Good Call, Upon Consideration? (ROUND 2)
Let’s workshop this poem about how easy it is to expose our own internalized racism--our own equations of blackness with depravity--even as we intend to fight it.
scent of the day: Burmite Honey, by Prin
Burmite Honey (2023, Prin Lomros)—an animalic-amber fragrance turning fossilized bee spit into what seems, and apparently without any help from civet or castoreum or hyrax, a spice-and-suet-dipped stick of moldy nag-champa-like incense burned in the Badah-lin caves of Myanmar by admirers of rock art, burned and burned in makeshift woody altars of sticky soot tar over the centuries (until access became more restricted with the military junta of the 1960s)—
takes a tangle of feral florals (tannic-apricot champaca, waxy-nectar orange blossom, perineum-honey jasmine) and rockets them into an electron-cloud haze by means of energetic citruses (tangy-pulpy tangerine, bitter-leafy bergamot) and frenetic spices (pungent-sweaty cumin, crackling-terpenic black pepper, barky-dusty cinnamon, piney-tobacco nutmeg, orange-pith coriander),
this highspeed diffusion of volatility anchored—similar to what we see in the more boozy and less carnal Overture Man—to an immobile base of warm woods (fermented-mildew Thai oud, chalky-silky sandalwood, sawdust-talcum amyris) and gooey resins (pine-mineral amber fossil, citrus-conifer frankinscence, medicinal-fungal myrrh) further sweetened—never to the point of being cloying—and even given a melted-candle core by caramelized gourmand elements (marizipan-hay tonka, fatty-musky beeswax, salty-pelt ambrarome)—
the overall result being a nag-champa-sap animalic that, living in the tension between sweetness and sin or even divine and demonic, marries a spicy-floral energy field of overcast glow (mainly fumes of champac and curry) to a nucleus of waxy-woody resins glinting whose strong citrus sparkle, because of the dark undercurrent of unguent hide and charred molasses and dried cat pee mustiness (more brazenly sensual, more halitotically naturalistic, than any Mitsouko or any Absolue pour le Soir or any Furyo, vintage or new), only can irradiate the overcast instead of parting it to blue, making for a fragrance that bests any Areej I have smelled and just comes with that inimitable Prin potion-meets sleaze of genital-wart gayness in some South East Asian apothecary;
the overall result, in other words, being a spicy-honey amber fragrance that, far from smelling like hipster lip balm beeswax on an IKEA vanity, reads much closer to a piece of fossilized honeycomb (ribbed as if by design for prostate pleasure) set on a creaky sideboard table (its musty-musky wood smoked by years of incense and curry cooking and sex drippings) after being used by a Burmese tribesman as a butt plug that it would behoove you to insert in your own colon to get at least your gut microbiome back to where it was in a time prior to the safe-spaces that have turned us from wolves into yorkies.
Good Call, Upon Consideration? He throws his hand up. “I can’t take the bullshit— oot-oot monkey business every fuckin day”: the catcalls, (“Dayum! That ass lookin real real good, baby girl!”); the racket in restaurants; the mayhem in matinees; the gladiatorial stares, every glance a dare to scrap, even in the would-be reprieve of marble museums. Your recoil at his words unmasks your circuitry— your own internalized fusion of black and beast. Why peg such throat-cracks of fatigue to pigment rather than to all stripe of monkey heat and chaos? It recalls the days when “black” itself was a curse and tongues writhed through every other adjective but the obvious (detours through ribbons, shoes) to single out that one ink spot—eventually resorting, as we hear still today from beer-cradling EBT whites slumped in project stairwells (“I ain’t prejudiced” prefacing every “But”), to that hush-hush fallback, “The black girl," after vocabulary (chiffon, barrette) runs dry to the point where frustration at one’s own lack outweighs those clumsy gropes for decency.