Roofie the Straggler
Let’s workshop this poem about a predatory consciousness converting a bachelorette dance floor into a hunting environment where it becomes clear that assault's origin is in the perceptual reduction.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: Private Label, by Jovoy Paris
Private Label (2011, Cécile Zarokian)—a vetiver-patchouli fragrance (more fossil and fungus than grass and twig) whose aura of sterile filth (used bandages, moldy money) and old-world decay (fallen staircases once perfumed by who’s-who entrances, cracked-and-dusty spines once oiled by fingers) evokes a pipe-toking bibliophile’s study gone to lignan-vanilla rot (ripped leather armchairs, their stuffing blooming with silverfish; wallpaper peeling and mottled with roof-leak mildew; hide-curled cinders of medieval manuscripts, recently torched with scotch accelerant for itinerant warmth, on a floor fractured and uneven from the hungry but patient peat bog below)—
opens with a rooty-tarry pizzazz that smells—thanks to a shared core of Ghirardelli-mint patchouli, book-lignan vanilla, brittle-paper cedar, inky-rooty vetiver, tarry-charcoal birch, scorched-earth guaiac, phenolic-oudy cypriol, castoreum-musk leather—close to Amouage’s Silver Oud (only drained of agarwood and thickened with the cough-syrup smear of Mancera’s Red Tobacco) and even closer to TRNP’s Aguru
but soon, as the patchouli’s transition from charcoal chocolate to ashy mushroom lets the papyrus-vetiver combo rise (medicinal, papery, smoky, inky), settles into an aroma of desiccated tobacco leaves (haylike, peppery, resinous, woody) removed from the musty sarcophagi of leather-bound books (tannic, bitter, nutty, smoky) and rehydrated in a glass of high-peat laphroaig scotch (briny, creosotic, vanillic, antiseptic), the vanilla-custard warmth at the base (so-tarry-it-is-leathery labdanum, so-dusty-it-is-creamy sandalwood) sufficiently balancing all the bitterness and ashiness—
the overall effect being a boozy-woody fragrance that, due to it its patchouli-vetiver-cedar-birch bloodline, makes it not just the sibling of Lalique’s Encre Noire and Bentley’s Bentley for Men Intense and Nasomatto’s Duro and Orto Parisi’s Terroni but almost like a 60-40 cross between Profumum Roma’s Fumidus and TRNP’s Aguru, the father of the family perhaps being Bortnikoff’s Sans Fleurs (which brings boozy antiseptic woods) and the mother being some mix between Profumum Roma’s Patchouly and some patchouli-vetiver-vanilla harlot (like perhaps Henry Rose’s Dark Is Night);
the overall effect being, in other words, a peaty-medicinal patchouli-vetiver fragrance, perfect either for an underworld bossman who makes people stand by his mere presence or for a tweed-jacket archivist who has not spoken aloud in years, that would be a dead ringer for my prefered fragrance Fumidus if only (1) its balance between axe-throwing-in-the-rain ruggedness and Proust-reading-in-a-clawfoot-tub smoothness tilted further toward the former (amber creaminess dialed down, asphalt smokiness dialed up); (2) its patchouli were quieter than its vetiver; (3) its beginning shapes in the evolution from oudy cough medicine to peaty mustiness were deleted; (4) its amberwoody base, very subtle and tasteful but making it more louder and long-lasting, were deleted.
Roofie the Straggler
Hammered blondes sway
on the bachelorette dance floor
like meat in warbled fade-ins
to cheesy poolside porn, a rogue
blowfly crazed by the rhythm
of rectal prolapse—lips
bitten, eyes shut; wrists
above their heads as if roped
to a mast in buccaneer captivity.
"Roofie the Straggler" is a poem about predation and its perceptual field — specifically, about the way a predatory consciousness organizes the visual world around it into a grammar of vulnerability and opportunity. Its nine lines do not depict assault; they depict the moment before, the scanning attention that converts a bachelorette dance floor into a hunting environment, and they do so through a chain of similes so precisely chosen that each one advances the poem's argument about how violation begins in perception long before it becomes action.
The title performs its argument in two words. "Roofie" as verb — to drug someone without consent — is casual in its register, the slang of a culture that has domesticated the act sufficiently to give it a verb form. "The Straggler" names the target by her social position relative to the group: not any of the women on the dance floor but the one who has fallen behind, whose distance from the herd is the condition of her vulnerability. The title does not describe an act already committed. It describes a logic — the predator's identification of the straggler as the appropriate object — and it names this logic in the predator's own casual vocabulary, without editorial distance.
The opening simile — "like meat in warbled fade-ins / to cheesy poolside porn" — is the poem's first and most fundamental perceptual reduction. The hammered blondes are seen as meat: not as people in a particular state but as flesh whose movement resembles the ambient sexualized imagery of low-end pornography. "Warbled fade-ins" captures the specific visual texture of cheap video — the slightly degraded quality, the slow dissolve — and places the women inside it as its content rather than as people watching it. The perceiving consciousness has already converted them into material.
"A rogue blowfly crazed by the rhythm / of rectal prolapse" extends the perceptual degradation into the entomological and the grotesque. The blowfly is drawn to decay, to the body's failures and exposures; "rectal prolapse" names a specific medical condition in which the body's interior becomes exterior, its containment failing. The simile is doing precise work: it locates the predatory attention in the register of the fly's relationship to damaged flesh — not desire in any romantic sense but the organism's response to exposure and vulnerability. The crazed quality of the fly's movement mirrors the women's dancing while placing that movement in a framework of biological opportunism rather than pleasure.
"Lips / bitten, eyes shut; wrists / above their heads as if roped / to a mast in buccaneer captivity" is the poem's closing image, and it is where the predatory grammar of the preceding similes arrives at its destination. The women's own bodies, in the postures of uninhibited dancing — bitten lips, closed eyes, raised wrists — are being read by the perceiving consciousness as already captive, already restrained, already in the position that violation would produce. The "buccaneer captivity" simile is historically specific: the pirate's captive, roped to the mast, is a figure of total helplessness within a total power structure. The women's voluntary dance posture is being perceived as that. Their freedom of movement is being read as its opposite.
This is the poem's most disturbing and most precise insight: that the predatory consciousness does not need to impose its reading from outside. It finds, in the ordinary postures of women enjoying themselves, the grammar of captivity it is looking for. The raised wrists of dancing become the raised wrists of restraint. The closed eyes of pleasure become the closed eyes of unconsciousness. The poem does not show assault. It shows the perceptual transformation that makes assault imaginable — the conversion of a person's freedom into the appearance of her availability.
The poem's nine lines are unbroken by stanza division, which is formally significant: the chain of similes runs continuously, one feeding the next, the perceptual reduction accumulating without pause or interruption. This enacts the predatory attention's own continuity — it does not stop to reconsider, does not break its own momentum, moves from observation to reduction to the final image of captivity in a single sustained operation. The poem ends where the predatory logic has arrived, and does not follow it further.