The Tip (Round 9)
Let's workshop this poem about two men debating what constitutes going too far during a candlelight session with an offering--a bartered-boundary sacrifice by a junky mother--to the god of fentanyl.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
Scent of the Day: Santal Sultan (Parfum), by Ensar Oud
Fate Man vibes, definitely: 50 percent Fate Man, 10 percent Reckless Leather, and the rest just top-tier materials and an artisanal feel of authenticity. And that is not so positive as it sounds. For these two, especially Reckless Leather, were some of my favorite fragrances. Now it is hard for me to go back to them. After Santal Sultan—and a whole host of other artisanals—it is almost as hard for me to go back as it is for the house mom to go back, after a gushy gang rape, to vanilla sex: no choking or dehumanizing spit; no making the child watch the screaming stretch of triple penetrations, watch close enough to catch residual juices not just of the men but of the mother herself. For now the ambro super-ambers in them really stand out to me. Reckless Leather is still one of my favorite aromas. But its AmbreExtreme synthetics read as absolutely ridiculous after smelling artisanals in general.
Aside from the higher-quality ingredients, what makes this especially unique is that the curry and ghee vibes—the main connection to both Fate Man and Reckless Leather for me—come with a minty side: a mint that reads like the breath deodorizers you chew after your Indian meal, the fennel mix. Compared to Santal Royale, which is musky red in vibes and much creamier, this is sunny yellow and with purple-green herbaceous streaks. An herbal sandalwood fragrance—that is what this sucker is. Rosemary is the most prominent herb. That brings Thanksgiving to my mind.
Making the whole feel sort of like stretching in the dawn outside on the deck, an organic sun salutation of tremendous relieve (unless, of course, three men are waiting in ambush until after your husband leaves), the opening impression is of cutting underripe fresh pineapple. That impression only corroborates that festive feel: if not for some retro side dish like a sweet potato casserole with crushed pineapple folded in) or something tropical to add to the cranberry sauce in the hunt for something way less midwestern vanilla (careful what we wish for), then at least to drape on top of the holiday swine.
Good sandalwood is ureic, urinal—bittery uric acid. I like that, which is why I also love civet. Civet, I deeply feel, was the missing ingredient here. That would have made this be better what it is supposed to be: a sunny, bright sandalwood to start the day in the morning chill. The cedarwood adds such a crisp and refreshing pencil-shaving edge to the creaminess of the sandalwood. People complain about how reliant this fragrance is on cedar. I think it plays an important role. That said, if there was anything to pull back in order to make room for civet, it would be this, in my view. If I had my way, though, I would just add more civet and leave the cedar ramped up like it is. The cedar, which makes this fragrance energetic and clean, really makes this stand out from Santal Royale—its meditative twilight sibling.
But yes, we get that urinous aspect here with the sandalwood alone. It is definitely more prominent than in Fate Man. As for the comparison with Fate Man, whose better craftsmanship and blending cannot make up for the lower ingredient quality, Santal Sultan is more centering and comforting in its unabashed naturalism. That speaks to the quality of the sandalwood, because Fate Man uses a whole bunch of cozy labdanum, but even with that, its coziness cannot touch Santal Sultan. That said, I think Fate Man is the superior scent. Santal Sultan, however, falls short in this regard to Santal Royale, which is even more centering and calming.
Santal Sultan is like buttery Indian spices and sandalwood, although the degree to which my nose finds this buttery has gone down in comparison with my experiences, in particular, with Santal Royale: a deeper, creamier, more brooding nighttime version.
*Overhaul of whole today
The Tip Two men, blunted, stand over a thrice-curbside coffee table— gang glyphs gouged into its sticky body like cell-block graffiti; a takeout carton, Tasty Hunan, wedged under the short leg. Jeans and boxers puddled over baby-blue Nikes on gray carpet crunchy with cigar guts, busted vapes, and that lime teether (its vibrancy stomped by the ashy deadfall of indifference)— apocrine musks of streetball perinea plume over stale Glade. Their dispute, its casual air (as if merely “Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or . . . ?”), contradicts more than just the candlelit mood of Bobby Brown’s “Roni” on the boombox. The younger man, fuck-buddy plug for those fentanyl lozenges (lethal keys to the snow-bunny heart of the pimpstress-mother, now sedate in its broken pulse against the under-toilet linoleum)— he works himself with spit, the siren-choked section eight of trash turned trashier by the guileless gurgles of innocence, the coos. He has his reservations. “Cuz—you talkin bout killin this bitch!” “Tch. How you figure, nigga? Bitch suckin like she hungry. Mmh! Got that mahfuckin instinct. Just like mom dukes—bet that shit.” The younger man, shaking his head, keeps stroking at half-mast— on-deck circle, practice pumps. “I’m talkin size. Shit too tight!” As would a parent while wiping the creases of thigh chub before dusting tomorrow in talcum, each wife-beatered man cups a foot (“tenderoni” like the lyrics)—sandpaper thumbs, match strikers, delicate with the squab’s pliant arches. The no-penetration rule, which Mom had repeated (“Please”) to the one she knew (“Please”) as she shut the bathroom door to the twisted cost of getting herself straight, today’s tagalong, bandana blue, reads as mere suggestion: “Trust, Cuz.” An irrelevant factoid—planted in juvie health class (girls are born with all their eggs)—syringes conviction, still met with knotted brows, into his bowlegged stance, fresh from a bid. “On God, Cuz. Shit born ready to stretch. Shit be crazy. Feel me?” “Nigga, this—. Nah, I’m good on that.” “Aint even hearin me! Tch. Lil nigga—for real. How you think they gon have babies?!” “She aint ready to have no baby! The fuck?” “Shit born ready! Midget bitches—. Tch. Shit’ll stretch, Cuz. Just can’t hit deep.” After a teabag into the suckling reflex, milk violence engorging his baby leg, he snatches the other heel with a g-thang glare— swiveling its rashy butt, skippy squeaks, to the missionary ledge. “Just the tip. See? Tell me bitch aint good: cooin for that chocolate! Lil ho like mom dukes and shit! Bet she take two pipe nigga! Bet!"
“Born ready” is the ideological center of the poem. The phrase collapses future reproductive capacity into present sexual availability. It turns development into destiny and destiny into permission. Beneath the street phrasing is an ancient misogynistic structure: the female body imagined as always already sexually available because it is eventually reproductive. The poem exposes this logic as both absurd and lethal. It is not merely wrong; it is a mechanism by which childhood is erased.
The reference to “midget bitches” intensifies the same logic by extending it through size and category confusion. The older man treats smallness not as a sign of developmental vulnerability but as a technical variant within adult sexual possibility. This is one of the poem’s most horrifying conceptual moves: the predator does not deny smallness; he reclassifies it. What should prohibit action becomes a problem of method. The moral absolute is degraded into logistics.
The dialogue’s casualness is formally essential. The men speak in banter, mockery, dare, repetition, and masculine challenge. Their exchange has the rhythm of a vulgar hypothetical rather than a moral crisis. That tonal flatness is part of the terror. Evil does not arrive in grand declarations. It arrives as argument between men trying to prove knowledge, nerve, dominance, and toughness to one another. The poem understands how peer pressure can become an accomplice to atrocity.
“Trust, Cuz” crystallizes that masculine recruitment. Trust, normally a word of care, loyalty, or reliability, becomes a demand that one man accept another man’s predatory expertise. “Cuz” manufactures kinship between the men while excluding the child from the realm of obligation. The only bond being honored in the room is the coercive fraternity of male persuasion. Vulnerability has no standing inside that fraternity except as material.
The poem’s use of vernacular is not decorative. It stages a whole social and masculine logic at work: challenge, ridicule, certainty, sexual boasting, and the refusal to appear weak. The older man’s speech does not merely communicate belief; it pressures the younger man into alignment. Every repeated address, every scornful correction, every insistence that he is not being heard becomes a tactic. The conversation is itself a grooming of the accomplice.
The ending reveals the lie inside the title. “Just the tip” presents itself as restraint, but the scene immediately shows that restraint was never the point. The phrase is a threshold device. It exists to make the first crossing sound small enough to attempt. Once the predator can reinterpret the child’s reflex as confirmation, the supposed boundary expands. Partial violation becomes proof of broader entitlement. The minimization was never a limit; it was a wedge.
The final boast is therefore interpretive as much as sexual or physical. The older man wants the younger man to recognize that his reading has been “confirmed.” He treats the child’s involuntary sounds as vindication, as if the scene has proven his theory. This is the predator’s psychic payoff: not merely domination, but being able to narrate domination as correctness. He has transformed helplessness into evidence and then congratulated himself for reading it.
Formally, the poem works through violent juxtaposition. Lyric density collides with street speech; childcare detail collides with predatory handling; slow-jam atmosphere collides with infant vulnerability; biological fact collides with moral stupidity; baby-blue fashion collides with the crushed lime teether. These collisions create the poem’s pressure. No register remains pure. Domesticity, music, science, slang, and care are all dragged into the same contaminated field.
The syntax reinforces this contamination. Long sentences accumulate details before the reader can escape them. Parentheses do not soften the poem; they deepen the indictment. Appositives and asides function like forensic exhibits, each one revealing another failed barrier: the mother’s drugged absence, the prior plea, the child’s object, the soundtrack, the misremembered health-class lesson, the carceral history, the masculine dare. The poem moves less like narrative than prosecution.
What makes “The Tip” so disturbing is not simply its willingness to enter horrific subject matter. It is the precision with which it shows violence becoming thinkable. The poem refuses the reader a clean monster outside the world. Instead, it presents a room where ordinary objects, half-knowledge, failed care, erotic music, drug access, male bonding, and linguistic minimization are all made to serve the unthinkable. The horror is systemic without becoming abstract. It remains rooted in hands, feet, carpet, smell, sound, and speech.
The poem’s ultimate subject is permission as a manufactured lie. The predator assembles that lie from fragments: a drugged mother, a pleading boundary, an infant reflex, a song lyric, a broken biology lesson, a friend’s hesitation, and a euphemism of partiality. None of these fragments can authorize anything. But the poem shows how, inside a degraded masculine logic, they can be arranged to feel like proof.
“The Tip” is therefore a poem about interpretive atrocity. It shows innocence being violated not only by action, but by reading: by the adult insistence that innocence has secretly meant something else all along. Its achievement is to make the reader feel how language prepares violence, how euphemism lowers the threshold, how pseudo-knowledge supplies confidence, and how male complicity turns hesitation into permission. The poem’s deepest terror is that the child’s helplessness is not ignored by the predator. It is noticed, translated, and used.
“The Tip” is a poem about predatory rationalization: the obscene process by which violence teaches itself to sound plausible. Its central subject is not only child sexual violence, but the interpretive machinery that precedes it—the way neglect, addiction, masculine bravado, pseudo-biological reasoning, ambient erotic culture, and infant reflex are assembled into a counterfeit permission structure. The poem does not merely depict atrocity. It studies how atrocity argues.
The title is brutally efficient. “The Tip” invokes a familiar predatory euphemism of partial violation, a phrase that presents itself as limitation while actually functioning as entry. The word “tip” also suggests the visible point of a larger submerged mass. What appears in the scene is only the exposed edge of a deeper structure: poverty, drug dependence, sexual entitlement, carceral masculinity, misogynistic folklore, failed guardianship, and the corruption of ordinary care. The poem’s horror begins in the title’s false modesty. “The tip” is never merely the tip.
The opening tableau establishes a world where abandonment has become domestic architecture. The “thrice-curbside coffee table” has been discarded, retrieved, and degraded into use again. Its “gang glyphs” and “cell-block graffiti” turn furniture into a record of confinement, territoriality, and boredom hardened into menace. The Tasty Hunan carton wedged beneath the short leg becomes an emblem of unstable repair: trash propping up trash, disorder made temporarily level by refuse. The room is not simply messy. It is morally and materially improvised out of neglect.
The clothing image is especially important once the “baby-blue Nikes” are understood as belonging to the men. Jeans and boxers puddle over those shoes, producing a grotesque color irony. “Baby-blue” does not identify the child’s property; it marks adult male self-styling in an infantile hue. The poem therefore displaces baby-color onto the perpetrators, while the actual baby-object—the lime teether—is crushed into the carpet’s ashy ruin. Childhood survives as aesthetic color on men’s footwear while actual infancy is buried beneath smoke, vapes, cigar guts, and indifference. The contrast is devastating.
The lime teether is one of the poem’s most concentrated symbols. Its “vibrancy” has been “stomped” by the “ashy deadfall of indifference,” making infant need visible as something already ignored. A teether is an object of soothing, pain relief, and developmental care. Here it becomes a casualty of the room, a bright little sign of dependency flattened by adult debris. The child’s presence is not hidden. It is everywhere legible. The horror is that legibility does not produce protection.
The poem’s smell-world intensifies this moral atmosphere. “Apocrine musks,” stale Glade, cigar residue, and trash create a space where bodily fact and failed concealment collide. Glade does not clean; it masks. That failed deodorizing anticipates the men’s verbal behavior. They do not make violence less violent. They spray language over it: instinct, readiness, technical limits, folk biology, bravado, and the minimization embedded in “just.” The room’s air is therefore analogous to the poem’s rhetoric: contamination covered by a cheap artificial sweetness.
The Bobby Brown reference deepens the poem’s tonal obscenity. “Roni” brings candlelight, adult seduction, and nostalgic erotic address into a space where those codes become monstrous by misapplication. The song does not merely sit ironically in the background. It becomes part of the cultural atmosphere through which the men misread and sexualize what should be absolutely outside erotic interpretation. The lyric echo of “tenderoni” is especially corrosive because its softness is violently displaced. Language designed for adult flirtation becomes one more contaminating pressure in a room with an infant in it.
The poem’s social setting matters, but it never functions as excuse. Section 8 housing, carceral residues, drug supply, and trash-strewn domesticity contextualize the violence without dissolving personal culpability. The poem is not saying poverty causes monstrosity. It is showing how abandonment, addiction, and masculine social codes can create an environment in which safeguards fail and predators learn to treat failure as opportunity. Context here does not excuse the men; it reveals how many barriers have already collapsed before the scene begins.
The mother’s incapacitation is central to that collapse. She is physically near but functionally removed, sedated on the bathroom floor after receiving fentanyl lozenges through the younger man. The phrase “lethal keys” is exact: the drugs unlock not only her absence, but the chain of access that follows. Chemical dependency becomes spatial vulnerability; spatial vulnerability becomes predatory opportunity; opportunity becomes argument. The mother’s body is present as broken guardianship, but the men are the ones who convert that brokenness into permission.
The phrase “pimpstress-mother” is deliberately ugly because it fuses maternal role, sexual economy, exploitation, and compromised agency into a single damaged title. The poem does not sentimentalize her. But it also does not transfer the central guilt away from the men. Her addiction and degradation create exposure; they do not author the violation. The poem’s moral intelligence depends on that distinction. Failed protection is not the same as predation.
The younger man’s role is one of the poem’s most disturbing psychological constructions. He has “reservations,” but they are not true ethical objections. He worries about size, danger, and consequence. His concern is not the child’s inviolability but the possibility of injury or fatal excess. This is why his continued arousal while objecting is so damning. His hesitation is not conscience in any full sense. It is risk assessment inside an already sexualized frame.
The “on-deck circle” and “practice pumps” imagery makes his complicity unmistakable. He is not positioned outside the scene as a horrified witness. He is warming up within it, physically rehearsing while verbally resisting. The poem’s moral pressure comes from this contradiction: reluctance can coexist with participation, and hesitation can become a staging area rather than a barrier. The younger man is not innocence corrupted by the older man; he is a weaker threshold through which the older man’s certainty advances.
The older man’s rhetoric is the poem’s engine. He argues through instinct-talk, misogynistic analogy, peer pressure, and broken reproductive knowledge. Most horrifyingly, he converts infant reflex into appetite. The child’s involuntary responses—sounds, movements, sucking, squeaks—are innocent bodily facts. The predator forces them into an adult sexual grammar. This is the poem’s deepest violence before the physical violence: the seizure of interpretive authority over a body that cannot speak, understand, consent, or correct the meanings imposed upon it.
In this sense, “The Tip” is a poem about semiotic violence. The infant’s body becomes a text the predator claims to read. Coos become evidence. Reflex becomes desire. Helplessness becomes invitation. The poem does not present this interpretation as ambiguous. It presents ambiguity as something manufactured by the predator. The child is not unclear; the adult reading is corrupt.
The “no-penetration rule” is one of the poem’s most tragic details because it already marks a degraded moral universe. Such a rule should never need to exist. Its presence means the mother has tried to establish a last boundary inside a situation where any sexualized contact is already catastrophic. The repeated “Please” reduces authority to pleading. A command becomes a plea; a prohibition becomes something the men feel entitled to parse. The tragedy is not only that the rule is violated, but that it has already been forced into the form of negotiation.
The men’s handling of the infant’s feet intensifies the horror by perverting the gestures of care. The comparison to a parent wiping thigh creases before applying talcum invokes the ordinary tenderness of childcare: lifting, cupping, cleaning, steadying, soothing. But here the grammar of care is stolen and repurposed. The poem makes tenderness itself feel vulnerable to contamination. Hands that imitate parental delicacy become predatory instruments.
The phrase “sandpaper thumbs, match strikers” captures this contradiction with terrible precision. The men attempt delicacy, but their bodies remain rough, abrasive, combustible. “Match strikers” suggests not only texture but ignition: the touch itself threatens to spark harm. The infant’s “pliant arches” heighten the asymmetry. The child is all softness and dependency; the men are friction, pressure, and heat.
The “juvie health class” factoid about girls being born with all their eggs is a grotesque parody of knowledge. The information is biologically adjacent but morally irrelevant. Detached from ethical comprehension, it becomes permission. The verb “syringes” is especially apt in a poem saturated with drug logic. A fragment of misapplied knowledge enters like a narcotic, injecting certainty into the older man’s stance. The poem understands that dangerous reasoning does not always come from total ignorance. Sometimes it comes from a tiny fact broken loose from moral reality.