Hog
Let’s workshop this poem about a teen girl who, bringing the maxim "It's all fun and games" to renewed life, misreads as rescue what ends in collective violation worthy of the dissociation it provokes
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: Oud SQ Terengganu, by Ensar
Only my second wear, so take with grain of salt. A tobacco-oud scent for lovers of bitter-tannic medicinal fragrances, which I am. The tobacco and the oud support a tannic aura, not too far from what we get in Bortnikoff’s Sans Fluer—an aura somewhere in the overlap between antique wood, old leather, and bitter grape skin. No patchouli is listed but the patchouli vibes, three parts mothball and one part chocolate, are definitely here. The strong patchouli impressions might just be a phantom effect, due mainly to the woody medicinal trifecta: cubeb, tobacco, terengannu oud. But I think there has to be patchouli here.
The patchouli dose seems large enough to remind me of the ultimate patchouli oud: Aguru, with which it share a common core of saffron, myrrh, tobacco—albeit the Ensar comes off much more classy, much less in the mulch. Indeed, there is enough of a patchouli impression here to bring me back to Red Tobacco and the innocent days of the frag journey. And it is not a reach to say that there is, like with the Mancera, a sort of cola-fied treacle of purple Robitussin: icy-lozenge Terrenganu oud, eucalyptus-pepper cubeb, anbesol-numb clove, dusty-bark cinnamon, nutty-earthy nutmeg, stewed-compote plum, vinous-jam rose, smoky-salve castoreum, bitter-fungal myrrh, and even perhaps—although this could just be the cool-terpenic rosewood working with the myrrh—unstated pine-resin olibanum).
This reminds me most, at least from recollection, of Tigerwood 91. Both have a minty-chocolate patchouli vibe and impressions of a leather pouch with peppery and black tea inside. Tigerwood 91 ramps up—especially with the added iodine-bandaid oakmoss—the medicinality and this medicninality coupled with the amount of tigerwood oud pushes the composition into tiger-balm proportions, numbing proportions of a dentist visit. As such it outshines Oud SQ, which is why I never secured a bottle. I will say that this seems more accessible than Tigerwood 91. Tigerwood 91, after all, brings—and maybe it is because of the added animalics (musk, ambergris)—this aggressive dentate-animalic element and it just keeps pummeling you with it: a dental carry tooth rot element to it like when you pick it with a mint toothpick and then smell that you are meat despite all your lies to self.
Hog Hitched to the bearded biker whose cranked throttle teens mistake for rescue, she felt torn from the helm of herself— battered pink balloon, spit-knot loophole to gang heat otherwise gay, tugging and heaving every which way at the mute end of a fraying string.
This poem, “Hog,” is a compressed study in trauma, dissociation, and the violent misrecognition of spectacle as salvation. Its power lies in how it renders psychic fragmentation through kinetic imagery, presenting a subject whose experience of being “rescued” is inseparable from further objectification and loss of agency.
The opening immediately destabilizes the conventional symbolism of escape. A “bearded biker” with a “cranked throttle” evokes the cinematic grammar of rescue—speed, masculine intervention, dramatic extraction. Yet the crucial detail is that this rescue exists only in the eyes of “teens,” whose interpretation is explicitly called into question. The poem’s first move is thus to expose the gap not just between the little girl and the man she thinks is rescuing her but between outward spectacle and inner reality: what appears liberatory at first may turn out to be a gangbang nightmare of bukkake proportions.
The phrase “felt / torn from the helm of herself” is the emotional center of the poem. “Helm” suggests authorship, navigation, self-command; to be torn from it is to undergo not simply physical displacement but psychic dispossession. The subject is no longer steering her own experience. This is an especially effective formulation of dissociation because it preserves a sense of structural selfhood even as control is violently severed.
The central metaphor intensifies this fragmentation. The “battered pink balloon” makes us think, in context, of LL Cool J’s line: pink cookies in a plastic bag gettin crushed by a building—except here presumably there is no plastic bag. The imagery of a hollow elasticity really is striking: damaged femininity, vulnerability, and unstable buoyancy. A balloon is light, passive, directionless once detached from anchoring control. The phrase “spit-knot loophole” is deliberately grotesque, collapsing bodily intimacy, coercion, and improvised fastening into a single degraded mechanism of attachment. The imagery suggests a being reduced to something tethered rather than self-directing.
The final stanza’s “gang heat” complicates the scene further, implying that the biker—having taken the little girl back to the bike club—is not a simple rescuer but part of a larger threatening ecology. “Otherwise gay” is particularly interesting, but we know what it means: the girl is not only the centerpiece of a gangbang but the pretense for the men to fondle one another (perhaps a tongue on a clit might just land on the pistoning dick, for instance).
The final image—“tugging / and heaving every which way / at the mute end of a fraying string”—is devastating. The subject becomes pure residual attachment: dragged, directionless, increasingly close to total severance. “Mute” is crucial. Whatever communicative or agentive capacity remains is silenced. She girl is likely muzzled at least by hands. The “fraying string” suggests both the weakening of connection and the imminent possibility of complete detachment—not freedom, but annihilation of relational coherence. As her every hole gets filled up, she becomes more hollow.
The title, “Hog,” functions on multiple levels. It invokes the motorcycle itself, with its associations of outlaw masculinity and brute force, but also carries animalistic connotations that intensify the poem’s atmosphere of predation and bodily degradation. It is easy imagining that the girl, through the process, is called a “hog.” After gobbling up all the men have to give, that is the natural reading.
Formally, the poem mirrors its subject through fragmentation and compression. Its abrupt syntax, compressed metaphors, and rapid shifts in perspective reproduce the disorienting psychic conditions it depicts. The result is a poem about what it means to be moved violently through the world while being fundamentally absent from one’s own steering.
Hog, trauma, dissociation, coercion, agency, spectacle, fragmentation, poetic analysia