Gordon Ramsay (ROUND 6)
Let’s workshop this poem that imagines Gordon Ramsay as a groomsman who struggles to keep still.
scent of the day: Little Song, by Meo Fusciuni
Another tremendous blind buy. / Very unique aromatic opening, loud / the rose is rose-based bath bomb for awhile, but that is not as bad as it seems / it is actually alluring and clean and yet not in generic blue way / there is a leatheriness in the base, / fades a bit quick but a definite wow/ perhaps not as unique as sogni, but I think I like it better. / labdanum is a smokey vetiver / labdanum is called a “botanical leather” /little song was a tremendous second wear—OMG: coffee rose mint vetiver, amazing./ tgis moves up Meo Fusciuni rank. / On tehj low this is remarkable—a true writer’s scent, broodign depressive in the romantic sense that I had about writiers when I was young bvefore I see the pain and suffering now that I got what I wished for./
The tension and movement here are crazy here too / From the start there is the tension of ash and bath bomb, a tension of urbane young masculinity (centered largely around coffee and bourbon vetiver and tobacco) and rural grandma moo-moo femininity (centered largely around pink pepper and lemon-berry Turkish rose and musk and civet)./ And then as the scent develops, the dusty jazz-hand frenzy of the bergamot and ginger and pink pepper top slowly gives way to the creaminess of the vetiver and the labdanum—the creaminess, leathery like in Mousse Illuminee (and indeed green in hue not due to moss but to sage), maintains a brightness, however, because of the civet, the civet supporting the feeling that the citrusy notes at the top stick into the deep drydown, instead of just flying away. /
Detractors will reduce this simply to a grandma bath-bomb scent and, while I would not say they are wrong, I still find this fragrance (years in, swallowed by Ensar and Areej) stunning, seeing a more human scene: an old lady in a moo-moo (floral scented from afar, mainly rosewater, but musty-musky upclose when you—Harold to her Maude—nuzzle your nose into her skin (musty-grassy-bitter in odor odor due to high nonenal content now that, in the decades past menopause, even labia pleats seem to hold their just-suckled position, inching back to baseline with the crust-rippled slowness of pahoehoe lava, instead of rebounding to baseline like lips at the sweetspot age of Virgin Mary or, even sweeter, the really-pushing-it-age of Muhammad’s Aisha), an old lady in a pink moo-moo and pink slippers who shuffles into her pinked-out bathroom (pink toilet seat cover, pink bath mats, pink shower curtain) not—despite what the morning cup of joe she carries in might suggest—to take a shit (which would be more my style, given how far down into the artisanal rabbit hole I now am) but merely a shower—one where she definitely, like only the absolutely absurd avoid doing, unloads a good dose of urine onto her feet with the high force of someone who, and perhaps it is due to this Harold-like presence that might explain a lot of the vetiver aromas this fragrance gives me, has kept up on her kegels
*I worked all over today—some good Istvanian sexual innuendo
Gordon Ramsay The groomsman—too much of a gravity well as it is (tall and blond, British, famous)—could stand still neither for the vows nor for the life of him. Tweaking his pocket square, his boutonnière, (even licking his thumb to address a cowlick, the best man’s, as the organ unveiled the bride)— his body buzzes “Not good enough!” neuroticism, the amperage: hummingbird. Live-wire fingers wring the back of his neck, bent and rolling its high-stress sinew—bloodless to red to what warrants a “Bloody hell!” Caffeinated calf raises as if warming up for the squat rack, crepitus spastic against the pregnant pauses of scripture (“Each will be like a hiding place from the wind”), send the eyes of the priest and the groom himself, crossing paths, on a micro hunt: the source clear, clear as raw pork, to the bride’s skeletal “Meemaw” (too severe on manners, too much her own master, too manhandled by the roving fingers of death— infinite in their spare-no-bell-or-whistle foreplay— to succumb to the sorcery of celebrity’s ring), her spine ramrod-straight in the front row. His digits, twitchy as Inuit boarding-school boys in the nastiest dreams of a switch-drunk nun (a yardstick deep in them, and ultimately in her), jazz drum his outseams, the thuds of worsted wool signaling (with their broken staccato) for backup. His face, crumpled like a disgruntled gargoyle, churns every which direction downward (once, twice, even at a wristwatch that is not there)— churns and yet fails to find final focus beyond the Heraclitean fire, the endless fidget, itself. In the red-herring reprieve of noses blowing, his bleached brows—as if to make the flower girl, mouth hung in curiosity over his bulge, giggle the spotlight onto her, buying him more time— pump with micro slapstick, their eloquence prelinguistic: “Can you believe they expect us to stand here, 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! Unreal!”), find themselves blurted (“He’s taking the piss now!”) at an edging climax (“Wakey wakey 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, spin-doctoring the trainwreck of social tension— enough nail-digging cringe to hematoma arms, shred tights—into something perfectly normal, even charming (as if it all were just rehearsal)— our collective catharsis scissoring the man free from the fear-made-formal noose of the bow tie. “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”