Mirror Firewall
Let’s workshop this poem about the fleeting distance a narrator creates from his own harsh reality through judgment of others, only to be confronted by the undeniable reminders of his own condition.
scent of the day: Caravansary, by Pineward.—Intended to evoke images of wagon frontiersman in a pine forest circled around a winter fire while they sip warm tea, Caravansary—a more coniferous take on a smokey fougere than we see in DS & Durga’s Burning Barbershop—is a long-lived skin scent (as delicate and sleepy, unfortunately, as its whisps of tea and chamomile)—one, however, that checks (like many Pineward releases, especially Snoqualmie and Brokilän) so many of my boxes: terpenic olibanum and a log-fire accord on a foundation of mint-sap conifer notes (fir balsam, blue spruce, pine needles) and earthy-animalic notes (moss, pinecone mulch, deer musk).
Mirror Firewall Renewed by late-winter sun (plus crack) several blocks from your own sidewalk haunt, you mutter more than a flash of othering: “’nother damn hobo”—dream distance, lucid flight, endangered by the left-right swing of filthy sleeves frayed in the fringes of sight.
