Today I have been too occupied with frights. 

The frights of the world and of the head, the slick panic that crawls up through your chest in that ecstasy of ruin. The hand that shakes and shakes and the desperate voice that asks unceasingly questions without sense. 

Help, and help, and help, and the refrain continues, and help, and help. The refrain continues. The body knows nothing. The body is raw, and the mind is simply meat set in all that bristling. 

Time passes, and I am afraid. The bills go unpaid. The lights inside my skull flicker on and off. I sit behind my eyes in blind panic. Hold, hold, the moving of the self through sheaves of water like a bladed fish and I cannot control the currents. The one that I would call to me is gone, resting before battle, recovering in softer lands. 

My name is Sid Branca and I am depressed. Hold my hand in the night.

An ant crawls into the ear, and the recollection of a body blurs in time to music. Put my heart upon the wind, because I cannot stand to house it here. Put my tongue upon the sea, because it grants no wisdom to these teeth. The collapse, the assemblage, the discarded part. The balloon that lifts the woman to the sky. 

Sometimes, I think, things could have been easier. 

I could have crawled up from the sea, no father and no memories, a blazing fire in a mussel shell, slowly grinding into sand.