history would vindicate his insanity. But that did not stop him from removing tumors. And this has not stopped you. You are a dancing star.

You are going home. The ambulance has come. It is your time. Walk into the light of peace, knowing this cannot be easily written off as evidence that the trauma black kings like you face is so bad that even the efforts to save them result—as it might with a feral cat who bites and scratches the humans just trying to help—in lashing out at the very rescue workers fighting on his side.

You have ranted too long for that narrative to go unchallenged. There are receipts. Your girlfriend and your child—they know. You have complained to friends. They all have internalized the manifesto. Your friend Mike, in fact, has your if-I-ever-just know letter.

Just know——. Man, what can I say? Just know that this was the way I saw fit to protect black people and really mankind from these bored warrior whites, the scarf-wearing fuckers. They operate on an insidious lie that the West has declared a war on the mind body and soul of black people. The lie is that the antiblackness project of white supremacy enjoys an especially pervasive grip over the West. The lie is insidious because it demoralizes black people. It gives them an excuse. It keeps them stuck in grievance. And it perpetuates the cycles where blacks are born thinking they need extra help because there’s this whiteness bogeyman out there. And then guess what? They end up needing help, which continues the cycle.

And that’s the crazy shit. That has me all fucked up on how even to express the point. The white supremacy shit is a lie. That rolls off the tongue easy. And you better than anyone know that I say it like a broke record. But like for the last year, maybe two, it didn’t seem right coming out my mouth. I continued to say it but it didn’t sit right. I knew why. I just did not want to face it. I’m starting to see that these woke motherfuckers are right. There is an antiblack agenda. The crazy shit, though, is that they are the evidence! All the shit they do to “dismantle white supremacy.” And it isn’t small. They have their tentacles not just in Hollywood and comedy stages and university classrooms. Their reading materials—chief among them that fucking walking poison DiAngelo and all the shit (How to Be Antiracist, How to be Less White)—are integrated into various federal agencies: Homeland Security, FBI.

So yeah, I have come to see my packaging as false—or more like too narrow. There really is an antiblack agenda. It might seem weird you hearing that come out of my mouth but its true. I’m not saying its intentional. It’s more institutional. All the helping hands and special treatment given out to black people, the fear of calling them out for their shit culture (the black Americans, of course)—it presumes that we can’t do for ourselves. It keeps us on a plantation of dependency like big spoiled babies, like that bitch from Willie Wonka. I watched a documentary about how Caribbean blacks won’t rent out their AirBnBs to black Americans. Gee. I wonder why? We’re menaces. They don’t clean up. They don’t have accoutnability. They fight and get draw police presence. And what happens if I complain about the glorification of drugs and violence? I’m an Uncle Tom. And what happens if, God forbid, white parents shake their head as they steer their children out of the park because the pussy-juicing music, the raps abpout perc30s stuffed in the asshole, is too loud? They are racist.

It’s wild man. And thing of like black people outside of all this nonsense. Little Nigerian kids are out here smarter than the average adult American—black white or whatever. And they have this weight on their shoulder of the black American. If I’m pissed, they should be livid. If I used the identitarian logic, I might push back: “These Nigerians are getting paypack for selling blacks off to slavery.” Of course, there are two problems here. (1) This logic is poison: Nigerians today had nothing to do with what they ancestors did—even though, side point, I do know a lot of Nigerian slumlords who have that enterprising spirit of Madam Tinubu (look her up) and I cannot help but think these slumlords would have been the ones sell off their fellow blacks. (2) The identitarian logic of the West must also have an extra antiwhiteness filter, though. We must only painting whites in a bad light, never black. So we can’t really even really say that Nigerians sold blacks into slavery. That would be another expression of the pathology of whiteness: “white fragility,” “white deflection,” or whatever.

So you got the ruination of blacks here on the one side. But that only one part of it. Think of all the people caught in the shakedown. Think of all the whites suffering because their society has to serve black people. Put the Asian kids aside who get blocked from universities because of DEI quotas. (That is just one of many death knells. They will go elsewhere and make other coutnries great while we’re over her in Sexyy Redd decline.) But yeah, just focus on white people. Remember how Veruka’s father has all those workers in his plant opening Wonka boxes to ensure thast his precious daughter get her golden fuckign ticket? White people, white men especially, are those workers. They have to give up their spots. They are expected to stay in their lane and stay quiet. They are put under extra scrutiny. (Expect to see, I guess, a lot of white stars even in basketball and boxing. Because it sis that sort of real oppression that does have the silver lining of breeding greatness.)

But seriously, what would you do if you were white—especially a down and out white—seeing the constant boosterism directed toward black people as you are passed over for jobs, policed harder because of your “oppressor optics” and all this shit. White is literally a pejorative. “Ain’t no white motherfucker gonna talk to me like that. I’m a black woman, a queen.” That is normalized on regular TV! It’s not just black Tubi.

I have enough of a damn heart to be pissed enough seeing my fellow man punked like this. Imagine how they feel. It’s fucked up. Did you know with all this equity shit music programs are getting rid of blind auditions—you know, where the violist or whatever plays behind a screen. Blind auditions were a saving grace in an age of true racist-based discrimination against blacks (as opposed to just discrimination agaisnt blacks because they don’t measure up_). It allowed musicians to be judged on what counts: their musical ability. But now we are in a time where it is deemed crucial to go even with the third-rate black over the first-rate white or Asian so as to make things equitable. Do you believe it? Doesn’t it make you crazy? I’m mean, I’m not crazy about factory farming or pollution so I guess I can see how someone cannot bug out. But it just looms so big in my mind. Blind auditions, once beacons of fairness, are considered now violent impediments to the creation an equitable society. We have come back to handpicked based on color.

It is fucking wild. It just blows the mind. But my point is. Don’t you think white people are gonna be pissed? These woke whites are not only crippling us and attacking our sense of agency and our pursuit of excellence beyond anything but handouts. They are on top of all that baiting white backlash! I mean yeah, part of me thinks whites are to scared to do shit. But I’m thinking of these Starbucks whites, city whites. What about the rednecks? They turn on the same TV and see themselves punked and blocks and then gaslit. The mantras repeated like a castechism. Whites have all the popwer. Only whites can be raqcist because racism requires power. And yet they are stuck in their same powerless position. Surely are some point you snap. I know I would!

These woke motherfuckers are playing with fire. Country whites, they know how to survive on the land—at least better than blacks. And the motherfuckers are armed. It’s hard not to see in this what I see everywhere: a desire to keep making money, keep the grant funds rolling in. Because when whites start pushing back, even if its not the “total war gun violence but just like the pendulum swinging the other way to compensate for the excesses of the woke shit, and like then white people be out here calling black people “niggers.” And its hard not too. And I’m not even coming from some Chris Rock shit. I mean after having your language policed so severely for years it becomes a taste of freedom.

But see, that’s the thing. What will happen as a result? These woke motherfuckers will be like “See, I told you there was white supremacy lurking! It was right there under the surface waiting to blow!” Nah motherfuckers! You manufactured that shit.

On some real tip, and I know this sounds like some conspiracy shit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out antiracists groups, like BLM or the most disgusting one (that Southern Poverty Law Center) are actually funding antiblack shit! I’m talking straight up KKK rally shit. The machinery is not hidden. Just as United healthcare has a vested interest in seeing people sick, the same applies here. These social justice warriors keep blacks stuck on a plantation of dependency, where the very ineptitude enabled by the spoiling handouts can be cited as evidence of a white supremacist plot against them. These social justice warriors bait white backlash in the process, normalizing the punking of whites and the diminished opportunities for whites so that told-ya-so reactions further justify their grant funding, their mission—their DEI stations in every university and government agency. The corruption and greed is clear. Even if by some fat chance the antiracist watchdog groups were not funding white supremacist groups, that would not matter. Their record could be clean, free of all cynical opportunism. They could really believe in their goodness. That would not matter. The spirit of the effort matters. United Healthcare does not need to be funding McDonald’s and gangster rap to know of its evil. Likewise here. It is a power play—a poisonous one.

I can see how that might sound wild. But I don’t think it is that crazy. That how this fucking place works. Shit, if firefighters were running out of work those motherfuckers would set fires. At least there would be tempting incentives to. I mean, that’s how bureaucracies function. Diversity industries and nonprofits, whole administrative systems or whatever, can develop a vested interest in maintaining a state of crisis to justify their own budget and staffing, their whole existence. That is what we have here. I think you see now why I almost can feel homicidal at points. I’m like “Please stop helping us! Your fucking help is hurting.”

Despite how I speak, I know its not just all white led. I know black people are responsible too. Shit, my empathy extends to them to. It’s hard not to blame them. We have lived comfy on the plantation. People will take the known basics over the uncertain promise of something better, especially when that something better requires getting our lazy asses up. It is human nature. Maximize calories in and minimize calories out. It is why we’re all fucked up by Snickers bars. It’s also a cultural-identity thing. We have this woe-is-me identity to uphold. We feel oneness with our spiritual singing ancestors: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen . . . .” We have our ceremonies. And that is no small matter. But just like in the Leslie Marmon Silko book that you never get to, to be healed we need new ceremonies. New ceremonies are scary though. It’s leaving the nest.

So no, by targeting these woke whites I am not trying to deny black agency. Yes, I call these whites puppeteers of blacks. And I know that makes me seem like I am divesting blacks of agency just like these woke fuckers do. Since I am now considering this my impromptu manifesto to you, I might as well answer the question why I target the scarf-wearing woke white, especially the women? Because I’ve decided long ago that if I ever go out I am not going to diffuse my potency, casting it all around. Here is my reasoning.

When you are being mobbed or are fighting on behalf of people who are mobbed—and btw I do feel I’m doing that. I mean my white professor was fired for reading out loud Huckleberry Finn, reading out every “Nigga Jim.” I mean, I know it makes me sound nuts when I go off on tangents. But they aren’t really tangents. Every job I have taken—it could be anything—and there were always these antiracist trainings like the ones I mentioned: “How to Prevent whiteness from Causing Harm in Private and Public Spheres.” They beat over your head how bad black people have it and how much privilege white people have. Why do I have to learn for a damn IT job doing dumb shit—not even dumb shit but divisive: literal scapegoating straight out of the antisemite playbook. So I had to do a learning module for the job I just got. You wouldn’t believe the questions I had to answer. “After the police shooting, Tom—a cis white male—wondered if the black male did anything to provoke the encounter. Explain in your own words why this would be an overt example of white denial even if Tom insisted that he was merely asking and not assuming?” Or check this one. “In a city council meeting, in response to the high crime level in the black part of town, Jim—a cis white male—says ‘Surely the fact that all these young kids hear the glorification of drugs and violence in rap music has a grooming effect. A black man’—you know these test writers wanted to say black king. But best believe they capitalize every goddamn “b” in “black” but never the “w” in “white.” You can’t make this shit up. Anyway, “A black man in the room, understandably upset, stands up to speak truth to power: ‘Of course you would say that. You are a white man. You harbor racism in your heart.’ Jim is eager to say he does not harbor racism. Jim’s response is a textbook example of white fragility. Explain why in your own words.”

You really can’t make this shit up. And by the way, guess who lead the campaign against my teacher? ‘That is not acceptable!’ And guess who tried to rally me because I was black and was expected to be deeply offended? That gets me exactly to my point! The bitch came to my fucking apartment when I didn’t answer emails.

Anyway, when you are getting group stomped you got to pick one. That is your best hope. Pick one motherfucker among them. Bite that motherfucker. Tear her eyes out. What’s the saying? He who chases two rabbits catches none? Grab the one rabbit and tear it apart on some ancient Greek shit. At least you will have that one satisfaction, tha tone secret blood, as they are kicking your gut. I chose the white woman. That is who I will grab in this fight.

Any decision comes with costs. And mine in this case is that my rhetoric makes it seem like the white woman is a puppeteer to blacks. In some senses I do think this is largely right, to be honest. And when I feel like I’m losing it and I get that feeling inside like I myself am being controlled as if by some demon—yes, then I do resort to that language. But obviously it is a gross oversimplification. I know that. But yeah—that is who I lunge for. You got to pick one. Even if it is random, you do.

But actually this is not random. It also serves a rhetorical purpose. Because think about it. Black people don’t want to learn that all the so-called pro-black antiracist shit, all the “math is racist” or “defund the police” or ‘I’m opposes and so I need help’ shit is the machination of white bitches. I’m making the bet, between you and I, that for me to position these ideas as woke white woman ideas, which they largely are, it will have better strategic impact. We already hate Becky and Karen. It is a life or death fight. So if I can have black people all identifying these hurtful policies and hobbling supercitizen treatment with the machinations of Beck and Karen, then I think that will serve us—and thereby the whole of mankind—well. Maybe we can better break free of the wormtongue hypnosis and look to how we contribute to our own failures. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Who can resist the temptation to have a readymade excuse for all one’s failures?

Blaming woke white bitches is not only largely true but our best shot. That my idea anyway. And there are those personal reasons I mentioned, like that white bitch trying to rally everyone to censor and silence and shame someone, a wonderful professor, whose mere presence did more for black kind than any of her poison. I hope for a future where we will will resist this woke shit and start reading Shakespeare. Shakespeare is for humanity, for all of us. These woke white bitches—see there I go, I can’t help it—mock Shakespeare as a “Dead white man” and mock logic and timeliness and perfection and manners. They want us like in loin clothes consulting charlatan shamans. They are poison. I’m rambling. But I can’t stop. They would poison us to feel good about themselves. Like I guess I’m autistic or whatever because I can’t stand that they actually think they are helping when in truth they are hurting us. They actually think they are being brave when it is unbrave: if Disney supports your cause it is not radical. They actually think they are being selfless when it is selfish. I literally cannot take it. It is like nails on a chalkboard. So yeah, the white woman in the SJW scarf—that is where I direct my fury.

Picture that in the papers! Your words bear the inner marks of truth and justice. This will have ripples. You are the tipping point. You have become glorious, bleeding on the concrete.

Take your exit with pride. No matter the incentives, you core circle will not pull the card of “he was radicalized by a false ideology.” Roommates in college, classmates and grade school—sure, they might tow the line here. But your people have heard your tears, heard the national-monument-level passion with which you went off at dinner tables and on couches. You spoke with a righteousness bearing the internal marks of truth. No, they will not turn. They will speak responsibly too, which is good. After all, you do not want more killing—well, more accurately: you do not want people like you to want more killing. Your people will say “It was unfortunate that Jakim chose this path. We think there are more productive ways to fight cancer than radiation. But one thing is clear: he was right about the diagnosis.”

Your people will keep your message alive. Fire with fire—their heartbreak will spur their intensity. Take heart in the end in that. This lie of white supremacy rising was a money-making scam. And they will say so in interviews. They will tell that for the rest of their lives. Your incessant venting was not enough. But it was priming. The message now will better come through. The predatory help industry will crash down no matter the incentives for blacks to stay on the plantation, no matter how good whites feel spooning out their poisonous charity—a charity that makes plane drops of winter coats to starving Somalians look like a lifetime supply of fortified peanut butter. Your people will say, in no small part because of you, “No. Enough is enough!” And they will eventually stop this blight of whites and the hoodwinked puppets who think that obsession with being down and out, obsession with grievances and victimhood and what is owed to them (owed to keep them on the plantation that they have over generations grown to find a comfort and a sense of identity and even pride in), is true black power. Black people will have new ceremonies.

Give in to the creeping numbness. Surrender with that knowledge. The silent majority of black people are on your side. More will come of out of the woodwork, inspired by your case. Blacks are not subhuman. They have hearts. They see the truth. It does not sit well with their spirit to live in a world of lies, however much they benefit. It eats at them. All the blacks who have it so good, seeing the ease with which their white friends are blocked from friend circles and romance and career opportunities—even if somehow the could sit with the inhumanity in this equity and all its anti-colorblind auditions, they cannot sit any longer with the lie of an external force of whiteness ever on the hunt for them and holding them back at every turn. All the blacks who are marginalized and hobbled in their bonnet roach infestation, all the blacks struggling—they will no longer be able to sit with the lie that what is keeping them down has nothing to do with their daily practices and the poisons their own culture, and now the American cultures at large with the dominance of black culture, tell them are cool and hip to drink and smoke.

Yes, even these section-eight dependents are not subhuman. After they commit adultery or shoot someone or do drugs each day they hear that voice inside quoting hip hop lyrics meant to prove their swagger and hipness. But they know deep in the human part of their souls that this does not pardon them and that they have chosen the easy route of refusing to push back against a toxic culture. It does not sit well with their dignity, furthermore, to keep demanding freebies from the white world. Even spoiled children feel shame for their displays of entitlement. Even through the excitement of controlling their parents with emotional manipulation, to them—somewhere inside—it still feels wrong seeing their mother bend over backwards to give them everything. And when they grow up unable to do for themselves these grown children, some surviving nuggets of conscience within, feel shame for their dependent psychology. The feel shame, yes, no matter how much cultural idea logy pushes that shame down by stirring up lies as about a world against them—using as evidence the very ramifications of the history of hobbling handouts that have decreased the likelihood of their ever enjoying a normal adult-human degree of self-sufficiency, handouts that have kept them too small-minded and lacking in skills to govern their own affairs.

Go into the dark through the light tunnel of neuronal frenzy. Go home to the oblivion before conception, a black man having finally stood up to face the power ploy with brutal honesty. The letter will survive.

Share

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Narcotico, by Meo Fusciuni

Narcotico strong kouros vibes, mentholic herbality and indolic sourness and musky leatheriness, although less interesting but more competently made and darker in my book than Kouros—at least in vibe and discounting performance. Think of it like an Odor 93 tuberose twist on Kouros. Yes, the tuberose here is strong—very white floral indole evne though no tuberose or any white florals are listed. But of course the perfume is called Narcotico, as in narcotic, and tuberose and other white florals like jasmine are the narcotic florals. And yes, because of the rubbery nature and because of my experience with Odor 93 I am sure the dominant floral is tuberose—its rubber perhaps reinforced by the oud. Indeed, because of the dusty nature—like the inside of a dusty chapel known only to locals—I get here it would seem like this is the same tuberose in Odor 93 (same mothball camphor glow) and really it overtakes the composition here where I suspect it is not supposed to. Or maybe, since this is called “narcotic” by name, I have it reversed: maybe Odor 93’s tuberose is overdosed and I am only putting it the other way aroudn because I ma thinkoign of Odor 93 as Meo Fusciuni’s tuberose dominant frag.

I suggest this as Kouros replacement, especially if you cannot get older bottle where the yellow ambery Animalis perfumers base contained real civet and at high doses. I suspect the reformulated Animalis perfumers base is here in Narcotico. White florals, herbs, frankincense, white musk, patchouli, tonka bean, vanilla—these two have so much in common. Narcotico dials down the cleaning product aspect of Kouros and instead boosts the tuberose and spice. They are notably different. Narcotico, in its deprioritization of Kouros soapiness, allows the sacred mystical parts of their shared connection to shine through. Both use synthetiic musks but the ones here add to more of an impression of powder or dust blown into the air from off the hand. In Kouros, on the other hand, we get a galaxolode that goes much more like laundry suds. Both give you mustiness. But Kouros is more jockstrap muskiness whereas Narcotico’s mustiness, less sour, tilts more in a moldy-cellar direction. Both give you leather. But Kouros’s leather is more smooth and mossy and pronounced whereas Narcotico’s is more rugged and spiced and grainy.

Narcotico is very much like Kouros—think Kouros only with the urinal cake is toned down and a sort of Bel Ami cola spice ramped up. Yes, the frankinscence here is a crucial difference and anchors the difference between 1980s jumpsuit aerobics lockerroom (Kouros) and something much more sacre and church-like (Narcotico). This is less aggressive than Kouros, and—although there is a clash of bitter and sweet here, something perfumer intended—it definitely has less of that Kouros signature tonal whiplash (an olfactory expression with what can readily be found, as almost an Istvanian signature, in my literary writing and even in my perfume reviews). Yes, this is like Kouros turned into a church incense—perhaps even, keeping the connection tight, the church bathroom (less the urinal than a wooden cabinet in there that keeps hand towels, which would actually vibe well with Giuseppe Imprezzabile’s intention: this is supposed to be the smell of his grandmother’s clothing cabinet back when he was 9.

Narcotico is one of my favorites of Meo Fusciuni, in raw smell perhaps above two other more original fragrances: Little Song, whose composition is objectively better and whose vibe is arguably more atmospheric, and likely over Last Season, which—even though it overloads the fragrance with indolis aromachemical and unami seaweed vibes that I find irresistible—is a bit too synthetic and pushy. As far as Odor 93 and Buio and Varanasi are concerned, Narcotico would fall short. This goes especially for Varanasi—a take on leather (if we could reduce it to just that) that is smoky and ashy and yet aquatic and animalic. Varanasi is inimitable in a much truer sense than how people use the term to describe Kouros or the crib-filled Koran—a book that for all the talk Ensar makes of it being the anchor for a religion with no tolerance for thieves and plagiarizers is next to nothing but plagiarism itself (which of course makes sense given the anxiety the book itself repeatedly expresses, the pains it takes to say, it is absolutely original: pure childish overcompensation that we all can see through now in our era where, although we are much more childish in some ways, have much more of a grasp of psychology).

Share

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 93)

buzzers, edible panties, to buy their way out of a bed body-bagged by cowgirl blubber

prescription opioids from family and friends—dinner-party medicine cabinet

a blind man sniffing his wad of toilet paper as if brown were his favorite color

in a day where being used has become taboo, worse is when no one wants to use you

citing prison letters, crazed from solitary confinement, as grounds for parole denial

in the plutonic depths of a mine sucking at air too thin for flame

roofied into the deboned pliability you had not felt since the changing table

words are part of reality, but why be autistic 
when you hear things like “He was more
concerned with words than with reality” 

a toxic culture where desiring innermost intimacy 
is being desperate, and where being desperate 
is worse than being either a slut or a prude

our demand for a spouse who can provide home and security (build the fence)
and yet novelty and adventure (smash the fence), all while being our bestie—
if only we sat more around fire we could return to sharing partners like bonobos

midgets worried around dogs

the bum toll at every off ramp

politicization of high-resolution visualizations of the early fetus 

a spinster’s prop of delusion, the bridal veil graces the fat neck in the mirror

your lover kisses the childhood burns—
the yardage of melted candle, pink and peach—
that have yet to let stop driving you insane 

delivery men, cashiers, and so on fighting mental atrophy 
through on-the-job decisions that make them feel important:
giving extra napkins, small-talking, offering to double bag

advocating minimalism in shoe sole on grounds
that one remote tribe runs barefoot, but ignoring 
the show-off rite-of-passage aspect of their practice

enervating depression naps versus invigorating buoyant naps

even if self-hatred is learned, does that mean it is uncalled for?

desperate to find some sort of neglect 
behind the sudden death of the infant
so as not to face that yours can be snatched up too

that inner Zeus inhabiting you
appears only in theater, before
an audience in the semi-dark

unable to stand that beaming
nonstop in the guru’s eyes,
you tell yourself it is just an act

lingerie, color-shrieking pieces polar opposite to thong skimp, devoured by the gut

what has come with the advent of the shame movement?

but the movement of shaming people for not being 
“in the present moment” targets not only anxiety 
about the future but even free-floating daydreams  

painted cakes may very well satisfy real hunger—
not just aesthetic hunger, but hunger hunger too:
the hungry lose themselves, fantasizing in salivation  

posters stapled over each other on telephone poles—tooth and claw red here too

talking over the silence with an other, intimacy becoming too intense 

semen threatened to lurch from the unzippering dam, loaded as he was

what you would be like—other than like a young child—if you did not hate yourself?

the welcomed (muscle) imbalance of the specialist (athlete)  

incentives to exaggerate statistics to sustain the victim culture

thoughts about people deaf to your existence 
cropping up during momentous experiences 
that otherwise have nothing to do with them 

carpet into which snow has never to melt nor mud to spread

the torture of exposing only testicles in the summer sun

pockets deep enough to keep lawns watered even in our world state

insecure about your home cooking

how much of you it shows that you read birdsong
not as emanations of “I’m the one to be loved”
but rather as wails of “Who, oh who, will love me?”

it takes a limited vision to see American architecture, or even American cheese,
as lacking deep history—limited enough, especially if coming from its own people, 
to be a diagnostic of autoimmune rage against the boredom of well-to-do-ness

the wish is as big as could be, and yet her breath merely tickles the dandelion

a bird flying in reverse

creeks choked by a sudden surge of melting ice

vigilant about clearing roof snow—or is it Dad’s distraction from the obesity inside?

facing that history could go on without her (only one person, after all)
opened her to surrender herself to that one door—opened her, that is,
to shut doors that, kept open, kept her world large only on the surface

that point where more love has faded than will appear

he could astound you with wisdom if ever you could lure him into conversation

bullying campaigns against bullying keeps bullying alive, which is the point

what might happen, what “humanoid crush error,”
to the toddler intolerant of the robot’s heartless
snatching of the toy with which he was playing?

an arm around the shoulder, standing 
in a hollowed room that has not echoed
footsteps like this since move-in day

telling yourself that it is hope 
for tomorrow, rather than cowardice, 
that stops you from killing yourself

completely naked little boys covering 
their breasts with crossed arms, 
hands clutching their shoulders

beautiful landscapes failing to uplift us even beyond the screen

machinists with fingers too thick—thick as thumbs—to work a fast food register

out of breath hordes wobbling their way to the tourist attraction

caricatured portraits in which capturing likeness has been taken seriously 

a painting of a map used as a map

erecting a wall around who you love
in the least has who you love 
contemplating how to escape

it makes sense to try to keep your privilege, but imagine blocking out other groups
even when they pose no threat to you—and no, this is not the black-white cliché
creampied into skulls by colleges and Disney: the asymmetry leans the other way

and yet being hysterical around the dying may distract the dying  

knowing that you have to be the one 
to leave this town even as you know 
you will never feel so tied to a place  

the question, “Why worry about the health 
of one already condemned?,” can be reworded,
of course, as: “Why worry about anyone’s?”

the worst that could happen is that you die sooner—a rule with exceptions

it being sanctioned takes enough edge off 
to render vagina fetishism—common
among straight men—not quite fetishism

unearthing purpose-giving liberation to be 
bitter in righteousness from the false belief 
that your rapist was morally responsible 

difficulty letting go of the preoccupying rituals, 
the perfect control of everything in your space,
once you are forced out of solitary confinement

understandably construed (like gardens) as the pineal gland 
between man and nature, what are we to make of dancing
being so associated in contemporary minds with boozing?

the conscious decision to change how to say the family name 

milk crate night stand

might vagina fetishism run
subterranean enough to have him
convinced of being straight? 

as soon as he enters the shower
your boyfriend’s phone rings, there 
on the bed, even though it is off

living one furnished room to another

those assertions false in the sense that they lack truth-value

“If Imma be miserable no matter what, a nigga might as well drink—sheit!” 

nervous about getting too used to being alone

the rage of a drunk father was an occasion for the boy to learn the woods

if people are forbidden to voice their prejudices, then how can we work them out?

just as gringos fall into a groping Spanish—
“No lefto turno”—when speaking to Mexicans, humans
used to fall into deadpan talk when talking to 80s robots

every scenario can be seen as miraculous: 
how can one explain your bed sheets being
wrinkled exactly as they are this morning?

since those who fall for one conspiracy theory
tend to fall for so many others, best would be 
to endorse your pet conspiracy and reject the rest

that side of town where people cough all night
or are kept up by those who cough all night—
everyone rooting for maximal mucosal yield

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Private Label, by Jovoy Paris

Private Label (2011, Cécile Zarokian)—a vetiver-patchouli fragrance (more fossil and fungus than grass and twig) whose aura of sterile filth (used bandages, moldy money) and old-world decay (fallen staircases once perfumed by who’s-who entrances, cracked-and-dusty spines once oiled by fingers) evokes a pipe-toking bibliophile’s study gone to lignan-vanilla rot (ripped leather armchairs, their stuffing blooming with silverfish; wallpaper peeling and mottled with roof-leak mildew; hide-curled cinders of medieval manuscripts, recently torched with scotch accelerant for itinerant warmth, on a floor fractured and uneven from the hungry but patient peat bog below)—

opens with a rooty-tarry pizzazz that smells—thanks to a shared core of Ghirardelli-mint patchouli, book-lignan vanilla, brittle-paper cedar, inky-rooty vetiver, tarry-charcoal birch, scorched-earth guaiac, phenolic-oudy cypriol, castoreum-musk leather—close to Amouage’s Silver Oud (only drained of agarwood and thickened with the cough-syrup smear of Mancera’s Red Tobacco) and even closer to TRNP’s Aguru

but soon, as the patchouli’s transition from charcoal chocolate to ashy mushroom lets the papyrus-vetiver combo rise (medicinal, papery, smoky, inky), settles into an aroma of desiccated tobacco leaves (haylike, peppery, resinous, woody) removed from the musty sarcophagi of leather-bound books (tannic, bitter, nutty, smoky) and rehydrated in a glass of high-peat laphroaig scotch (briny, creosotic, vanillic, antiseptic), the vanilla-custard warmth at the base (so-tarry-it-is-leathery labdanum, so-dusty-it-is-creamy sandalwood) sufficiently balancing all the bitterness and ashiness—

the overall effect being a boozy-woody fragrance that, due to it its patchouli-vetiver-cedar-birch bloodline, makes it not just the sibling of Lalique’s Encre Noire and Bentley’s Bentley for Men Intense and Nasomatto’s Duro and Orto Parisi’s Terroni but almost like a 60-40 cross between Profumum Roma’s Fumidus and TRNP’s Aguru, the father of the family perhaps being Bortnikoff’s Sans Fleurs (which brings boozy antiseptic woods) and the mother being some mix between Profumum Roma’s Patchouly and some patchouli-vetiver-vanilla harlot (like perhaps Henry Rose’s Dark Is Night);

the overall effect being, in other words, a peaty-medicinal patchouli-vetiver fragrance, perfect either for an underworld bossman who makes people stand by his mere presence or for a tweed-jacket archivist who has not spoken aloud in years, that would be a dead ringer for my prefered fragrance Fumidus if only (1) its balance between axe-throwing-in-the-rain ruggedness and Proust-reading-in-a-clawfoot-tub smoothness tilted further toward the former (amber creaminess dialed down, asphalt smokiness dialed up); (2) its patchouli were quieter than its vetiver; (3) its beginning shapes in the evolution from oudy cough medicine to peaty mustiness were deleted; (4) its amberwoody base, very subtle and tasteful but making it more louder and long-lasting, were deleted.

Roofie the Straggler

Hammered blondes sway
on the bachelorette dance floor
like meat in warbled fade-ins

to cheesy poolside porn, a rogue
blowfly crazed by the rhythm
of rectal prolapse—lips

bitten, eyes shut; wrists
above their heads as if roped
to a mast in buccaneer captivity.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Oud Sultani Surira, by Ensar Oud

Sour tart earthy vanilla with a whole lot of salt—almost like salt made into a resin. This has that Pink Papua marine vibe but much more in an ocean water turned resin way than an ocean water still liquid and full of florals. like a companion of Pink Papua. purple coral scent in blue water but with a leathery castoreum base—and even a cypriol-like facet tgat lasts through the whole life of scent—lacking in pink papua. surira gets a sort of arctic air, subtle mint too—also not present in papua.

The malaysian oud here, I believe, is from the peninsular side (west malaysia that share border with thailand to north) and not the east (which is in the northern part of Borneo island), which tends to be more salty mineralic. Orris mineralics are commoin to both peninsular and non-peninsular Malaysian ouds—that is, the West (thai side) Malaysian and the East (borneo side) Malaysian. I do get that here definitely. But I get more of the peninsular side vibes: leathery metal (like a clean castoreum) and humid mineralics—smoother than Hindi, less honeyed than Cambodian, and—with the resin-rich mugginess I get here (reminiscent of a Terengganu, an oud fromn this peninsular rergion)—definitely denser than Borneo.

Sri Lankan oud is used here too. And that explains the yuzu-meets-vetiver impression precisely while also, given that Sri Lankan get briny as well (almost like a lemon-herb-tea twist on a blue oceanic), explaining—when combined with the pestled-orris-and-ambergris impression of the Malaysian—the super salt quality of the whole and the unexpected resemblance to Pink Papua—only more the rainsoaked bark of a jungle than the lily pad in a salt-water zoo pond​, which in itself is hair-splitting. But what seems to make thwe difference, and one will especially notice this as this scent ages (many say this is one of the few Ensars that age badly, becoming a vanilla-spikenard drone with less development from teah like elegance in the beginign), is the musky-mossy influence of spikenard that synergizes with the peninsular Malaysian to heighten the impression of wet bark that has not yet began to rot but for some strange reason—and here is the influence of the orris—has a brown purple hue.

Share

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 92)

ashram Wi-Fi

the blind feeling out messages in unplanned bumps

equatorial tanning salons

sea-salt beards

waiting for the I-changed-my-mind call

male benevolence as the only assurance of a woman’s wellbeing before the gun is a lie 

to become enraged at the man who killed your child
is to let him wound you twice—unless, of course, rage dips
deep enough into analgesic eros to be worth any time

the one in whom you wanted—you needed—
to confide about your pain from the divorce 
was the very one from whom you divorced

the task persisting in the face of certain defeat,
that is the story of everything—everything but
the eternal core of the self-sprung wellspring

going into an experience thinking you already know
what it is to have it—the tragic gift of teachers, coaches—
means being blocked from having it only in one sense

a plastic bag caught in a cactus, unable to do its wind dance

ethnic restrictions in an open marriage

desperate for the world to be better once you create a child

despair over so much time wasted on religion is a sunk-cost pull to come back 

youths yelling on the subway, itching to rage out were we to say “Quiet down”

African cab drivers not wanting to pick up African American customers

failing to profile by race or gender, or by power of locution or whatever, is a slander 
to the Holy Ghost that gifted us wisdom since we were ocean critters, but it is also 
a slander to remain closed to exceptions to the rule or to the call to revise the rule

how do you not feel scared when experience—
the boots on the ground of Locke, of Hume—
has trained you to think they are dangerous?

what you know to be just a gorgeous robot 
will still unbalance you with adrenaline
even better than jump scares in a horror film

rather than planning out how to act, circling
what-ifs, trust that you will handle the situation—
terrible advice for the antipode of the worrywart

falling for your own pillow talk—meant to make the asymmetry lean the other way

fancy words put reality at a distance, 
but the richness of reality deserves 
being approached from all perspectives

dwelling on what will happen next helps us prepare and ultimately keeps us hooked
to life, but it takes us out of the moment—well, since we are always in the moment,  
better to say “out of the sanctioned moment”—and opens us to anxieties as well

depression is a con-artist: it cons us 
into normalizing three naps and makes us
ashamed to admit having been its victim

tester shots of Fentanyl to see if this batch will result in wooden chest

stuck for life in what you are so good at

the game of sitting at the feet of a guru wrapped in a blanket

your own child killed in the school massacre 
do you step up as that neighbor parent 
for survivors, or do you avoid eyes with them? 

that greenlight question: what does it matter to throw away a mere day of sobriety?

squeamish about tapping phones and going into war 
at least while the responsibility for protecting 
the members of your country do not fall on you 

feeling invulnerable to cheating on your spouse 
makes you think deep friendships pose no threat, 
enabling that subtle slide to an emotional affair 

burpees in solitary

digging out the pockets of alley life 
too wasted by substances or life   
to be responsive to your kicks

towns from the past constructed—
payphones, vintage Firebirds—
for those stuck in that decade

hypnotizing yourself to believe the lie

mere safety regarded as happiness among immigrants

the chemicals we must add to us to be who we are

having capitalized on a calamity does not mean having planned it

underwear toe-flicked into the hamper with pride

survival competitions among robots

professional humiliators hired by the high powered

cry bullies enabled on campus 

hearing “Mommy, what’s that?” when the that is you

is it more the overgrown weeds 
or the one buried below them
that calls you to the cemetery?

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Narjis Noor, by Elkhaldi (and Tauhid)

Mood-boosting springtime scent of yellow flowers mating in a golden sun—think: weedy daffodil soap. Absolutely stunning doughy nectar and tobacco vibes from the narcissus. I love when flowers go doughy like heliotrope and here the narcissus does just that. It is one of the best in the line. And on my second wear this might be in the running for a top ten spot, which is a big deal in my collection. Vegetal pollen musk that many will associate with artisanal soap. Osmanthus provides as suedy body and ramps up the yellow floral feel with subtle impressions of peach.

My partner hates this fragrance with a passion: said I smell like an old man in an old-age home who has shit and pissed himself repeatedly. She is getting the pigstye resemblance from narcisuss. Pigs give off a compound common to narcissus I think. It was a visceral reaction. This—unfortunately, in light of that—is in running for my favorite Elkhaldi and is vying for my top 20 of all time. It makes sense that it would. It has musk—check. It has yellow florals, which I really like for the nectar and sun and even weediness and leathery they can show. It has a variety of ouds—check. It is animalic (female-taint jasmine, and the furry-pelt Kashmiri musk)—check. It has Persian-style shammama spices—check.

I am tremendously smitten with this one. It brought me back to the first Elkhaldi’s I smelled, which are remain at the top: Civet Regale and Ghazali Finale. The star of the show of course are the florals: fuzzy-peach osmanthus; narcotic-grundle jasmine; shag-tobacco narcissus; spiced-herbs shamama (saffron and bay leaf and definitely cinnamon). But these are grounded in ouds: fermented plum Cambodian; unsweet-tar Burmese oud (very similar to what I get in Mongolian Mriga); woody-incense Vietnamese Oud.

The closest fragrance I have to this is Jinx’s Rayong Fleur (a decant). Both are spicy-soapy yellow floral fragrances anchored in oud (especially cherry-tobacco Cambodian) and musk (especially creamy-leather Kashmiri). Rayong is a nice scent but Narjis does the job better. Rayong goes a bit more weedy and waxy (hipster-arthouse vintage) whereas Narjis Noor goes more petals and musk (authentic-musky vintage)—both things I like. Both go into the territory of grandma dress gentrifier whites (yes, even the “males”) on fixed gear bikes and cowboy boots smelling of yellow floral soap with a sort of vegetative costus-like rootiness. But—with maybe how the spices work with the musk (I don’t know yet)—Narjis goes more like biological woman in that same situation whereas Rayong feels like a trans woman on that same bike—a trans woman ready to ruin the career of any comedian or professor daring to dead name or misgender or state facts and statistics “unsettling for vulnerable populations”; a trans woman bearded to all circus hell and yet dying to use the girl potty at any establishment (if not to ruffle some pedophile juices, then at least to ruffle some political feathers).

The difference comes down to the floral accord that rising from the melange of yellow floral ingredients. The Jinx is more like dandelion whereas the Elkhaldi is more like daffodil (narcissus, narjis). While both dandelion and daffodil are iconic spring florals that share green and yellow floral accords and a mating garden impression buzzing with bees in the sun, their scent profiles diverge in texture and intensity. Dandelions are defined by their bitter weedy edge (which is why the Jinx seems more like a garden overrun by weeds and thereby more in the direction of Parfum d’Empire’s Mal-Aime, Mal-Aime mixed with a bit of that alluring cigarette-ash-pesticide I get from Rasasi’s Tobacco Blaze). Daffodils, on the other hand, are characterized by a more elegant floral sweetness with hay-like undertones. The difference are small between the two fragrances but you can really divide them by the difference between dandelion and daffodil. Dandelion is more bitter and milky and smoky whereas daffodil is more sweet and floral and haylike. Dandelion is more herbal and rugged whereas daffodil is powdery and sophisticated. While dandelion does have honey vibes, the stemminess is font and center. Daffodil on the other hand is much more the petals: honeyed and full of sunshine. Perhaps more import to me is that dandelion—more green, bitter-milky, meadowy, weedy—is not animalic, not especially sexual, whereas daffodil (especially in absolute form) can get heady and musky and sultry. Really you camn distinguish the two on that honey vector. Although both are waxy (reflective of the protective layer over both flowers, a layer that has many fatty acids in common with beeswax), dandelions—sugary, lactonic, pollen-heavy, almost like a talcum powder made to smell like cut grass—are more on the upbeat nectar side of the spectrum (think of when you would rub a classmates are with the head of one in school to mark them with a yellow streak) whereas daffodils—heavy, narcotic, indolic, and with a muskiness and tallow-coated leatheriness that deepens with age—are more on the moody beeswax side of the spectrum.

Another way to put it is like this. It is like the difference between the look and feel of real 70s cinema vs the contemporary hipster odes to that era whose flannel and crab fisherman beanies, whose opiod problems and deckhand Navy tattoos, make them—no matter how real their penchant for eating Vienna sausages and corned beef hash right from the can—just about as blue-collar as Springsteen. The Jinx is the Platonic shadow cast though a hipster lens whereas the Elkhaldi feels closer to the real deal, closer to the eidos. The cinema analogy really does apply to the differences between the two fragrances. The authentic 70s cinema had erratic and organic grain whereas the modern homage had a digital overlay to emulate grain and give that throwback gritty vibe (but which often comes off to perfect in some sense to be authentic: too evenly distributed or whatever). While a real 1975 film might look a bit dusty or washed out in color (desaturated earthy palette), a Tarantino homage to that era will often have hyper-vibrant yellows and reds that look like a 1970s magazine ad rather than a 1970s movie. The modern homages are try-hard (not necessarily bad) and so use all this stylized lighting to scream: this is the 70s: heavy yellow and orange filters with a toss in of audible pops and anamorphic lens flares here and there to mimic the film flaws of the era. And yet because the underlying digital image over which all these 70s-makign filters are overlaid is so sharp, the superimposed “softness” can sometimes feel like a blurry filter rather than a natural optical limit like in the case of the real thing.

Yes, that is the key difference between Rayong Fleur and Narjis Noor. Narjis comes off like the original Shaw Bros Kung Fu film (say, Five Deadly Venoms) whereas Rayong Fleuer comes off like a Tarantino homage or 70s exploitation (say, Kill Bill). That makes good sense in general. The whole Jinx style is that arthouse throwback aesthetic.

If Narjis had more of the civet of the Jinx I think it would be even better. But, despite my impressions of the fragrance (artisanal soap sitting under sun in a yellow floral dominated garden), several people have told me that this already comes off as fecal as it is. So that could be overkill. I have Elkhaldi’s civet paste, though. I could just layer—and yes, that needs to be done.

*My poems almost never directly relate to my perfume of the day. This is an exception. While my perfume of the day is daffodil-centered as opposed to dandelion, they both share that weedy yellow floral aroma.

Mercari

The dandelion riot has moms 
looking skeeved out 
along the daycare fence (chain link,

extra guilt), but their kids—
twisting stalks, smudging 
each other’s forearms yellow—

free into the wind a time rift—
bitter nectar, milky and smoky— 
they would buy online. 

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

SCENT OF THE DAY: Dryad, by Papillon

Dryad (2017, Liz Moores)—a green-leather chypre that, sodden as it is with both the rooty dampness of fungal decomposition and the vegetative verdancy of a young stem twisted to its limit but refusing to snap, seems less a composition than a resurrection, Robert Piguet or, to cite the Bandit perfumer I have in mind (my panties-huffing astral sister), Germaine Cellier clawing back (Thriller-style) through the oily leather of its coffin and through the soil and perhaps even through the tarmac of an overgrown parking lot into a scrub of bracken and brambles and blooms salted by sea air—

evokes a variety of pastoral scenarios (pulling garden weeds with vegetable-tanned cowhide gloves, a goat circular chewing a ball of green—womb-warm, not spa-fresh—in the background; clouds irradiated gray with impending rain, everything overgrown but nothing grotesque; foraging in an Irish-folklore forest where the moss-gripped trees hunch under a spectral fog of chilled humidity, phosphorescent lichens crawling up their trunks; digging through loamy soil—the kind of soil you would choose to lie down in—for fishing worms, the air of the mist-cloaked forest thick with musk after a long night of countless rapes and murders too hidden to detect but too close to asphalt to believe),

and why it evokes such scenarios—why, in particular, these scenarios tend to center around coastal forestry rummaged by ruminants, perhaps even a pollen-dusted Julia butterfly (the lone member of the butterfly genus Dryas) mistakable in its flutter for a thorn-crowned nymph (a dryad) whispering among the dew-slicked weeds and wildflowers of Parfum d’Empire’s Mal-Aimé (foxglove, thistle, nettle, fleabane)—is perhaps clear when we consider the contribution of each element:

(1) galbanum, dominant from the first inhale, unleashes green-bell-pepper verdancy sharpened, especially with the help of the citrus elements (bright-tannic bergamot, sour-steel citron, tart-green bigarade orange), into a metallic bitterness that suggests the chill of morning dew on tall grass and imparts a retro feel to the composition (especially when coupled with the next note);

(2) oakmoss, nearly as dense and leathery (only more inky and not as soapy) as the Irish-Spring moss of Rogue’s Mousse Illuminee, lends an earthy gravitas of fungal bark, its aroma of lichen rot deepened by various other decompositional elements (vegetal-compost vetiver, matted-fur costus root, fermented-urine civet, carbolic-perineum castoreum) and given a camphoric glow especially by the woody-medicinal lavender and the peppery-sharp geranium;

(3) costus root, here more reminiscent of the sebaceous gland excretions of wooly quadrupeds rather than the scalp of naked bipeds, the biggest contributor to the goat effect and the man reason I feel Silenus is Dryad’s best representative, lends an unwashed-fleece sensation that nudges the scent into livestock territory, although here the cud-ball greenery—even with the inclusion of vanilla-cream benzoin, milky-skin apricot, waxy-indolic orange blossom, powdered-paunch orris, and banana-custard ylang-ylang in addition to the civet and castoreum—outshines the underlying lipid-rich lanolin enough that (unlike with one of my other costus stars, Goat by Wolf Brothers) the grasses and shrubs and berry briars upon which the ruminants graze remain more the focus than the ruminants themselves (although this becomes less true with time as the oily musk of green leather builds);

(4) waxen green florals (mainly tobacco-honey narcissus, but also the more spectral florals like geranium) add to the spring sensation of new beginnings, the skunky-pollen jonquil (a type of narcissus) bringing—especially with the help of the tobacco elements (autumnal-hay deer tongue herb aka liatris, smoked-leather tobacco absolute)—a feel of animal-warmed hay;

(5) fruity elements (the various sparkling-clean citruses plus the kitten-ear apricot and the berry-bush Turkish rose) impart, especially with the help of the radiant civet, a subdued glow, enough to brighten the overcast sky but not enough (unlike in the case of another green leather like Aramis’s Tuscany Per Uomo) to override the dark-leathery aura and reveal a totally unfiltered sun;

(6) herbal elements (rustic-herbaceous thyme, savory-green tarragon, hay-urine clary sage, stemmy-camphoraceous lavender) reinforce the scissored-stem greenery of the galbanum while adding a shadowy medicinal fog, although their potency—even when coupled with the pine tar and other resinoids meant to evoke the Bay of Biscay pine forests of France’s Landes region—not enough to bring us to one of Prin Lomros’s woodland witch apothecaries where mysterious green tinctures steep in wooden bowls);

(7) comforting resins (mainly benzoin, but likely also cinnamon-tar styrax, smoky-sweet labdanum, crème-brûlée peru balsam) thicken the glowing oakmoss as well as add enough cozy warmth to make the goat’s presence seem nearby;

(8) rooty vetiver, more vegetal and decayed than bright and grassy (although both sides seem present), boosts the smoky-fungal-leather feel that could make this composition too unclean in its cleanness for some (filth much closer to Beatrix Potter than to Marquis de Sade in the liminal space between manicured lawns and absolute wilderness) and serves as one of many dark elements steering the composition in a brooding direction, far enough away from the airy verdancy of chypres like Cristalle or Givenchy III (which comparatively feel more springtime-in-the-sun rather than mossy-forest-in-the-mist) that I can almost get hints of fireplace ember and even the peat of Fumidus—

the overall effect being a costus-galbanum chypre that, blending the best of Jinx’s Rayong Fleur with the best of Parfume d’Empire’s Mal Aime, brings you right back to Guerlain heyday (even though novices, or perhaps just people young enough to have spent their entire lives in metaverse distraction from the encroaching ecological indeterminacy that Liz Moores seems to be saying something about here, would not be entirely wrong in smelling toilet-bowl water blued by bleach-free hippie-approved toilet tablets).

Share

*Worked on Section 2. The nerd in me really liked the allusion to the metaphysics of material colocation. Gumby is the textbook case of what some metaphysicians see as the spacetime convergence of two distinct objects: Gumby and the lump of clay he is. You can squish the clay into a lump and thereby kill Gumby even though you still have the same material. Mr. Malik, in the earlier versions, used her Gumby toy as a butt plug on the little girl, and in order to indicate how perfectly aligned the woman’s genitalia are with the little girl she has tattooed on her I say that the two converged as closely as Gumby and the material that makes him up. That little nerdy philosophy thing though did not need to be said. The plumbness was already clear with the mere word plumb. In this new version I used to extra real estate to describe that Mr. Malik would work her asshole with not just his thumb but a candle.

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 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

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!”).

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Burniss, by Havenhollow

An autumnal tobacco—a tobacco, in other words, transformed by sweet-hay deertongue from an object into a whole season.

If Cochise makes you think of the southwestern tribes, this one takes you out of the Blood Meridian atmosphere and more into the Pocahontas atmosphere of a tobacco ceremony around a cornucopia (not the European horn of plenty but rather the actual Native American equivalent: the gathering of corn, beans, and squash). All of the Havenhollows as far as I can tell have a common core—something very reminiscent of what we get in a variety of fragrances from Fate Man to Abu Madyan. I suspect liatris or deertongue is the hidden essence instantiated in most of the Havenhollows—liatris, a native perennial flower in North America that gives a tobacco aura of herbs mixed with hay, and maybe some immortelle, which gives a tobacco aura of maple syrup and rum. Liatris is autumn in a bottle and these all bring you there in some way. While it creates a lovely signature, whatever that core is in truth, it does blur a lot of these fragrances into each other. I have only worn Cochise maybe twice and this maybe twice. I have too big of a collection and so these deserve much more time to appreciate their uniqueness.

The tobacco is big here. You get various heavy cured tobacco notes: Havana, Burley, Perique, Virginia. But you also get Nicotiana alata (jasmine tobacco). That introduces a fragrant botanical aspect of the living flowering plant. There is a smoky menthol aspect (which I also get in Anachronism), something more in-between Akro’s Smoke and Nishane’s Fan your Flames: the firepit association of the former (I sense fire here where fragrant woods are burned) and the menthol of the latter. This is a tobacco scent indeed. And for whatever reason, maybe it is because Cochise was my first intro to the house and it set a Native American mood, I think of Native Americans smoking tobacco. In addition I get the autumn vibe from the liatris and tobacco and also of course from the honey and plum that evoke a late-autumn bounty—the preservation of sweet fruits and late-season yields. I get images of orange and red and yellow sweeping across whole rounded mountain sides. And because of that I picture in particular Native Americans from the northeast smoking this tobacco.

In areas like the Hudson Valley, where I am from, tobacco was a deeply rooted sacred plant, well before the Europeans came, in the two main distinct cultural and linguistic families that dominated the whole northeast: the Algonquins (Mohicans, Wappingers, Wampanoag, and so on) and the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, and so on). Tobacco was not a casual recreational habit. It was a holy medicine used to carry prayers or seal political treaties or welcome guests. Smoking at council meetings often would function like the equivalent of signing a modern notarized legal document.

I feel that Burniss is a fragrance in honor of ceremonies where tobacco played a central role. Because of the autumnal vibe I get from this fragrance and many other Havenhollows, I imagine this fragrance as being in honor of thanksgiving festivals (such as the Green Corn Ceremony and the Harvest Festival) where tobacco was the central spiritual driver of the entire ceremony. During these major harvest celebrations, the most sacred moment was the Tobacco Burning Ceremony where the community gathered around a big fire to watch the spiritual leader thank the Creator, the earth, and the three sister spirits (corn, bean, squash) for sustaining them. As the leader spoke he would cast pinches of tobacco directly into the flames, and that is what I get here in Burniss. Tobacco was considered an offering—something to feed the spirits before they could enjoy the bounty of their own harvest. And then this would culminate in a community feast and then perhaps, or so I imagine, a smoke session where elders sit in a longhouse surrounded by the newly gathered harvest (baskets of colorful flint corn, braided seed corn hanging from the rafters, and piles of winter squash) as they smoked pipes and talked about the upcoming winter hunting season or whatever.

A lot of this makes good sense. Deertongue leaves, the leaves of liatris, are packed with the coumarin that gives off that comforting aroma of sweet sun-dried hay and herbal vanilla and tobacco. This note perfectly mirrors the scent profile of sweetgrass, which is one of the foundational sacred medicines burned alongside tobacco in Northeastern ceremonial fires to invite good spirits. Cedar, furthermore, is another of the four sacred medicines in Northeastern Indigenous traditions (alongside tobacco, sweetgrass, and sage). It shows up big in Burniss and it would have been used as the basis for the harvest ceremony fire.

The drydown in Burniss is a tad soapy—an earthy, fresh, sweet soap a lot like the real deal native american product. Yes, I get an earthy botanical soapiness—much different from the fatty tallow associations of old European soaps, which could be slightly rancid in smell. The soap here instead reminds me of modern handcrafted botanical ones. That makes sense given that this fragrance is filled with dried herbs and cedar.

This has none of the funk that Europeans brought. Natives were downright shocked at how bad Europeans smelled. The castoreum here adds a clean leatheriness and serves to ground the woods and simulate the cozy, textured environment of a longhouse lined with winter furs.

Cochise I still think is the star of their offerings, even over the one everyone searches for: Anachronism.

*Worked all over but added two new lines—one to the first stanza, another to the second. The last version had a great economy and a gritty atmosphere. This new version introduces specific narrative friction that elevates the piece away from just a bleak portrait and into a devastating living scene.

The Last Vestiges 

Happy Meal box battered (fries stiff, having clocked
a night’s share of miles), the meth-mouth mom sighs
at the door. Into her childhood home she whirlwinds
(“Heyy my big boy!”), scooping up the TVed toddler
in a centrifugal hug that streaks away her prom gaze
still over the fireplace. Unlike that pit reek cartoonified
by curbside Febreze, that fluttering cheer cartoonified
by curbside mascara (and by a toke, coughs held back,
in the visor mirror) wilts in on itself mid breath. Cash
must be coaxed out of Granny, shifting kitchen items.

She does that teen sway, one foot behind the other— 
men, smoking against the car, framed in the window,
crank-cricket vigils etched in scorched-earth craters
surfacing on her too: “Mom, it’s an allergy. I told you.”
Too fast the day approaches when—against the fixity
­of that reek, too contagious to stand—the transience
of that cheer, no less contagious, will flare so bright
that the boy, little fingers fretting the toy’s contours,
will understand the necessity of becoming immune
to hope at a level of consciousness before his time.

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

BLACK POISON CUNT

scent of the day: Nose Rest Day

Subscribe now

*This is now even sloppier. But I wanted to give this more of a story arc and show the nature of the man’s polemical rants as they would loop to friends and family.

Subway Restraint

The time has come. You are trapped. Stinking with the bodies against you each way, pressed suit disheveled—calling yourself late understates the gravity. Who could have known, kissing your girlfriend goodbye with interview nerves, butterflies for the future, that the time would come now? But it has. That is how life works. Everyday—sunrise, sunset—the ambulance dopplers elsewhere. That is until one day you find it coming for you.

Serve the long game. Do not jump right to throat daggering that lead cunt, shrieking as her arms spread to restrict you and the bodies behind you from exiting the split door of the subway. Your first move, seductive as it no doubt is, should not be to impale that vein-flared neck of fanaticism with your “Urban Pal” pocket push dagger—its blade just over two inches of larynx love, double serrated for bleed-out rip backs meant to thwart repair (and cheaper than a gas-station sandwich, for whatever it might be worth to say, on bladehq.com).

Breathe. Swamp ass and mildewed underwear, mildewed enough to smell the holes and blown elastic, imprint the molded plastic with the funk of a track-mark jasmine that had made the worst life choices and a meth-mouth tuberose that had been double dipped as toilet paper. Over this hobo base, over as well the commuter heart (a coffee halitosis fed into sulphuric frenzy by the sugars of gum and lifted into full Fantasia fanfare by the radioactive autotune fixatives now as obligatory in Sephora fragrances as the equally-unwashable twerking is at the Democratic National Convention)—over it all you can smell your own adrenaline sweat (cold and sour, like finger pads after rubbing a coin or a car key), this metallic top note synergizing with the brakepad scorch into a rusty aldehyde that coats the mouth in a fuzz of iron fillings. But continue to breathe. Raise your nostrils above the urban crotchrot, above the rotten eggs of sump water stagnant in the trenches below the rails—all of it today kicked into a roil by the dank-dog mustiness of fabrics and footwear soaked from the rain in the streets above. You are a tall man. Appreciate the space you still have in the claustrophobic crush.

Restrain yourself. You know now, you can feel now (after decades of laughing away the ridiculous numbers in murder news), how death can wash up in indolic glory on the autopsy slab with stab wounds nearing—if not well into—triple digits. But the time for blade gratifications, multiple climaxes at the cost—if you do it now, like some monkey—of a life ruined by the gavel, might show itself with some patience. You are not a fucking monkey. Unloading after a wait is better anyway—especially an agonizing wait where every nerve screams for action, every gland mewls for milking, like engorged tits barred from the mouth of the crying infant. Think of the goo building. The inner child in us all, no matter how old or wise we become, wants to witness as much ribbon bloom from the popped cyst, sweet blips of curd along the way—the bigger the coiled pile of cottage cheese at the end, the better. Think, then, of your pride—as if again showing your mother the height of the pile of mashed potatoes on your plate—when you get to behold the destructive mass of your freed burden.

Shoves and slithering words, hold these back as well. You stand above the rabble. Let the seething fury of your stolen big day mount, right up to the gills, as the chanting mass behind this bitch—“No! One! Gets! Off!”—hammer-fists away any bold hand trying to pry open the panels from within. Feel the spittle spatter on your face, the inadvertent mist of justice-warrior apoplexy, grow into purposeful thwacks as you insist to be set free from the metal trap of this neo-witch hysteria. Feel them grow more aggressive, her forehead rammings—right into your heart, the cunt, every time the panels open enough. But stay your hand. We have waited for the right ambient conditions too long to blow it too early. Have we not?

Time dilates for us. Accept, in the growing splay of seconds, the futility of your plea. It can be hard, yes—like trusting that the sea will buoy your body if only you let go of tree-mammal tension of white-knuckled toes. But trust that the futility is a friend. It grows the potency of your ferocity, the need for your ferocity. Come the time for execution-style rejection of the entire modern farce, the futility will turn you invincible. It will turn you invincible even to bullets for a time, so long as right now you stay rooted—rooted in that narrow space where you work yourself up for having been made a sardine and yet where you, wanting like any heart breaker to “make it last all night” with this American girl in her slouchy beanie, conduct yourself as if on an empty beach somewhere in the breeze.

Every smartphone glows a weapon of mass judgment. But neither this nor all the corner-nestled CCTV cameras can excuse slipping away into some private pocket of psychology. It is all to easy for a human to get caught in the vent of fantasy: if only I were wearing one of those old-school carnations on my breast pocket, squirting acid like The Joker. If anything, let the nontruth of such counterfactuals further fuel your frustration. For ultimately you must go to work. When you do go to work, however, give your defense attorney—hands tied by whatever scraps you leave behind—at least a little to work with. Think of it that way. Thinking of it that way will keep your will from buckling even as it serves to titillate your will with the promise of a later chance to buckle—perhaps even crumble, delivering you into painless disindividuation: oneness with the World-All. This is about edging, okay?

Try to lock in eye-contact with that one officer in the sea of phones raised, several of their owners screeching at you “Don’t you fucking touch her!”—a baiting formula as transparent, of course, as those feline-heat growls of “Don’t you dare cum in me!” Throw in a “Please help, officer” or two: the film never stops rolling. If you really want to piss yourself off, say it a bit too soft. The officer will fail on cue, either way, to safeguard your free passage. Is this not, after all, a non-castle-doctrine state where squatters have rights over your home (such that you cannot remove them yourself without legal repercussion)? Is this not a duty-to-retreat state where, although no one raises an eye about calling in an exterminator to spray paralyzing roach poisons, burglars have won settlements for injuring themselves on the job merely because you set a rated-R McCallister boobytrap (a floorplate, say, that triggers the release of a neurotoxin dart that paralyzes the diaphragm) to deal with a chronic problem—or even, if only on rare occasions, merely because of a broken ankle caused by your wobbly porch railing or a concussion caused by your shoddy weekend-warrior wall mount of the 8k flatscreen with too much street value for any BIPOC to be equitably expected to resist, especially when flaunted (day in, day out) through arrogant bay windows pointed curbside in a fuck-you to color?

Besides, the officer is white. He is white and, even though you have the asset of being darker skinned, he fears that career-shattering r-word in later press. How could he not? The press, “legitimate” press, has adopted the buzz words and speech patterns of campus activists: news anchors, for example, stressing (with not even a hint of understated irony) the adjective “black” as a moral-bludgeoning means to heighten the shut-it-down force of their words (“Understand that you are talking to a black woman!”)—exactly as in when, to quintuple down on the impression that blacks are especially precious (such that mistreating a black person is more heinous than mistreating a non-black person), the white “ally” barks at the professor “Did you just tell a black man where to sit?” or the black student snipes at the white professor who challenged her opinion “Are you seriously calling a black woman wrong?” (both examples invoking an emotionally and historically charged context that makes people second-guess the morality of an otherwise mundane act, cranking up the volume on race to elevate its seriousness even when race was not a factor). So no, the officer—like the countless professors, paralyzed (were it not for stutters and perhaps even tears)—is unlikely to do anything (even in your favor). Trapped in a narrative the man never wrote, the stakes are too high. Is not this mob, after all, anti-Nazi? Sure it is, at least by the look of all their signs: “fuck nazi scum”; “fight antiblack killing”; “white vigilantism = fascism / black vigilantism = freedom.”

You could declare “I’m a black man.” Invoking race in that way usually gets whiteys like this in check. They know, after all, who the fuck is king. But you have integrity. You have refused taking any knowing handout. That would be giving in. Lesser men would have given in. You, on the other hand, would rather suffer than accept a concession you consider unearned. You would rather die—because, yes, that is what this ultimately about—than participate in what you know to be a system of lies and injustice. You have such a magnitude of negative respect for these powers, the true powers that be with the platform to keep denying that they are the true powers that be, that you are not even tempted. Perhaps you are too hardheaded. People have said it. But you are you. And that is admirable. It is a hill you will die on—again, that word. People type comments on social media but they are not willing to die. They are not willing to go out blasting, taking their enemies with them to the death before the luck of birth. You are. So good shit, nigga.

Declaring “I am a black man. You are blocking a king”—even if hitting exactly the right emphases on “black” and “king” (mere apposition like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura)—would not even work, though. Socrates easily could have escaped his prison cell. You cannot. This a major city. People here know there are good blacks and bad blacks, the ones infected by the contagious disease of whiteness. They make finer grain decisions unlike in more suburban areas where the woke white will be like “Let the king pass” if only in the form of ushering you away like secret service tasked with protecting the most precious supercitizen, innocent and entitled.

There are also plain logistics to consider. It breaks the seal if they let you go. So even if they want to respect their king, it is for the greater good—it is for the benefit of you, a moral superior—to keep you trapped. And perhaps this frustration will wake you up to the slaughter of kings and queens. That could be their rationalization too. And if nothing good—no awareness, no turn around—comes of causing you discomfort, they could always chalk it up to unfortunate collateral damage—a mere drop, they might tell themselves, in the bucket of hell you must live every day here in triple-k Amerikkka out to get you as soon as you step out the door(even though in truth America is the very heart of a Western culture that has not only best articulated, better than any other ever on Earth, why racial discrimination is wrong but has best fought, better than any other ever on Earth, to end it). They would call it collateral damage, yes, to a higher cause just like in Ellison’s Invisible Man, still your favorite book since college, where the Marxist organization (the Brotherhood)—seeing, like no doubt this snowbunny slut in front of you, black suffering as combustible raw material—stirs up Harlem riots as part of an agenda, eerily similar to the real life situation where like organizations tried to create a massive black welfare dependency, to tank the government.

And speaking of Invisible Man, there is that scene where the Marxist white bitch—always the white cunts, huh?—says “Don’t you think he should be a little blacker?” Same goes here. You are not black enough for either the cause or to expect to get a free pass. High yellow tones like this do not command the respect. You need to be black black to wield the word “king” in a public arena. Yeah, perhaps in a dorm room getting high you can make the room walk on eggshells around you like you are Henry the Eighth. But in this grand public spectacle, no way. Face it. You do not possess that brand of blackness that has the white activist bowing low to tongue kiss Timberlands in a campus wedding filled with one-way vows: “I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness”; “I will tolerate any discomfort on the path to equity”; “I will never speak over a black person”; “I will never deny black truth”; “I will do everything in my power to abolish whiteness”; “I will not weaponize the police against black people”; “I will redistribute my unearned advantages”; “I will never call reparations ‘looting’”; “I will seek to understand more than to be understood”; and so on down the restorative justice line. Look at you, nigga. You do not even have dreads.

Even if you were jet black it might not even matter. We have already moved on to the next cultural hierarchy. You know each day you grow into an outdated commodity. For now at least, until perhaps the wheel turns back around, the mob—and thereby Disney, the weather-vane of the herd—has passed the high water mark of Black Panther. The FBI and universities have surely toned down their “How To Be Less White” learning modules, mandatory for compliance. It has been one or two Oscar ceremonies already since the last time any speech had to involve a star, usually another white cunt, doing what a white cunt does: crying at the podium about how unfortunate it is for black families to have to give their beautiful black teen, a king-in-the-making if only he can survive open season, what has become known as “the talk”—the former definition of the talk, which concerned the birds and the bees, having been supplanted, of course, by the more urgent issue of protecting as many black young men as possible (and “good riddance” many will say not just because sex discussion is already covered by the hip hop tracks that explain when to insert the Perc30 rectal suppository but because, think about it: “the birds and the bees,” that phrase, sounds as white as the surname “Smith” and thereby as antiblack as apple pie and old glory). It has to be a year or so, perhaps more, since the last movie—was it Tom Hanks?—where we are hit with that pathos-pulling scene where beautiful black parents must sit their good black boy down, a boy in no way posting pictures of himself with semiautomatics on Instagram, and give him the talk, the talk about how he must say “Yessa” to every officer and keep his hand on the wheel and never talk back and always announce he is merely reaching for his wallet; the talk about how he must say “Yessa,” in fact, in such an old school plantation way that—and here is the ghoulish conspiracy behind it all (but that is Hollywood for you)—young teens, naturally rebellious, will know exactly the way to assert their defiant identity: engaging in the very noncompliant behaviors that increase the odds of another news spectacle to keep the money-making cycle going. Ellison was not stupid.

The trans cause is in the foreground now. Oscar winners not only flaunt their trans kids like handbags (“So brave isn’t she?”) but are damn sure, when they thank their parents in the speech, that they use the term “gestating parent” for mother and “non-gestating parent” for father. And when in the post-ceremony interview they are called “brave for using these inclusive terms in such a public way” they will be damned sure to work in how the male swimmer in the news, the one in female drag with much more than lats and traps busting out of the singlet, was “so brave” for “absolutely crushing the other girls” in the competition—the most confrontational starlets preempting the bigoted response on so many tongues scared for their careers by saying: “Those assigned female at birth are just gonna have to get faster huh?”

And now the undocumented cause is just starting to get going. On the horizon—perhaps around the time we might expect Disney to release Mexican Panther (the writer who suggests Mexican Cucaracha instead, even if done completely innocently, fired on the spot because everyone else, especially the white cunt bitch sluts, feels “uncomfortable now” (and perhaps in part because it hits on a truth: how the illegal scurries, under and over, in the secret of night in a way remarkably similar to the roach)—we are bound to get Oscar winners who will make their drop-the-mic comment “No one is illegal on stolen land” even as they themselves own property gated and ready, the scum fucks, to call cops on any indigenous person who tunnels under just to grab a quick bite from the fridge (not any hamper sniff session jerk offs or anything).

So what is to be done? Plead to the mob. Remember: this is a marathon of baby steps. Plead—if only for the lenses. Plead through your teeth and muscles clenched by the taunting yells. Plead for someone within the drumhead jury, someone within the raging pack savoring your submission, to empathize with your humanity. Know all the while, again, that it will be in vain. And know that even if it were not, and even if it were clear by some magic that the efficacy was not a function of your skin, that would just defuse the pressure behind the cork pop yet again as it has done for too long now—yet again tempting you into quietism, into ignoring the life-redeeming call to pop off. How many times have you put your tail between your legs as you pussyfoot around a world of monkey justice? That time is over. This is a call to action.

Take on a pitiful tone of a meek victim. The tone, no, is not out of any realistic hope to draw forth enough compassion for your release. Things have escalated past that point. It is to bait them, stoke the appetite. Crowds lust to stomp the downtrodden, polished mirrors to their cruelty. It is out of a desire, moreover, to increase your coiled energy for lashing out at what will thereby swell beyond a ramming wall against free passage to your once-in-a-lifetime interview—swell into a polished mirror of your patheticness (smash-beckoning for you as well, however much it reflects calculated performance).

Plead your urgency. Plead with hopeful expectation since you—the you in some other hemisphere, so to say—well knows that hopeful expectation is ridiculous here, which only fans the building torrent: a broken record, yes, but hypnosis (especially self-hypnosis) works on humans. Explain the critical nature of your interview—a self-imposed torment, since it reminds you of all that is going down the drain (swirling just out of reach like in a nightmare). Explain it, much more importantly, since you owe no explanation; since only a bitch-ass-punk would give an explanation at this time—and yes, you are going to have to make up for being one. Keep your decibel just below their cacophony—a self-imposed catalyst to tap further into the mitochondrial amphetamine harbored within each cell. Even lie and say your wife is in labor, giving the horde all the chances in the world—all the chances to deny you still and thereby add grist to your motivational mill.

Scan the officer’s face once again. Scan back to the young zombies, mostly white and desperate for purpose in the potential virality of doing what is said to be “for your own good,” for your own good as “a black male in a society that has declared total war on black bodies.” You read the headlines. You listened to the news. And yet you still chose the subway. The protest is over the death of a martyred lunatic whose unruliness and death threats to passengers landed him in the chokehold of a marine who, for whatever it might be worth to say, received cheers from black commuters in danger and death threats from mostly-white “antiracists” in cyberspace. Scan their faces—scan, scan, scan for a flicker of reason. Try to reach any lucid eyes beyond their algorithm lenses. Even though the race card has already been pulled just looking at you, vocalize your blackness. None of it will make a difference, of course. But unblinking cameras roll for court scrutiny.

Only the best of men, after all this edging, can keep resisting. Do the following exercise if you feel you are going to blow your load too soon. For what you are after is too cook in your own juices, low and slow, as long as you can.

Move your lower jaw to the left: breath in and then out while holding it there. Now move your lower jaw to right: breathe in and then out while holding it there. Place the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth: breath in and then out while holding it there. Raise your shoulders slowly as you breath in and then, as you breath out, slowly bring them down. Repeat if you need to.

So where do we go from here? Do we go scorched earth: sticking her smug neck with a poison syringe—antifreeze, bleach, isopropanol, insulin—or even just a brutal headbutt into her nose? Or do we ease in a bit more, giving the attorney more to work with than just the black card (a trump card in typical situations) in case you make it out? Run through the latter first.

Perhaps pivot off your meek presentation with a surprise snatch of a phone glowing in your periphery. And then, as you dash into the train’s recesses, hypnotize yourself to think your sole life-on-the-line mission is to pulverize the phone: as many fragments as possible. Even if it does nothing to help the free flow of bodies, at least you can claim this victory. Admittedly, that is too small a victory to assuage your apoplectic blood pressure. But perhaps the owner will chase you down (into your web), which will provide a pretext for the dagger’s sting should any hands be placed on you.—No, strike that. Rewind the reel.

Start back at the door. Make sure you have a belt can of bear mace (much better than some comic-book carnation and much more realistic and wieldy than a hypodermic needle taken from your diabetic father). Go for the highest Scoville you can get (five million) and whose stream extends over thirty feet (udap.com)—you are welcome. After the cadaverous smiles of mockery press closer, after more and more spittle flies into your mouth and eyes—peel back the safety catch. Remember, it is you who should be spitting in her face. She is the very temptation of the victimhood mentality ruinous to black kind—a temptation for all people given that it provides an aura of purpose and gravitas while also a golden ticket not only to sidestep hard work and accountability for past behavior and future fate-carving, but also to extort and abuse and manipulate one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level grandeur as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” an ancestral crusade for payback against the ever-shifting “powers that be.”

After sternum rams get harder, after the officer turns a blind eye to your pleas of due diligence—unleash the chemical inferno. What would be the valor of protest, beyond just the valor of having a view, if there were no risk of baptism by liquid fire? Direct the maelstrom right into her face—even slipping in a couple, or seven, canister punches to that cunt mouthpiece—and then over everyone. Refuse to free the trigger as the doors finally close, leaving just enough room for you to spread every last bit of caustic fog.

Let the doors close for protection against the underground gas chamber of your creation. The dagger, scorching a blurry halo around your phoenix form, can then step into the limelight—and righteously so (given the interview, given your own seared blindness)—if any sleeper agent tries to restrain you. Even if you cannot see, even if your main concern is clearing a path, try at least to hear the writhing of numbers on the other side of the glass. There is no guarantee, despite what protestant-work-ethic Americans like to believe, that all your efforts—all your baby steps of patient calculation—will be rewarded with a not-guilty sentence. Give yourself something, that rich umami of pain and panic, to play back. Indeed, you might even be killed today. Savor what you can.

Instead of going the mace route, you could just hold the dagger out from the headbutted spot on your chest and walk forward. Confront the slouchy beanie clone, tattooed in bought exoticness, with a stark choice. Test her resolve. Or perhaps even better, you could walk forward with a bleach-filled syringe. That might not be such an unreasonable option after all. Among those Shakespearean-era audiences who lobbed tomatoes or cabbage or fish or rotten eggs at the actors, surely at least some of them carried into the theater something from home. And so could you! The problem is, others among the swarm would no doubt swat away any such device. The bear mace strategy still crystallizes, then, as a more satisfying and yet prudent course, balancing both defense and offense in the chaos of the moment.

Edging cannot last forever. Edging would not be edging without release. Containment must eventually fail. Toward jouissance—that was the trajectory. You are not God. You cannot run all the options. The bear mace strategy is best. But you knew this all along, did you not? Do you have a syringe? No. The mace and then, when it ended, the only other device you brought along to the theater: the push dagger—you knew before swiping the Metro Card, did you not? And yeah, think of how good it would be to clock her with that can. If you could have skull fucked her to death as an infant you would have” “How’s this for a minority report, little snowbunny bitch?” But you cannot go back. You unmake this cunt by filling her sex-sleeve form with nut.

You are tired of it. You have been tired of it for too long. You are tired of mental slavery packaged as freedom, dependency packaged as cool. You have waited for it to blow over. It waxes and wanes, fine. But does it ever blow over? No? There are too many bested interests. This is climate, not weather. You are tired of being told you have to have this or that from white people in order to survive here. You are no slave in the basement of a torturer who remains your ownly source of food. Do not believe the hype! You are no panda, driven to near-extinction by human encroachment and habitat destruction and yet surviving almost entirely due to human-funded breeding programs, artificial handouts, and government-protected reserves. You are tired of the evangelizing, the incessant belaboring of the point from both white hos and every Whoopi on TV as if one day you would fall to your knees and finally confess to their teary applause. “Yes, I admit it. My PTSD worsens every second I have to spend in world that has declared total war on the black body and the black spirit. I gaslit myself. I said my failings were mine. I did not want to face that it was the white man behind it all.”

Fuck this cunt. You are tired of being told you cannot do it on your own. Fuck her puppets too. You are tired of black people mouthing these words, these antiblack words of perpetual leaning and dependency, in the name of black power. The militancy with which they insist that black fate is in the hands of white America, that antiblack racism means that black people cannot make it here on their own (a lie that would be hobbling, self-defeatist, even were it not a lie), does not make that insistence pro black. It is antiblack. Dependency is a loser’s game. Begging can never be shined into empowerment, at least any empowerment that rises above that of the sleazy craftiness of guilting society to giving more freebies—a craftiness that has now stooped to lies since black people enjoy the same about of freedom from antiblack persecution as anyone else (at least when we delete the hobbling in the form of help that comes from white society.) The mask is see through. You know who the real Uncle Toms are in this twilight zone. They will never break you, at least in the way they want.

They will pay. They do not know you. They will pay for not knowing you. You are not a doormat. You are not the center. We are all in this. Your role is vigilante. You are not God. You must have a style. And the tentativeness to own your style has given you the style of a doormat. That ends now. You need to make it end good. Flowers bloom in all kinds. You are a dangerous flower. It just took you a few decades to bloom.

You need to hit that cunt bitch in the mouth with the edge of that can with all your spiritual might. Mothers can lift cars when their babies are trapped. That is where you must go. Dig deep. And you can because this is bigger than you. Cunt comes in like a helper of black people. She is a liar. She is a poisoner. She talks about an antiblack agenda in the West. But the best evidence for such is all their efforts fight against that agenda, fight against what fake-progressive money-hungry clout-chasing snowbunnies like her call an “ever-growing white supremacy.” Remember all the hurtful help she has given your people. That will increase the power of each strike into mother-protecting-her-baby proportions.

She would blame all black failure on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy.” And look what that does. It allows blacks to wipe their hands of any complicity in their failures and instead fault the nebulous specter—a lie. And what does that then do? That stultifies black agency and black dignity, which itself leads to widespread underperformance in so many domains that it would almost seem there really was an antiblack chokehold. Fuck this cunt. She would see you as a sad case of “internalized whiteness” just because you refuse—even though it meant years of being called “Jiggaboo Uncle Tom,” “race-traitor-ass nigga,” by blacks under her spell—to repeat and repeat her ghoulish gospel, the macabre mantra and downright lie, as to how much blacks have been and continue to be victimized (and hence to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy perks, pity-driven privileges that excuse them from the responsibilities requisite for human flourishing). She would see you as a puppet of the white man for rejecting the idea that victimhood is the beating heart of black identity, for insisting that blacks have a personal say in their destiny and have all their opportunities open to them. She hates you because you encourage black people to free themselves from her grievance hypnosis, free themselves from the plantation of dependency that hypnosis keeps them on. Smash this cunt for that! Smash her for siphoning away what little sense of agency black people have. Smash the clout-chasing snowbunny slut for sending blacks charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic—for what is but a mirage of oppression! This cunt pushes black people so hard to see themselves as victims that they hallucinate racism in every shadow, distacting them from pursuite of any excellence beyond guilt trip grievance. Beat her face the fuck in!

She calls for defunding the police, the cunt—defunding the very thing keeping too many black communities from falling victim to the hypersexual-hyperviolent-hyperdruggie ravages of black culture. She could care less about the teary wails from so many black mothers who must pay the price of this white whore’s cure for a mere hystericized problem. Deck her right in the fucking teeth for that—right with the edge of that can, rich white ho!

She mocks the luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility—as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness (that contagious evil of all evils). Who the fuck is she, this black-poison cum dump, with her simple history? Smash just for the face that she dares have a phone even as she spits on Europe. Ruin her face with that can, nigga! Shakespeare and Columbus and Washington, punctuality and perfectionism and math—she would dump them in the trash on grounds that they are white! Ruin that fucking Becky-ass bozo face. Cunt is really going to spread a lie about how the door to our freedom is locked and then she is going to close to door! Bitch is going to take away the books that lift us, that cultivate an empathy beyond race color creed, all because they were written by whites! And then the bitch is going to support black music that glamorized destructive norms and behaviors: thugs, whores, drug addicts. Who is this bitch to mock Goethe, cunt? Smash her again for that!

She would lower standards for the black boys and girls she says she cares so much about, the lying slut cunt—as if blacks were mere underlings. She would to “dismantle” math courses and classical music programs (and so many other sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing), especially on such ridiculous grounds as that they are “inimical to black styles of knowing,” or that they are “designed to humiliate black youth while making whites.” She would never challenge their bad grammar or their CP-time tardiness or their gangster music—all, and so much more, as a matter of being (in what amounts to a complete opposite-day twilight-zone nightmare) antiracist! Fuck her! She brings death onto the black spirit. This woke cunt who goes around saying that “expecting black kids to become as literate as white children is an antiblack affront”—who better is she than yesterday’s slave masters who said that “Readin ain’t right for black kind.” Clock that bitch like your life depended on it! This cunt thinks that the standard is racist just because more blacks fail to meet it. “How’s this for disparate impact? Huh, slut!?” That is what you say as you clock this white bitch, the scarf-wearing scum.

She would have blacks protected from hearing uncomfortable data, unsettling words and ideas, while reading a textbook in a college course they chose to be in—as if blacks are invalids. Just to feel good about herself this blonde anorexic bad built bozo bitch will groom black children into perpetual leaners, spoiled entitled monsters, supercitizens with no motivation to develop into full-fledged agents! All the subminimal expectations (not just in education, but in conduct even), all the kid-glove leniencies—what does it do? It spoils blacks into an infantilized state of arrested development and dependency on whites, which further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites (a vicious feedback loop). She wants fucking pets! She wants pets who will only sing about our victimhood! She wants pets who will never hear anything that upsets the victim narrative cunt-borne lie! Knock this bitch’s lights out for being a groomer predator cunt!

She would keep blacks dependent and broken, keep them sick, in order to reap the moral praise of being the healer. This a Munchhausen bitch and the only good a Munchhausen bitch has is to be a set of fuck holes. Fuck this cunt. Beat her face with that motherfucking can, nigga, like you raping this lily-white bitches face in the fucking bassinet before she could have done her damage! Beat it like that.

She stokes a moral hysteria about white supremacy on the hunt and keeps apologizing for being white. The fucking cunt needs to apologize for being a cunt poisoner. How can people address the root issues behind the upsetting disparities with her lies? Skull fuck material no doubt as early as five or six, this whore is pulp in the making. Make it happen, nigga. This is your time. We all die. This heals. It is brain damage time for this cunt. She is Satan’s spawn. Some are deemed vermin on the basis of a lie. This no lie. Gas chamber would be too good. Beat her fucking face in with the can—the fucking edge! Watch her teeth bust and just hit the slut cunt bitch again and again.

She baits a white backlash. White men are sick of the punking. Every screen you turn on readily shows that the mockery is not just acceptable but actually aspirational. That understates the point. As if whites were not so straight-jacketed, so vulnerable to deplatforming and job loss just for unsettling BIPOC population with certain statistic or even saying a word precariously close to a word only black people can say, that it makes perfect sense why more and more pray for 23andMe to reveal blackness—the mocking and punking of white men is even considered valorous, as valorous as white men mocking black people is considered cowardly (“brave” is the Hollywood Oscar’s speech word, “brave for punching up” is how they put it in their ultimate gaslightery). White men are sick of the asymmetry in what they can say or what art they can create. They are sick of being told they have oppressive optics. They are sick of being told to stay in their lane and that they cannot write nonwhite characters in their books. They are sick of being hit with the cudgel of cultural appropriation—especially when no one owns culture, when all cultures and all their products were a function entirely of what came before, when all cultures steal and remix. This cunt is baiting a backlash just to say “See, I told you so.” She cares not one bit about the damage that will be done to blacks. Smash the cunt!

Smash the cunt and smash the cunt. Her predatory help seems to her so truly like real help that this is for her own good. The parasite had it coming. She is nothing now. Her face is mush—just one bacterium in a whole flush, but a good mush nonetheless.

Behold yourself in your glory. You burst through the choking fog, blade clenched in your searing fist, heedless of appeals. Behold your balls. You are a reasonable man in an unreasonable world. Carve a path of blistered steps through the fallout haze. Destiny awaits along the rails beyond this threshold of necessary violence. Today the cauldron of your boundless potential boils over at last.

Slice them all, as many as you can get. These social justice warriors, both the whites and the blacks they have hypnotized, continue to abuse the country and the entire Western world for their profit (social capital, career opportunity, feeling radical and important and good) because the people, either too entranced by the phones or too affected by the recruitment efforts that has leaked out from the universities into their phones, have done nothing to stop them. Just as United healthcare has a vested interest in seeing people sick, the same applies here. These social justice warriors keep blacks stuck on a plantation of dependency, where the very ineptitude enabled by the spoiling handouts can be cited as evidence of a white supremacist plot against them. These social justice warriors bait white backlash in the process, normalizing the punking of whites and the diminished opportunities for whites so that told-ya-so reactions further justify their grant funding, their mission—their DEI stations in every university and government agency. The corruption and greed is clear. Even if by some fat chance BLM movement or the Southern Poverty Law Center were not funding white supremacist groups, that would not matter. Their record could be clean, free of all cynical opportunism. They could really believe in their goodness. That would not matter. The spirit of the effort matters. United Healthcare does not need to be funding McDonald’s and gangster rap to know of its evil. Likewise here. It is a power play—a poisonous one.

Moral clarity sometimes requires accepting the mantle of madness. You are John Brown dragging pro-plantation men out of bed and hacking them to death for being, like all these SJW pigs, murderers by proxy. That is who you are. John Brown did not know whether history would vindicate his insanity. But that did not stop him from removing tumors. And this has not stopped you. You are a dancing star.

You are going home. The ambulance has come. It is your time. Walk into the light of peace, knowing this cannot be easily written off as evidence that the trauma black kings like you face is so bad that even the efforts to save them result—as it might with a feral cat who bites and scratches the humans just trying to help—in lashing out at the very rescue workers fighting on his side.

You have ranted too long for that narrative to go unchallenged. There are receipts. Your girlfriend and your child—they know. You have complained to friends. They all have internalized the manifesto. Your friend Mike, in fact, has your if-I-ever letter. Picture that in the papers! This will have ripples. You are the tipping point. You have become glorious, bleeding on the concrete.

Take your exit with pride. No matter the incentives, you core circle will not pull the card of “he was radicalized by a false ideology.” Roommates in college, classmates and grade school—sure, they might tow the line here. But your people have heard your tears, heard the national-monument-level passion with which you went off at dinner tables and on couches. You spoke with a righteousness bearing the internal marks of truth. No, they will not turn. They will speak responsibly too, which is good. After all, you do not want more killing—well, more accurately: you do not want people like you to want more killing. Your people will say “It was unfortunate that Jakim chose this path. We think there are more productive ways to fight cancer than radiation. But one thing is clear: he was right about the diagnosis.”

Your people will keep your message alive. Fire with fire—their heartbreak will spur their intensity. Take heart in the end in that. This lie of white supremacy rising was a money-making scam. And they will say so in interviews. They will tell that for the rest of their lives. Your incessant venting was not enough. But it was priming. The message now will better come through. The predatory help industry will crash down no matter the incentives for blacks to stay on the plantation, no matter how good whites feel spooning out their poisonous charity—a charity that makes plane drops of winter coats to starving Somalians look like a lifetime supply of fortified peanut butter. Your people will say, in no small part because of you, “No. Enough is enough!” And they will eventually stop this blight of whites and the hoodwinked puppets who think that obsession with being down and out, obsession with grievances and victimhood and what is owed to them (owed to keep them on the plantation that they have over generations grown to find a comfort and a sense of identity and even pride in), is true black power. Black people will have new ceremonies.

Give in to the creeping numbness. Surrender with that knowledge. The silent majority of black people are on your side. More will come of out of the woodwork, inspired by your case. Blacks are not subhuman. They have hearts. They see the truth. It does not sit well with their spirit to live in a world of lies, however much they benefit. It eats at them. All the blacks who have it so good, seeing the ease with which their white friends are blocked from friend circles and romance and career opportunities—even if somehow the could sit with the inhumanity in this equity and all its anti-colorblind auditions, they cannot sit any longer with the lie of an external force of whiteness ever on the hunt for them and holding them back at every turn. All the blacks who are marginalized and hobbled in their bonnet roach infestation, all the blacks struggling—they will no longer be able to sit with the lie that what is keeping them down has nothing to do with their daily practices and the poisons their own culture, and now the American cultures at large with the dominance of black culture, tell them are cool and hip to drink and smoke.

Yes, even these section-eight dependents are not subhuman. After they commit adultery or shoot someone or do drugs each day they hear that voice inside quoting hip hop lyrics meant to prove their swagger and hipness. But they know deep in the human part fo their souls that this does not pardon them and that they have chosen the easy route of refusing to push back against a toxic culture. It does not sit well with their dignity, furthermore, to keep demanding freebies from the white world. Even spoiled children feel shame for their displays of entitlement. Even through the excitement of controlling their parents with emotional manipulation, to them—somewhere inside—it still feels wrong seeing their mother bend over backwards to give them everything. And when they grow up unable to do for themselves these grown children, some surviving nuggets of conscience within, feel shame for their dependent psychology. The feel shame, yes, no matter how much cultural idea logy pushes that shame down by stirring up lies as about a world against them—using as evidence the very ramifications of the history of hobbling handouts that have decreased the likelihood of their ever enjoying a normal adult-human degree of self-sufficiency, handouts that have kept them too small-minded and lacking in skills to govern their own affairs.

Go into the dark through the light tunnel of neuronal frenzy. Go home to the oblivion before conception, a black man having finally stood up to face the power ploy with brutal honesty.

Share

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment

See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost

click for pic

scent of the day: Terre d’Ensar, by Ensar Oud

Only third wear so grain of salt.

Cousin to Layers of Jade, both centered around a minty—almost dental clove—oud it seems. But here we have the spotlight put on dank patchouli and cypriol to create a fishing worm soil, rich black terre, that has swallowed up a resinous piece of nearly dental agarwood—although the medicinality of the oud here does not go as deep into dental-0clove territoriees like it does in Layers of Jade or Togerwood 91 for that matter (a perfume homage to the very source of that anbesole impression in LaYERS of jade). The soil in Terre d’Ensar is dark (more Black Changho dark, earthy-char, than the smoky-dark of Aroha Kyaku). And yes, it is definitely cypriol bent like 1984. It feels, however, like the moss greenery here in Terre d’Ensar is a shadow of 1984 and Chypre Sultan—rotten and buried, withered and turned to brown.

Just as a fougere is a fanciful recreation of what a fern would smell like, or just like the benzoin-vanilla-labdanum trifecta is a fanciful recreation of what amber sap might smell like, Terre d’Ensar feels like this is a fanciful recreation—a highly aestheticized version—of what dead and buried agarwood smells like—dead and buried under mud. Ensar used the perfect oud, as far as I can tell, to create this impression: Merauke oud, which comes from the swampy lowland and floodplain regions of South Papua. Although it shares the “green” jungly register with Sri Lankan oud, the resemblance stops there: Sri Lankan is brighter, airy-herbal, and citrus-leafy whereas Merauke is dank, earthen, humid, and subterranean. Because Merauke wood is often harvested from partially buried, mud-logged, or marsh-grown trees, its profile becomes darker, deeper, more muddy and more fungal. It can veer medicinal, peaty, and almost cave-like—an oud that smells as if excavated from ancient soil rather than distilled from sunlit wood. That is exactly what we get here. I do not know if Ensar is using buried Merauke. But it would seem that way. I own both ouds derived from from alive and dead Merauke material thanks to the distiller Franklin Elim. Both express petrichor, which is what Terre d’Ensar is designed to be. But whereas the alive material expresses more of a vetiver-grass adjacent petrichor, the dead material—with its tendency toward dark chocolate, roasted coffee, medicinal patchouli—expresses more of a black worm soil (which again is what Terre d’Ensar gives me).

If Kouros is a nightcrawler wearing Antaeus, then Terre d’Ensar is a nightcrawler wearing 1984. Terre d’Ensar, to put it another way, is more like the panned-back consolidation of the earthworm burrow in fantastically rich black soil—soil so rich that its aesthetic power verges on overriding our instinct not to stick clumps in our mouth (such that even those of use who have eat out boots when we have gone hungry would have turned to it before the boots if it was available). Yes, that is now how I will forever see Terre d’Ensar: a nightcrawler burrow that goes several feet deep into the chocolatyest and peatiest black worm-poop soil and whose entrance at the surface is covered with leaf and moss rots and various other decayed things (including mold) that this fragrance gives you in aestheticized form.

Understand that both this fragrance as well as the sort of nutrient-rich soil full of nightcrawlers (and even the nighcrawlers themselves) naturally smell fresh. However nasty the worm might seem to us, it is not hyraceum or civet paste or beaver tail oil or a rubbery pussy lip combo of jasmine and tuberose. This is truly fresh—garden-soil fresh with hints, if you pay close attention, of freshly harvested seaweed or tidepools at low tide mixed in with geosmin-rich earth. Yes, I do get that briny-umami edge here—cool-mineralic moss at the bottom of a waterfall like an Irish Spring commercial, a wet jungly mossy impression that seems to be a common thread through all Indonesian Papuan ouds of which Merauke is just one. Whereas Port Moresby highlights the brisk electric-green clarity of coastal-highland resin, or whereas Wamena oud highlights the cold pine-mineral austerity of mountain-grown resin, or whereas Sentani oud highliughts fresh peppery-herbaceous lift of north-coastal wood, or whereas Asmat oud highlights the smoky-ambered saline density of southern lowland resin, Merauke—once again—highlights the dark-rooty richness of an unexplored forest. And that is what we get here: like overturning a massive mildewed log in a dense dark forest where the soil has not seen the sun in decades and is so filled with proteins from grubs and centipedes and other such like critters that we gets wafts of that umami profile: like mushrooms growing on a soggy cardboard box rich with vanilla lignam aroma (and then almost as if dashed with fast-action yeast to make it fizz—yes there is a fizzy texture to this fragrance).

What adds to the freshness here and what does help give the impression that there was once the synny greenery—the dewy moss—of Chypre Sultan or even Mousse Illuminee is the other oud Ensar uses: Pursat. This Cambodian oud gives a bright herbality sort of like ginseng tea sweetened with honey. I find this herbal-tonic ursat a central component of a Yaaseen attar that shares much of the darkness I get here in Ensar—only there the soil impression has turned into something much mustier and even sour, like a compost bin that has gotten too wet and whose lack of oxygen has caused a predominance of rot. Terre d’Ensar, however dark and peat, is the healthiest soil you can imagine. The iso e super used here really reinforces that freshness. Agent 47 is more Prin soil. Terre d’Ensar is more Geza Schoen soil—indeed, with a Montabacco-style freshness.

I do wish we stayed in this panoptic crosscut of dark soil. But what ends up happening after the first few hours is that wwe zoom in closer and closer to the buried Mereauke log. Yes, the fragrance reduces into an oud aroma with some sulfur dioxide matchtick aromas. Now if my holes—nose holes—were not so blownout by the gangbang of several artisanal houses, this bedrock aroma would have me swooning. But now my spoiled as finds it generic. That is the cost. And it is also why variety is the spice of life. So many people start selling off all their designers and niche once they smell the wonders of artisanal. And then when they curate their collection they are left with one common base pretty much. And that is underselling things because a lot more than the base will be in common. Think about your moves. Keep a variety to keep your appreciation flourishing. I know that after a few months of wearing more regular frags: Habit Rouge to Kouros, Dryad to Beach Hut Man, Golestan to Little Song, Sex and the Sea to Serge Noire, Private Label to Ambra Aurea—yes, I will be floored by this “generic” matchstick base!

Share

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2017 portion of that five-part work.

MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 91)

condoms now the norm even in Tijuana donkey shows

missing her even when she is around 

a play where characters discover they are in a play

the unspoken but lived lie of a mantra that money will insulate you

a lot about who a woman is by the underside of her toilet seat

the worth of what you do—your art, your gift—recognized only by ugly women

Broadway may not make one gay, but it sure does usher you out on a red carpet

searching out, with the euphoric optimism of a geek, the mother
who put you up for adoption and finding her unmoved: “And so,
like, what you want from me? You seen the fuckin price of gas?”

when the miasma of depression dissipates 
you can finally become sad
at things really to be sad about

the weirdo no longer invited us 
to exasperation and revulsion once 
we labeled him “special needs”

criticized for an artistic process
mechanical and detached, still
his work seems distinctly his own 

sneaking the flask into every dry venue—libraries, school plays, children’s museums

it is impossible for us to exist estranged completely from that of which
we are completely a function—indeed, to say that the divine light reaches
even into hell undersells the point since everything expresses the source

pointing out how he has it nowhere near
as lousy as you do only makes him feel
more pathetic and committed to suicide

see the niceness of difference—
the niceness, say, of no hair
around which ribbons can be wound

conditioned to see nature as endless enmity, 
even as cameras cannot help but capture 
fox cubs at play and seals sunning on a rock    

fighting back the urge to shift your body yet again—even when not high on weed

to say that some suffer eternal torture, 
even for a finite evil, perhaps is to say 
that God is not ultimately successful

not content with just planting the seed
evangelicals gleek salivation like a cobra in wait
for the cumshot conversion of the atheist

art erotic enough to draw bipartisan ire 

struggling to appear at ease in your solitary night out

is she a mere child to think she can get away with it: 
sitting among the AA circle with rum-spiked coffee, 
or is something inside thirsty for her to be called out?

thermostat battles with the spouse

itches coming when it is inappropriate to scratch

sex with the toupee on

looking over to your girlfriend to see 
if the man grinding on you from behind 
is worth you remaining in place 

drinking your father’s liquor,
despite the likelihood of a beating,
in order to numb the beatings 

is it not more nettling when someone tries 
to make the least amount of noise, mindfully 
munching each potato chip in slow motion?

the part of the addict that says 
to himself, “This time at least 
don’t get as bad as before”

but at whom is it better to gaze 
than at a woman too independent 
to be a mere subject for the gaze?

little children in late-night supermarkets 

the loss of the pursuit that once filled your every thought

drawn to polyamory merely to see if you can stand ego devastation  

preparing your own paints and working on a typewriter as an homage to the masters

she suffered from excessive religiosity until the cysts
in her temporal lobe, which would have made her
a mystic or a witch at a different time, were excised

considered grumpy and snobbish merely for insisting 
that—all other things being equal—the more
we want it to be true, the higher the standard for entry

finding a lump, uninsured

inspired by trends without wholly surrendering your style 

Coca Cola in the tribal baby bottle

daredevil rescues of worldly goods from the lick of flame

cowardly courage-teachers

at least everyone remembers you when you are a midget

what is the safest way to open up to the risk posed by the alien?

staring in the mirror, staring in the fridge—what will that change?

fixed planets with a permanent day side 

the whore was the only one you could be honest with

the addictive high of combat, of getting shot at

peak experiences, where we lose ourselves 
for concise moments in the zone of doing, 
perhaps afford us earthly slurps of heaven

circling the mouth of the c-sectioned newborn
all up into vulva would be best, but hang-ups 
have us just dab it with a q-tip of maternal flora

suggesting, as it does, that any emotional attempt 
to convey the horror would fall short of its aim,
the clinical detachment of the depiction evokes it all the more

curators rejecting the artist’s plea to fix his illustrious painting 

ridiculing one’s culture simply by depicting it 
in art, as if it were obvious to one’s culture 
how ridiculous the culture really is

having resorted now to penciling in time to do nothing

you would think that people so long in solitary 
would speak, when finally around others again,
with cheer rather than with such flattened affect

faced with oblivion (or, more accurately,
subblivion), why not jump into love
with open arms even after heartbreak?

the joy of seeing a conviction disconfirmed 

junk withdrawal in unemployment offices

affluenza

leaving for the sake of returning

we beat ourselves up for failing to engage—
if at all—with books, which long held 
the junk position smartphones do now

seeing that you are not good enough
despite hard work—let that open you 
to bask in the glory of those who are 

with so much being potentially contagious, 
consider working into your life someone 
disciplined in self-improvement and joy 

construing atheists as those who believe in nothing

high-hungry enough to wring the MacGyver out of you

you should be backing off (as you think you are),
but by involving her in the nuances of your life
you have learned new ways to love her

babbling on the brink of death 

jealous of the fetus, whose kicks
your therapist allows you to feel,
because it swallows her attention

scoffing at the desire to conserve national identity 
even as you will never marry outside of Islam
because its beliefs and practices are “your soul”

wanting the one you love to love you 
not just for your faith, but still acting as if 
you are not of that faith even though it would win her   

seeing that you are not good enough
despite hard work—let not that open you 
to bask in the stench of mediocrity

the door-opening beauty of being caught 
in the world wave of broken hearts 
from which so much art has flowed 

those concerned with flourishing
should wonder not whether to lie, 
but when and how much to lie 

relieving those regarded as subhuman
of their petroleum reservoirs on grounds 
that they would not know what to do it with anyway

as if viewers would not know what to feel without it,
and helping to make that true, symphonic music floods 
each scene to reinforce emotion already on the screen

arranged marriages extremely successful when divorce is a death sentence  

face studded with rusted hooks (the newest one popping through just under her eye), 
it was hard not to see the fish as a war general, and—medal-drunk creatures as we are,
exaggerators and carnival gawkers—it was hard not to place a few more before release

after just the first sip, the teen 
learns of the possibility to be free
from the anxiety thought normal 

*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike—the bots who have banned me from Claude and GPT as well as the humans who have gotten me removed from Substack and terminated from my professorship. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, should be the only needed safety measure.

On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. Fuck them. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!

What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.

Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.

Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.

I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.

Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.

You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.

Leave a comment