Argos before
Odysseus leaves.
Samwise, Samwise.
Harry on the phone
at Christmas.
Don’t be afraid to just
phone moi.
Wendy, old,
and happy
with dreams
of flight.

Sometimes I don’t know how I got to where I am.

Today I was redecorating my room. I moved a shelf from one side, to the other side, without my roommate’s help. For the time being, that means it isn’t secured to the wall.

I still put everything back on it, though and if I happen to be flattened by it, then at least we can find amusement in the reality that– though tragic and untimely— it was sure not most surprising thing that’s ever happened to me.

(Being flattened by a shelf would barely make the cut for a story on the blog, and if it did, the emphasis would be over something else. “Sometimes I think I have too much dimension, splayed outward like an exploding minefield. What would it be to be garden-flat, richness compressed to a plane of existence that can be danced upon. I think I could make the shift from person to place. I think I would like you to think of me that way now. I think I could hold you.”)

One shelf usually holds my perfumes. I have four bottles that I rotate between regularly, and three were elegant and expensive gifts. The other, my favorite, is a $9 bottle I find most often at Burlington Coat Factory. The thing is, I don’t ever remember the name of any of them, and I don’t know any of their notes. I just think of them by their energy.

Seeing them all together, and realizing this, I spent some time. I smelled each in a row, comparing. The three gifts smell like go, get up, get going, grow, rise warm, rise glorious. My favorite smells like every side of stay. These are obviously not words used to describe perfumes.

And this is what made me think of the Tamarians. In Star Trek, the Tamarians speak only in allegories. They reference mythologies of their own culture, but without drawing out the full comparison.

They would not say: Right now, time seems dangerously disengaged from reality and space.

They would not even say: This moment reminds me of the bullet scene in The Matrix. We’re moving at different speeds. We’re dodging bullets. Time and space have become so not right that they’ve become real. They feel like tangible characters in this operatic ballet we are calling the present.

They would simply say: Matrix bullets.

I started wondering what Tamarian poetry might look like, and how I would describe my perfume using their patterns of speech instead, and that’s how this post starts.

With a poem about Fancy Nights, an old mostly-discount perfume by Jessica Simpson, as described by someone who has no real sense of smell, written in an USian imitation of a Tamarian dialect.

I mean, obviously.

It isn’t the ideal form for me, though, and if it weren’t November, I would not share because the poem fell a little flat.

Let us be hopeful that I will not.

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My Peppers are doing awesomely! Have you checked in? Pop by the list and visit someone!