The Printout (Round 4)
Let’s workshop this poem about adolescent secrecy and shame surrounding sexual exploration at the threshold of multiple taboos, culminating in the shock of exposure by the adult world
scent of the day: Musk Sultani, by Ensar Oud
Here we have another insane musk release. Real musk is the most seductive thing imaginable, how it envelops you in this fuzzy-animal aura that draws other in and you as well—not in the meditative way of sandalwood but in a one-way sex way: ménage à moi. It literally will make people swoon. I hate hype and BS but that shit is absolutely true. It is even perfect for self love. Some days I think I want to give musk a higher place than oud. But then I remember that on different days I need different things. Some days I want to radiate a texture of impossible to describe fuzzy allure. Those are musk days. Other days I want to smell like varnished mahogany or horse stable or moldy cheese. Those are oud days.
Musk Sultani is a Cambodian oud take on Private Blend. It do not own private blend but I own the supersaiyan evolved form of it: Of Wolves and Men. The Of Wolves and Men version I have is Kamboche—the Kambuche refering to the name that Cambodia had in the late seventies. Since both frags give a staring place to the musk and cambodian oud, and since both give us a fruit-sandalwood-rose melange, they are extremely redundant for everyone but the top-tier connoseuirs.
That said, there are some things that make it different. There are differences even in regards to their shared notes.
Take Cambodian oud, for example. Both give a bitter kinamic cambodian oud a lead role. Sultani used a melange, however, of Chenla, Ko Kon, and Pusat—the top-shelf Cambodian ouds (as no doubt basement wizards like Yaaseen’s Moustafa I imagine could testify to). Wolves, on the other hand, used an Oriscent blend that centers the Pusat (which give an extremely red vibe) and, although like the same three varieties, comes here in denser concentration for a more medicinal effect—a medicinal effect that goes in a dark-red-cherry direction because of the addition of Vietnamese oud (an effect that Sultani does not have).
As for the fruits, Sultani goes citrus whereas Wolves goes blackberry. And as for the rose, Sultani contains a wide variety (bourbon, turkish, Japanese perhaps)—many boosting the citrus brightness. As for the sandalwood, it seems to play a bigger role in Sultani than in Wolves even though its buttery side is more emphasized in Wolves and its green and dry in Sultani. As for the musk, both use Kashmiri-tibertan-tonkin trifecta of Private Blend but Wolves adds in Mongolian (perhaps my favorite musk) for more of a chocolately cream effect.
Thje cumin and schizuan of Sultani is the most over way this scenbt stands out. And then more refined noses with notice that Sultani jhas more diverse animalics. Wolves is moreso centered on Musk. It reads as more elegant: a furry musk, more serious than jokey, soaking cherry tobacco in an apothecary. Sultani brings castoreum (a bit played ouyt in Ensar’s repetoire) and lemon-piss civet too. Musk sultani—merging the cumin-pepper spice of Siber Extreme and yet the Musk-Khabib-style fresh-brightness of Musc Millesimime—reads more feral: a furry musk, bright and energetic, blooming from sun-cured beaver leather.
It really is unbelievable that some of us can have access to this. These aromas are life redeeming.
The Printout
—for C-Ride, a best friend for life
It was a heart-pounding last-minute scramble—
a dance the barely-teen latchkey knew by heart.
He washed his lather-proof hand (over dishes)
as best he could, pelvic floor still echoing spasms.
He placed the jar of petroleum jelly (too-bare)
in the medicine cabinet, label faced in (as it was).
He hid the black-tape-bound banana-peel pouch
(a MacGyvered apparatus less spicy in practice)
first in his toy chest and then, panged by paranoia,
in the kitchen garbage—greasy and browning.
He ran the dwindled roll of that electrical tape
to the basement, rocks in its radon walls like eyes.
He buried the skid panties that strapped his face,
just right for deep nostril tokes of the tart patch,
in his mom’s hamper (pausing at a crustier pair).
He pounced to his room upon the muffler scrape
as if engaged in his penny-rolling chore all along,
curtain shadows ghostly on wood-panel walls.
His windows rattled in the wake of the door slam
reverberating through the uninsulated hollows.
It unnerved him even though he anticipated it.
But once keys clanged the curbside coffee table,
ear-perking silence thickened. In computation
it thickened. Smackdab on the living room floor,
in the carpet’s worn path, lay an inkjet image—
washed out from a cartridge low on black,
too yellow from an empty cyan—pixilated
on printer paper: black thighs, spread-eagle,
onto which the hyperventilating marauder
in his mask had moments before, squatting
in ache, pumped out a diaphanous payload,
chlorine pool in odor (“All over you, Bitch”).
“What the fuck is this?!” his mom shrieked.
He surged up from the pennies, possessed
by a fierce dread that he had been found out.
Yet by the time he reached the cold doorknob,
confident there was no way he failed to cover
every taboo track, he found himself possessed
more so by a twisted curiosity to learn, that if
by some crazy chance he had been found out,
what damning detail he could have missed.
“What—the fuck—is this shit?!” she shrieked.
Clutching the printout in a fist that gobbled
the pan-African-hued header “Nubian Slut”
(pussy-ink-robbing red-black-green nutted to
ogling the line-by-lagged-line load of dialup),
she thrust the gleaming gorgon head (half-balled)
out in his direction (arm’s length), turning him
to stone in the ramshackle threshold, his expiry
dribbling coagulated to black waitress sneakers.
“The Printout” is a fevered coming-of-age poem that stages the collision between adolescent sexual secrecy and maternal authority in the era of dial-up pornography. Dedicated to “C-Ride, a best friend for life,” the poem situates itself in the memory-chamber of boyhood complicity and panic, where experimentation, shame, ingenuity, and terror coexist in electric proximity. Its narrative unfolds like a crime scene reconstruction, but the “crime” is autoerotic discovery, and the punishment is exposure.
The first half of the poem is kinetic and procedural. The barely-teen latchkey boy performs a choreography of concealment that is as ritualized as it is frantic. Every object carries symbolic weight: petroleum jelly, black electrical tape, banana peel, skid-marked underwear, basement walls with “rocks… like eyes.” The domestic sphere becomes a paranoid labyrinth. The boy’s ingenuity—“MacGyvered apparatus”—captures both resourcefulness and innocence; the sexuality here is awkward, improvised, and experimental rather than predatory. Yet the language does not sanitize the act. The physicality is sticky, greasy, earthy. The poem insists on the tactile absurdity of adolescent masturbation, foregrounding smell, texture, residue.
The concealment ritual reveals more than fear of punishment. It dramatizes the adolescent realization that desire generates material evidence. Tape rolls, laundry, garbage, and petroleum jelly jars become forensic liabilities. The boy’s world is one in which privacy must be engineered against omnipresent surveillance—embodied in the rattling windows, the door slam, the keys clanging. Even the radon rocks in the basement seem to “watch.” The poem’s sensory density—muffler scrape, reverberation, thickened silence—conveys how shame amplifies perception.
The hinge of the poem is the printout itself: a low-ink, pixelated image of “black thighs, spread-eagle,” labeled under the pan-African header “Nubian Slut.” The technical details—empty cyan cartridge, washed-out black—are crucial. They root the scene in a specific technological moment, the early internet, when pornography required patience and physical printing, and when the lag of dial-up could heighten anticipation. The image is degraded, yet powerful enough to detonate the domestic order. The mother’s shriek transforms the sexual image into a weaponized artifact.
Race enters the poem not as sociological essay but as charge. The header’s “pan-African-hued” red, black, and green situates the boy’s fantasy within a larger history of racialized eroticization. Whether the boy understands the cultural freight of that imagery is uncertain; what is clear is that the mother encounters it not as abstract politics but as transgression. The racialized pornography becomes doubly taboo—sexual and social—magnifying the humiliation.
The boy’s reaction is complex. He is possessed by dread but also by curiosity. This dual possession is psychologically acute. Shame does not eliminate inquiry; it sharpens it. If he has been caught, he wants to know how. The mind under threat becomes forensic, retracing steps, auditing concealment strategy. Adolescence here is defined less by desire than by the dawning awareness of consequence.
The final image crystallizes the transformation from kinetic improviser to petrified subject. The printout becomes a “gleaming gorgon head,” and he is turned to stone. The mythological allusion elevates the domestic scene to epic proportions. The mother’s outstretched arm freezes him at the threshold between childhood and exposure. His “expiry dribbling coagulated to black waitress sneakers” collapses orgasm, guilt, and mortality into a single grotesque detail. The sneakers—mundane, working-class—anchor the myth in economic reality. This is not a suburban comedy; it is a cramped, uninsulated house where shame reverberates.
Ultimately, “The Printout” is less about pornography than about the formative shock of being seen. It captures the adolescent realization that private fantasy leaves traces, that bodies leak evidence, and that parents are not blind. It also documents a specific technological adolescence—printer cartridges, dial-up lag, physical artifacts of online desire—before sexuality became primarily screen-bound and ephemeral. The poem balances humor and horror, tenderness and mortification, rendering the universal experience of sexual discovery with raw, unsentimental clarity.
coming-of-age poetry, adolescent sexuality, shame, early internet culture, pornography and race, parental discovery, secrecy and surveillance, domestic space, mythic allusion, technological nostalgia, class setting, humiliation, sexual awakening, memory and friendship