Christmas' Chronicles 2025
Poem & sketchbook page + a movie, an album, a perfume, and a book that are getting me through the season I cannot stop being a sucker for, after all.
Fireplace
Cry on a whiff of the bark screaming in minor keys
Over secluded embers that kept you ten for three.
They lied: Silent Nights, they are for nobody's sons.
Vertebrae tilt up towards the omission of reasons
towards the mist scraped and stalked by pine trees;
You can inhale beauty but you can’t keep it in.
Swim in his absence, drown a wish in mulled wine
The main course's a soft time bomb -- may it survive
All all-adorned spectres, all the traps of the season
the all-consuming urge to dream on and dream on
the forlorn expectations and should have been-s
You can eye that light but you can’t keep it in
in in in
A film: Stigmata (1999)
God bless raunchy, awkwardly written, critically frowned upon 90s/2000s horror movies with immaculate aesthetics. It might be one of my favorite genre.
(Bonus points if Patricia Arquette is there)
A perfume: Nirvana Bourbon by Elizabeth and James.
It was two years ago, the first time is spent Christmas there, in the woods, in the water. I was actively avoiding stalking, consequences, and internet connection, back then, but an urgency easily morphs into an habit, and an habit into an addiction.
Panic is thick, it’s sticky, and it’s quite effective spell work to try and essicate it, sober it up, with the dry scent of cedar, with the crisp aroma of fallen leaves. Echoing that smell directly on my wirsts, right over my bloodstream, with the addition of narcotic, spicy tuberose, is now part of the whole ceremony.
The perfume in question — which I wore in my first retreat, and that i’ve been wearing in any other one that ritualistically followed with yearly cadence, is Nirvana Bourbon and, of course, it’s discontinued.
A book: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Bought 15 years ago, picked up in the perfect time to fully relate to the unpacking of Catholic trauma, inherited fate, and magic realism.
“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”
On air: Mezzanine by Massive Attack
“You’re not my eater / I’m not your food / Love you for God / Love you for the Mother / Eat me in the space / Within my heart / Love you for God / I love you for the Mother”
Black Milk - Massive Attack ft Elizabeth Fraser
“Why don't you close your eyes and reinvent me?”
Mezzanine - Massive Attack
“For your heart is your heart / And your thoughts is your thoughts / Never mix love with hatred”
(Exchange) - Massive Attack
