Surgilube (Round 2)
Let’s workshop this poem about how a nurse's jerking off a patient can serve to restore our faith in the future of humanity--yes, even against the swelling tide of bureaucracy.
scent of the day: Kinamic Roma Zen, by Pinoy Sirun
First wear notes
It opens like someone zested a green-gold citrus over a warm snifter and then cracked open a humidor next to a kyara chip: bright acid and bitter peel flashing across warm alcohol, herbal fumes, and cool resin smoke. / There is no fluff here but I could not say that structure is tight or crafted at the highest level. / And even if every facet pulls weight, the effect is muddy like one often says of Prin—and if that much is true of Prin, then it is definitely true of this Pinoy release (and many others) / Not as standout as Blue Civet Dream, which is my benchmark civet in all its pungent glory just as civet de nuit is my benchmark in its smooth form, and also it has that rediundant base and shows an intermediate technical ability /
Calamansi, a Southeast asian citrus (perhaps my benchmark for the note, althoguh it might be in some prins), leads the opening—more peel and pith than juice, sharp and slightly bitter like a kumquat-lime-mandarine hybrid. / It bites into the boozy cognac accord (oak, rancio, volatile grape esters) but it does not stop it from going syrupy (as you migth think it would)./ Thyme (thymol/carvacrol) rides that brightness with a medicinal-green snap that lasts until the dry down / the effect is like citrus oil on oak staves soaked in cognac, not a cocktail umbrella.
Red champaca and rose rise after the first ten minutes—again, this is beign soemwhat charitable since we are dealing with a muddle, albeit a firigging high quality lovely muddle / Champaca, the densest floral in the build, here is not perfumey “magnolia cream” but rather tea-spiced and faintly phenolic with more peach-drizzled saffron hay than banana-custard facets—that saffron-adjacent tones really bringing out the leather, an oily yet metalic (castoreum-like) leather, that I get in pretty much all the Pinoys I havbwe tried ./ The rose is red and jam-leaning (damascenone sumptuous glow) but kept honest by thyme’s medicinal line and the remaining citrus bitterness. / I think I get the rose, like the thyme, deepo into the life of the scent / The tobacco is present in a more cured leaf and honey hay way than vanilla or cheery pipe spcie, but ti is hard to tell whwere it ends and where the oud begins (especially when we got champaca acting like a hay bridge)/ the kinam oud is camphoraceous cool, bitter-resin spine, mineral smoke. / It cools the florals and drinks down the booze, translating the cognac’s oak into drier, lacquered wood. / After first hour whole thing ready like a leathery-amber muddle (as muddled as the bits of unfilted material at the bottom of the bottle would suggest) with a bruised-petal or tannic-wine tint—little to no barnyard./
All the criticisms aside, the kinam here does everything a kinam should do: minty-sweet, airy, bitter and sour, pungent and medicinal, and with very low barn-poop quality that we get say in Ruade/ Kinam oud is to oud what bourbon vetiver is to vetiver: the “holy grail.” / It can be found in Vietnam, Hainan Island (China), Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos but its characteristics are so unique that it is sometimes treated as a category separate from other ouds from those regions. / Still, it is important to note that Kinam oud, which comes from various Aquilaria species (sinensis is the gold star we see in Hainan, but we also get crassna in Vietnam and malaccensus in Laos), is not a separate species but rather a rare maturation state of agarwood—extremely high resin content and specific fungal-oxidative transformation, such high resin content that it can almost seems (although this is more poetic than biochemical) a different substance (and this is why people can get away with calling kinam what people ten years ago would have said is too inferior to be called kinam) /
I have little doubt that high quality kinam is used here: sweet, bitter, sour, and acrid all in one—even with a “numbing” sensation and ethereal notes of cool mountain mist and sweet apothecary sap. / With the pinoy siruy syrup-meets-leather base that is common in most of their release, the apothetcay sap side of Kinbam is really emphasized here. / this is full of charm, unpolished as it is unsentimental / this feels as artisan of something—honey, jam, quiltwork—of something that I could have bought at one fo the booths in the Dutchess County Fair back in the early 1990s /
*worked mainly on the first long sentence
Surgilube
Pent-up voltage jacked out of their bedridden loins
by a matronly yet martial grip (clinical only where
it counts: in resolve), its shearing twists more often
than not spicing the empathetic pulse (two high
one full, two high one full, a few fulls, and back
again, only this time less careful in the downstroke
about the balls); blankets thrashing too savagely,
the gooey clicks of amplified insect scuttle muffled
too little, to be anything more than formality, a titty
with luck popped out right at the merciful moment;
quivering relief wiped down with a rag magical
in its inexplicable warmth, whispered tones soothing
the reverberations of nether brutality (but rarely ever
slipping into that baby talk detrimental to dignity)—
CCTV footage now confirms, yes, too many cases
for us to relinquish our faith in humanity just yet:
a steady stream of nurses (pink, blue), some saintly
enough to hush the most insistent eyeball nudges
to bedside wallets (“Ssh. Relax now.”), dispensing
farmer clemency upon the helpless in their charge
(old men alone, young men mummified in casts
that render every itch a summons to stoicism),
ensouled people more to them than billing codes.
Too humane (cooing moans) to be called “heretical”
and yet too violent (lip-biting) to be called “tender”—
such helping hands, with their tearing-up-Kafka nerve
to pump under fluorescence of corporate compliance,
safe-keep the fragile hope that true respect and TLC
can survive bureaucracy’s psychopathic crusade
to sterilize all rawness and risk and spontaneity,
all authentic interaction, for the sake of ensuring
a safe space smothered beneath smiley protocol,
a space right out of the dry dream of an HR officer:
where one must say “unalived” instead of “killed”;
where “honey” and “sweetheart” and “darlin”
become linguistic contraband, especially
if uttered by those with “optics of privilege”;
where men must not gather at the water cooler,
lest the spectral history of patriarchy be invoked;
where every office door must remain open even if
the student or colleague visiting you is in tears;
where discourse must follow a call-center script
as bloodless as the wall color of anti-anxiety beige;
where offering an extra shelter blanket requires
a four-page “Exceptional Supply Request Form”
signed by no fewer than two administrators;
where a burn-unit caretaker gets put “on notice”
for exceeding the 240 second sponge-bath limit,
the patient’s terror and need for a hand to hold
dismissed as irrelevant to “efficiency metrics”;
where “all employees are strictly forbidden
from bringing in outside food (including candies)
because “unauthorized communal festivities”
are liable to blindside especially “our colleagues
struggling with sustained caloric over-indexing”
(the safer replacement for “food addiction”);
where two caretakers must always be present
to deter protocol breaches, if even just leaning in
to listen closer (which, as a known precursor
to assault, violates the personal-space guideline).