Gordon Ramsay (ROUND 3)
Let’s workshop this poem that imagines Gordon Ramsay as a groomsman who struggles to keep still.
scent of the day: Attainment 2, by Amphora Exotica
Day one here, so take my words with a grain of salt
Attainment is very good. / EO 3 rugosa rose with smooth indian oud and a surprise blast of musk—all on a bed of bushman candle and spiced with saffron just like in vespers
*Third stab at the poem. I chose a picture of Tom Bombadil because I model “Nanna” after him in the sense that she is impervious to the sway of celebrity
Gordon Ramsay The groomsman—enough of a show-stealer as it is (tall, blond, famous)—could stand still neither for the vows nor for the life of him. Tweaking his pocket square, his boutonnière— his body buzzes “Not good enough!” neurosis at hummingbird amperage. Livewire fingers wring the back of his neck, bent and rolling its high-stress sinew—bloodless to red to what warrants “Bloody hell!” Caffeinated calf raises as if warming up for the squat rack, crepitus insane against scripture’s pregnant pauses, send the eyes of the best man and the priest on a path-crossing hunt—the source clear, all too clear, to the bride’s skeletal “Nanna” (too mannered, too much her own master, too worked on by the roving hands of death, infinite in their spare-no-expense foreplay, to succumb to the sorcery of celebrity’s ring), her spine ramrod-straight in the front row. His digits, twitchy as boarding-school Inuits in the nastiest dreams of a switch-drunk nun, drum his outseams, thuds of worsted wool signaling—in a telling staccato—for backup. His face, crumpled like a disgruntled gargoyle, churns every which direction downward— churns yet fails to find final focus beyond the Heraclitean fire, the endless fidget, itself. In the red-herring reprieve of noses blowing, his albino brows—as if to make the flower girl, mouth open in curiosity over his ways, giggle the spotlight onto her, buying him more time— pump with micro slapstick, their eloquence prelinguistic: “Can you believe they expect us to stand still this damn long? Madness!” Hand gestures of disbelief, curbed mid-flail but still as if to a bad ref call in Game Seven, come complete with thigh slaps and sighs— gusts of agitation. Motor tics upon motor tics mount until the go-to phrases of misdirection (“Oh wow”), the toupees of vocal Tourette’s (“There it is. Wow!”), find themselves blurted (“Wow. Hell of a point!”) at an edging climax (“Come on now big boy”) where we are called— in a stratagem of complicity-making, sedimented under layers of his muscle memory—to bust out our very own toupee: laughter, its surge meant to soothe our own discomfort as much as his, spindoctoring the trainwreck of social tension— enough nail-digging cringe to hematoma arms, to tear tights—into something whose normality increases the louder our collective catharsis winds him up into finger-jabbing freedom from the claustrophobia of the bow tie.— “I now pronounce you, husband and wife.”