Sunday, February 5, 2017

chester giles writes

perfume



the women and their perfume

 and all their hair
and their small fingers you want between
your fingers
               tied in knots
  their gentle skin
  and their perfume
when they walk past
   and you want to drink it
   and you want it rubbed off on you
you want to be inside it
    where they keep all their bottles
on the dresser
with the lotions
and the powders
      and you inside the bottle
                 sprayed onto their bodies
when they walk past
         wearing scent
         wearing perfume
dripping from their hair
and from their bodies
           such fine fingers
           such fine fingers
i want those fingers
   between my fingers
i want that scent i want that
       smell
on my own skin
on my own body
   from your body
i want to be beneath it
i want to be inside it
   when you walk past wearing perfume
       looking fine
       looking decent
  looking like something special
              i want that scent
              i want that perfume
to touch that skin with my fingers
to taste that perfume
     to wear that perfume
  your perfume
   on my skin
   and on my pillow
i want your fingers
between my fingers
because
         that hair  and
that perfume
    when you walked past like it
                                              was nothing
i started aching

Lance Parfum "Rodo" -- Alphonse Mucha


 Rodo_Fig11_gadget


1 comment:

  1. Algernon Charles Swinburne's title character in his novel "Lesbia Brandon," written between 1859 and 1868 but not published until 1952 because of its alleged pornographic nature, killed herself "by inches by opium and perfume." American and British newspapers in the 1890s commented about decadent, bohemian Parisian women injecting perfumes such as patchouli into the skin and blood stream in order to perfume the body. The lance-parfum Rodo was patented in 1897 by la Société Chimique des Usines du Rhône, in Lyon, which manufactured pharmaceuticals and synthetic perfume ingredients. When liquid ethyl chloride meets warm air, it vaporizes; the perfume was developed after an accidental spill of violet fragrance spilled into ethyl chloride. Like the earlier Kélène lance chlorure d’ethyle, which preserved ethyl chloride in portable, single-use glass or metal tubes for use as local and general anesthesia, the lance-parfum was a portable projection system for perfumed ethyl chloride, which was released automatically when the seal was broken. Rodo was manufactured in a variety of scents, including heliotrope, hyacinth, lily-of-the-valley, and Peau d’Espagne. It is possible that they were the basis of the newpaper reports of eccentric fin-de-siècle usage, such as subcutaneous perfume injection and perfume drinking. Lance-parfums were heavily marketed at the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, where users reportedly suffered intoxication, hallucinations, and cardiac trouble; the products were outlawed in the 1960s.
    A half century earlier, Walt Whitman, self-obsessed as always, had written
    I celebrate myself;
    And what I assume you shall assume;
    For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

    I loafe and invite my Soul;
    I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. 5

    Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
    I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
    The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

    The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
    It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
    I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
    I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

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