Metacognition (ROUND 2)

Let's workshop this poem about the subtle triggers of interiority’s earliest expansion, when perception first starts turning inward on a path toward awareness discovering its own gaze.

scent of the day: Jungle Kinam Pekanbaru, by Ensar Oud

first wear, need more time

More tannic woodiness (just like you get from the cheaper crocodile wood of San Fleurs) that here results largely from Malaysian oud, a type of oud that occupoies the darker mineral end of the Southeast Asian spectrum (earthy and humid rather than sweet or barnyardy: smoother than Hindi, less honeyed than Cambodian, and denser than Borneo). / The Malaysian oud here is actually tigerwood, a resin-rich and humid from that brings polished leathery and varnish wood and dark floral vibes to make for one of the most prized and meditative forms of Malaysian oud—a form that brings a strong wet-bark element and a vetiver greenery (which is why vetiver is a good reinforcer of it) /

here we do get a lovely vetiver, a vetiver that really scratches my nostalgia itch almost as much as Honour Man / Vetiver being probably my fabvorite note in perfumery even perhaps over oud and civet and castoreum and hyraceum, this is a big hit in my book. / the tannic vibe plus herbs does make this close to sultan murad, but it is the vetiver that edges this out a bit for me. / Sultan is deeper in tannic, which I do like and which would typically make me like that more than this more freshie composition, but again the vetiver really does it for me: from honor man, to cowboy grass, to st vetyver, to vetiver insolent, to bel ami vetiver, sultan vetiver, terre de hermes vetiver intense, black night, encre noir, and most definitel;y perhaps the king of them all Fumidus—I cant get enough

*Today I continue in the vein of Whitman by revising older work. In so doing, perhaps I mar the original spirit. But fuck it. Revising is important to me—first word not best word, as far as I am concerned.

Metacognition

Giggles unsparked
by the goofiest faces swooping in
to fish them out, yet still taken in

by the earnest labor, the infant—
nudged, as fevers will, inward
into wonder hungrier

for having stretched—
forms a distant smile of appraisal,
fine as the furrows of its brow.

*This poem first appeared in Cholla Needles (2022)

Photo Credit: harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/125775