She wears the perfume

Since this blog is mostly my "poetry blog", I wanted to put "She wears the perfume" here but never got around to it. So I'll just post it now... I want to keep track of all the poems that really capture something I felt (so vividly) at the moment (although I usually jot things down randomly on random canvases). This poem is one of them.

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She wears the perfume,
and she wears it nicely.

It's hard to tell at first,
but there's definitely something

beneath initial wafts
and first impressions

of her.

I don't know how to describe it--
(let me gather myself, let me gather my thoughts).

She's an interesting person...
someone beyond her years.
I really see her differently,
and it's not just the scent that defines her.

Her courage to question a system
that she thought could be so flawless, and so
unshakably, unmistakably

Perfect.

She wears the perfume,
and she wears it well.


So well, in fact, that she's choking
on the illusions that the witches have brewed,

contained in a ... glass
ever so lucidly.

the drugs have synthesized with oxygen--
circulation running amuck in her cherry "snow white" heart.

And it pumps--beats--pumps--beats--,
all the way to her feet,
and her arms and her legs and her stomach.

Slowly, she's ingesting the surreal,
digesting the unreal,
and protesting the real
and learned.

She wears the perfume to cover all this. lost in
figures and places that used to be familiar, but
are really just trapped in foreign vortexes of her once
familiar mind.

And this is how she copes with it,
on the real,
dressing herself for false attention and
setting herself up for a dinner date with
disappointment and heartbreak and stomachaches.

And this is just her countenance,
her cathedral facade--perceived as high and mighty
and royal and INVOLVED.

The truth could not be so distant.

And she's crying, begging to me,
to ME,
to help her through this and to mend her
sprained ankles over missing these
FOUR IMPORTANT STAIR STEPS
to identify, and
to reach that achieved state of mind.

Minus the truth.


Finished: Monday, June 23, 2008


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There are lots of allusions I've made significant to my past. In this poem, however, the narrator is a friend expressing his/her point of view of me. This poem describes my uneasiness with my faith (as a Catholic) and how "wearing the perfume" is a front, basically. I give the impression that I'm a very devout and religious person, while inside I'm actually having mixed feelings with my faith. This was written around finals week of Spring quarter... when I was very confused about what I truly believed in. But, as my disclaimer says, these were feelings I felt at the time, though I'm still willing to explore more about my spirituality... much more.

[Also, as a sidenote, the poem starts off simple on purpose and expands into more and more eloquent lingo. Like how perfume is emitted (subtly, at first), then inflates with a bolder scent ... like a balloon expands as it swallows helium.]

Going through this questionative stage in my life made me realize just how little I knew about what I believe in. What is Catholicism? And who is God? What has He done for us? Who is Jesus? There are so many questions I have that I initially would not be able to answer, should a "non-Catholic" be inquisitive about my religion. I'm still "semi-moratorium-istic", but I'm searching. And learning.