THE PARTY'S OVER

1.
The party’s over. Time for the music to stop. Goodbye.

We walked outside and the inevitability of the end surrounds us.
Of this never happening again.
The problem with getting old is it is an accumulation of last times.
I won’t let you leave my side and that way the memory will never end.
Time slowed and stretched.
Knowing that even then I’ll eventually forget you.
Until one day I stop washing these hands that touched your dick, to never forget its musky smell.

We walked outside and it smells of discontent. Condemnation.
The smell of everything that has gone
Of everything that goes wrong
That is no more.

(All we ever wanted was everything.)

I’ll forget the smell of the back of your neck.
Of your curly, damp hair after you’ve showered.
Of the raw, unrelenting smell of sleep and tender sweat on the pillow.
Of the tuft of hair at the base of your spine.
Of the smell of your sweet, sad eyes.
The smell of silences. The smell of words.
The smell of your absence and the desire to have you here with me.
This here that no longer exists.
Now, here is something else.

I want to fall asleep with my nose pressed against your neck. And wake up. Why.
It would hurt too much to remember that smell now,
The one,
Where the curve of the neck becomes shoulder,
A place where no one smells alike.

I could never smell the scent of your tears.
I could never let you see mine.

We walked outside and daylight surrounds us.
The light of days. Each day means different things to different people.
It smells of our tired bodies and forced laughter.
It smells of small talk.

We walk and our arms touch as if to remind themselves how once our bodies had locked.
There’s the smell of the desire to have sex one more time.
The smell of our haste to get there, as we weave between old houses.
In this town all the houses are old.
We step over potholes on the way, trying not to tumble.
Down holes, and the same mistakes.
Summer is here and it already smells hot.
It smells of sizzling asphalt, the trees and the trash littering the ground
After yet another night on the town.
You can always find hope in the trash.
Pick it up and build a new world.
Smelling of possibility, and mistakes.

A shimmer rising from the asphalt as the heat gets too much.
All that’s missing is silence, and the backdrop of a desert landscape.
Maybe the breeze scoops something light up in the air and the mirage vanishes.
In slow motion.
As do all the images we never hope to forget.
Or maybe it’s not so.

It smells of the river and of waters that never are the same,
(As we rime against the tide)
Of sea air and hot metal when we cross the train line.
It smells of the city buzzing into life,
In a cycle of ends and then beginnings and then ends and then beginnings, indifferent to our need for permanence.
It smells of a burnt city.

I don’t remember if the acacias were in bloom.
We smell flowers among the weeds.
We smell balms in the piss on street corners.
We smell loss in the paving stones.
We smell perverse rhymes in shop ads.
We smell myths in the railings of dead-end streets.
We smell the coming morning on the exhaust of the few cars going by.
We smell the air of time passing, unaware this time shall end.
We smell time lost and the time yet to lose.
We smell the lulling hot breath of the breeze.
We smell our hungry bodies caked in sweat,
in the smoked cigarettes drying the mouth,
in the traces of each other we leave on our breath
and of all those who passed us by.

We dodge the smell of the homeless that still sleep in rags and cardboard piled high, not knowing if one day, we on the streets might end up homeless.
This summer will not be like the others.
Our bodies will end up alone.
We’ll smell the fear on the other.
On one another.

A year ago, fear was something that happened to others and there was no smell of bad news on the air.
A year ago, the puddles of fetid water still reflected a clear sky.
The summer rain refreshes the air flooding our nostrils
And piques the smell of slime clinging to our feet.

If I wanted to be poetic, I would say,
Your scent.
But scent sounds too nice.

We can sense more than four hundred thousand smells.
We can sense a completely new aroma,
yet to be produced by natural means.
Or artificial.
We don’t know how we sense what we smell.
Olfaction is primitive.
It isn’t easy to turn the subjective perception of a smell into words.
But words will be all that’s left to memorise a smell.
We know how an old book smells and yet we can’t describe it.

There are words to describe shapes and colours and sounds and tastes.
There aren’t words to describe smells.
Smells are like music. A harmony of fragrances.
The stave. The score. The composition. Chords. And notes.
Or like taste. Sweet. Bitter. Seasoned. Fruity.

I keep your smell with me in words.
Always and only words. So many of them.
Words getting ever smaller.

2.
30 minutes before.

When we rub against each other and I throw you up against the wall,
I sense the smell of need, of all those who have loved fleetingly.
The wall smelling of paint and the drip drop of moisture. Of secrets.
An odour of imprinted desire, sweat and spunk, the beery cigarette kisses that await me. Like a lavish gift for which I am duly grateful and give my ardent body as reward.
I carry them all with me and with you under the skin, and when I return, I was here.

Between minds
Between teeth
Between bellies
Between legs
Between pity
Between tears
Between come-ons.
And we two extremes
Between story
Between song
And all along.)

It is in the damp sweat dripping down the walls that we leave our mark.
Some with others.
Some in others.

I can smell myself on other bodies, at other parties,
On these and other walls.

And as we cavort against that wall,

(wall of precious stone, of snags and spider’s webs
That scratch and snatch and sacrifice.)

And as we cavort against that wall, I’d say,
I see myself years back, kid,
trying to press as much of my body as possible against it,
my body smothered on a south-facing wall warmed by the sun,
trying to hide and to forget the loneliness and need for human touch and I consider telling him
the sooner he accepts the body,
the sooner he finds another body,
the sooner he craves another body,
the more intensely he loves that body like he would his own,
the faster loneliness will disappear,
even if only briefly,
but I know it’s not true.

The other wall was made of limestone,
(wall so mute, so hard so rough)
And soft
And smelling clean.
This one feels rough but my skin has also grown coarser after being pushed against so many walls like this.
Rubbing the skin away.
Ending up red raw and trembling
(such shakes and quakes)
But alive and burning, alive and then dry as a bone.

This wall scratching my hands, jammed behind your back, that can’t stop holding you tight.
And our knees when our legs buckle or someone pushes us from behind.
And heads that lose track of where they begin and where they end as you kiss me and we laugh,
because of the booze and the drugs, because we’re happy.

Our fingertips can smell too.

If we could go back in time and smell each other,
the smell of our hollow bodies on this street.

3.
An hour before.

Bodies running, coming together, slipping away.
The attraction and repulsion of skin. Possibility and separation.
The constant rhythm of the music
aligns us in time with our heartbeat.
We repeat and shrink from the other’s sticky skin.
(Feel. Repeal. Repeat.)
I can only see you when the light permits, but I notice your smell.
I close my eyes and breathe in.
I pick out your gestures in gold leaf and the caverns of your armpit.
Your smell is littered with half-spoken sweet nothings and hints of comfort and confrontation.
You smell my harsh despair and the chill of the void.
Shadows cast your shadow amongst the shadows,
and sweat makes your presence known.
I lick your neck and keep you in my mouth forever.

I want to learn of the dense smell you secrete within you.
Without it being ruined by fresh air.
Or by the smell of others.
Of cigarettes, and beer and puke and piss and the air freshener.
Flesh and bone.
Without knowing what flesh smells of
Or whatever may be the smell of bones.
The smell of your sweat just before it seeps through your pores.
The smell of your blood which must be as metallic as it tastes.
The smell of your still warm heart.
The smell of your tensed sinews before orgasm.
The smell of your muscle before sleep.

We’re surrounded.
By music, heat, people, lights and heat.
I don’t move. I’m moved by them.
They sweep up my body with them in common rhythm.
I’m surrounded by me.
By the impossibility of being another, when all now are here.

We’re surrounded.
There’s no way out. We can only carry on.
Lights shimmer on the sweaty bodies.
(This is no image. This is a smell.)
It smells of circumstance under siege.
Outside they await us. We cannot leave.
Music that drowns out our voices, even the sirens.
Lights that blur with the sirens. And the headlights.
And with your eyes when they are open.

If we never let go of each other, the party will go on forever.

4.
Two hours before.

You take me by the hand to the bathroom and my first impression of reeking shit rapidly shifted, to suggest mothballs, effluent and then bad breath, of different intensities blending into one.
And then much to my surprise, a delicately floral scent, like a wilted flower in a jar of stagnant water, or a bunch of fresh flowers you smell from within a dumpster.
It’s barely there but I can smell it - flowers.
A spasm of vomit and jasmine.
A thing of beauty on our way, having come from where we came.
A breath of life in the corridor of death.

Our love smells of latrines. And shit. And piss. And vomit. And disinfectant.
And liquid soap when I wash my hands and watch you in the mirror when I can get away with it.
Most of the time you’re a blur, restless and wobbly, you and I.

I was always told my desires were filthy and I believed them.
It is in filth that I feel desire and I desire you.
Our love smells of filthy toilets because that was where they threw us.
The greater it smells of shit, piss, vomit and disinfectant, the greater that love shall be.
They always made me feel dirty. I don’t know how to feel any different.

Our love smells of the dark, of the weight of night and denial.
When all we wish for is to smell the clean air of morning
and faces washed in plain water.

Anything else smells inconsequential.

5.
Three hours before.

I have to get out of here. It’s too hot. (The heat. The heat.)
I feel heavy and listless.
The fire I feel inside smells of smoke and burned flesh.
Of all they who, like us, burned on bonfires and in hell.
Immolation will always be our fate.
It feels as if the city is burning out there.
Iron and fire flooding my nostrils.
For the very last time.
For nothing will be the same after this party.

I have to get out of here to find myself.
We’re too close
And the lack of distance stops me from recognising my limits
And this feeling makes me anxious
And the anxiety makes my heart beat even faster
And this makes me breathe more smoke
More intensely
And all I feel is heat.

Sweat and the stink and the sting of pain
And all the drinks I drank burning in my stomach.
Or the frenzied swarms of butterflies that rise at times like these.
Lungs fiery with all the cigarettes I’ve smoked.
Up my nose, the bitter aroma of so much cocaine I don’t know how I can smell at all.
Foul-smelling. That’s how I feel.
An unmistakeable perfume, aromatic and foul at the same time
That has combined with the cigarettes.
(I smell like burnt filter tips.
My cough, dry and phlegmy.)
And yet, here you are to make a mockery of my ideas.
Breathing me in like I was the most pleasant aroma in the world.

I have to get out and smoke a cigarette so that, rather than inhale the smoke of others,
I breathe in my very own.
Outside. In the cold.
The best place to savour the smell of hot cigarette smoke.
Which may not be the same as the smell of burnt rubber.
Or burning plastic.
Or the smell of the smoke that billows from the chimney of the crematorium I can see from the window.
Or the smoke rising from the torn paper in the ashtray I sometimes burn without noticing.
This one word does for all.
Smoke. Por fumo. Expanding vapour.

A light rain falls that, instead of nostalgic memories of the smell of wet rain, soaks my clothes already sopping with feverish, boozy sweat and smells like mould.
Obsolete. Slow and stale.
A smell of second-hand sweat.
Clammy. Worn out
by futile desires and deeds.

Then you come looking for me smelling of the present. Of memories. Of my nostalgia for the future.

6.
Four hours before.

Your lips taste of must, just like the song goes.
Mouths where cigarettes have not passed are sweeter. They taste of meat.
Your lips taste of must and monsters.

Some moments before, I smell you close and curious.
We sniff each other out like animals in constant hide and seek.
We touch each other softly, as if we were fragile flowers
(petals brushing skin together)
before bending down to smell them.
Such a sweet smell, always sweet.
With one single purpose – to attract insects, spread their pollen and guarantee their fertilisation.
A scent that attracts as many flies as it does butterflies.
Bats are also drawn to foul smells.

For a few moments I give precedence to my sense of smell and I sniff your face before I kiss you.
The beard. The skin. The eyes.
I clasp your hands.
(Fingers intertwined with damage and fear.)
I hold on longer than I should
to be sure of the right moment to attack.
A delicate scent of gardenias. Marigolds. Delightful.
Subtle and devastating.

And then we kiss.
And in my mind Cinema Paradiso is playing, the scene of all the forbidden, censored kisses in the movies.
The smell of old sheepskin chairs and a room’s dust.
The perfume of another who isn’t you.
The smell of wall-to-wall carpeting and popcorn.
The hot and clammy odour of shuttered rooms.
On the screen, actors have no smell. They pretend.

(A smell bursting forth from a firm kiss.
A river overflowing
Between my mouth and yours.
I’m thirsty and my mouth is dry.
Silent, clinging faces.
We breathe each other in
Till we’re dizzy. Till we can bear it no longer.
I’m not myself, I can’t even speak for myself.
Ravenous hunger and a short memory.)

It was only yesterday and I’ve already forgotten.
It was the day before yesterday and last week and a month ago and an hour ago and I’ve already forgotten.

When a smell penetrates the naval cavity,
it activates protein receptors found in the cilia of the olfactory neurons,
generating the production of electric pulses in these cells.
These pulses are carried by axons to the olfactory bulb,
and from there to different area of the brain.
To the olfactory cortex, triggering the process of perceiving and telling smells apart.
Or to the limbic system, an area of the brain considered to be less sophisticated than the cortical areas, and which is responsible for triggering emotions and memories.
Some smells induce the limbic system to activate the hypothalamus, an area of the brain that stimulates the production of hormones responsible for a series of innate behaviours.

7.
Five hours before.

Every time I stumble I notice the smell of my despair and of furious dancing feet.
(The smell of change in the air and silent dances.)
The smell of what was left behind, and which even if it weren’t so,
with the best intentions of those who discarded them,
give off memories of wild nights and of abandon
and of nothing in particular, which are my memories too.

In a little while there your feet will be, beside mine, moving to the beat.
(Gently stepping in time to the music
In time to the things I’ve forgotten.)
My footsteps recognise yours.
And copy their movement.
Our legs lightly collide.

We don’t know when this will all end.
But it’s inevitable. Done.
The only future we ever had, we left in the past.
The future will be odourless and antiseptic
With nothing to take comfort from.

In the future, happening as we speak, our bodies will become fortresses.
Awaiting conquest.
Awaiting the taste and smell of victory.
Awaiting revenge best served cold.
Our bodies at a distance. Odourless and antiseptic.
With no memory of the smell of kisses and embraces, or of feeling our head in the clouds.

I never knew what clouds smelled of.

Immunity is the opposite of community.
It seems we shall never meet again.
Never to kiss. And embrace. Lick. Get messy. Slurp and suck. Sweat and feel aroused.
There’s nothing arousing about our present.
It seems none of us again shall ever again fall deep
One in another
Some in others
Till it wounds.

8.
Six hours before.

My body is an enormous black hole.
Like my pupils, which are so dilated everything looks blurred.
If I concentrate hard, maybe too hard,
at times like this,
I feel I can smell the inodorous, the water and mineral salts
in the sweat that regulates my body temperature.
In this body that reeks of drugs and alcohol.
In the bitter stink of cocaine.
A fiercely acidic, unpleasant smell in the nose and throat.
Within I feel so much vaster
than the space I seem to occupy.
I feel the skin is the barrier to a vast emptiness. A void.
And at the same time all these bodies around me,
glued together, sweaty and writhing, as if one.
As if mine. Not knowing where it begins and where it ends.
(Present in body, but not in spirit
And only pretending to need them.)
I need a drink.
I need a drink and a needy body.

9.
A few hours before, you didn’t exist.

I’m like a dog.
I trust my sense of smell most of all to assess any danger
Or prose or prey or people.
The same goes for places.
Squeaky-clean people or places both put me on edge.

I’d already seen you in photos but in them you had no smell.
I touched you an infinite number of times with my fingertips. You ran from me.
I spun you left and right. I zoomed in on you.
I memorised every feature. Every expression. Every detail and imperfection.
I tried to guess their chronological order. How you would be now.
None of this had a smell.

The name Narcissus derives from the Greek word narke,
meaning numbness, torpor, sleepiness
in reference to the hypnotic properties associated with the smell of the narcissus.
Narcissus and narcotics have the same origin.
The flower refers to the figure in Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection and perished.
At the place where Narcissus succumbed,
fallen head reflected in the pool of water,
sprouted narcissuses, named after him in his memory.
In the language of flowers, the narcissus is synonymous with selfishness and frivolous love.
It is a poisonous plant.

One day, I shall carry with me a little bottle of poison
Where all it takes is to raise it to my lips and then wait.

10.
Seven hours before.

When I walk into the party it’s dark
But the smell is so intense I can sense the presence of others.
At the door, the night’s humid chill blends with the warm humble bodies.
A deceptive smell that smells of guilty deceit.

(The precipitous beginning,
The principal of princely vices
The dawn of laziness and malaise
Smelling of fire, avarice and artifice.)

After the rarefied air of that room.
Its air of arousal.
In its wake a hint of sweet decay.
The fiery, forgetful bodies.
The smell of men with manly smells.
Lead. Sulphur. And ivory.

The smell of a party is the smell of sweat, perfume, beer, alcohol, pleasure and exhaustion.
Too many impurities for the body to get rid of.
Too many impurities cemented, etched, imprinted onto the space.
It smells of urine and disinfectant.
And air conditioning claiming to be fresh.
I can’t breathe. Nor do I want to.
And yet I allow myself to be contaminated by all these particles
That I (now) know are the last remaining few
And which I (now) can no longer remember.
The fluid from the smoke machines smells of strawberry.
At least that’s how it’s always smelt to me,
Of an intensity that almost makes me sick.
This journey over a cliff.
Devil in the bottom of the glass and in the body on ice.
Sometimes this smells like a hunting party.
Serotonin and dopamine.
Toxins exhaled by the skin.
Sometimes you smell danger.
Sometimes you smell cocaine.
Sometimes you smell poppers.

I’ve identified each party’s smell in all the parties I’ve been to,
I identified them as if they were the smell of my destiny.

The blue light of night is generous and hides our imperfections
Making decadence seem sensual.
The smell of a party is heady, evocative and intoxicating.
Simultaneously heavy, sweet and fresh, hope and disillusionment.
The bodies thrill me, lose control, and they excite
In a noisy frenzy that is as overwhelming as it is pungent.
The bitter smell of druggy early mornings.
Ever more exquisite corpses.

Someone always passes reeking of menthol.
Or someone who tosses their hair smelling of fruit shampoo.
Someone smelling faintly of wet leather
Or of freshly-cut dry wood
Or of citrus or flowers.
The fresh smell of youth.
As I cross the dance floor
I uncover a thousand different perfumes and take them with me.
I steal them from all those bodies,
To disguise my own rotting smell.

11.
A year ago we could all be found on the streets and we were innocence, joy and pride.
A year ago our lives were a party without knowing it was to be for the last time.
The problem with getting old is it is an accumulation of last times.

We used to say – There’s no future
Without really knowing what this meant.

We thought the streets were ours
Until they were ours no longer.

We light fuses
And our anthems delivering us from masks,
That we recite mask-free,
Smell of blanks.
I don’t know what pepper gas smells of.
It’s fun to rhyme souls and weapons
And horses with wings with wigs.
We’re tired of running in the wrong direction.
Our politics are broken-hearted.
We smell of struggle and mourning.
We’re strong, we are by chance.
By pure chance.
My machine gun I’ve loaded with sorrows.

Every time we kissed, we did the revolution.
Revolution smells powerful.
Revolution smells sweet.
Fresh, spicy and sexy.
A stench, a perfume and life itself.
There we all were.
We were many. In ever greater numbers.
Get used to it.
We, undernourished by our dreams,
Unaware poetry was there to be eaten.

I watch as the future now repeats the past.
As the streets now smell of emptiness
And I for one don’t want to get used to it.

There was poetry in the streets.
In every street where I find you,
In every street where I lose you again.
I know every inch of your body, I’ve dreamed of it so many times,
That I wander eyes closed and lose myself.
And quench my thirst and gulp down the air, so abundant, so close, so real
That my body undergoes a transformation
And I reach down and touch my own element
In a body that is no longer mine.

12.
It was a year ago.
I continue to seek your smell your place in the bodies of others.
But they smell of very little at all.
I smell of dirt. I smell rotten.
I want to carry on with the smell of youth in my nostrils,
It’s a different smell to old age,
Even if they tell me old age smells
more pleasant, sweeter and less intense.

From you I have kept the smell of the end of the party.
But these are only words that by now mean nothing at all.