I have been trying to write a poem about you for weeks. I imagine your name on the dedication page. I imagine the way you don’t look at me when I hand it to you. I imagine you reading it aloud, alone, in your bedroom that I have never seen. The work of my heart is largely one of fiction.
I am clinging to a cup of coffee, my limbs are tangled in the door. I look at the place where you were. I am falling apart. The bird in the head is making new song, new song. I try to look at the counter, the sidewalk, the outlet hidden near the ceiling.
Every room holds secrets, blossoming out from the depths of them, ivy unfurling in bright light unnoticed. My body is displacing secrets with every movement. You see them, because you see. I am learning to look.
Learning the ways of silence is its own method of speech. My mouth is filling up with lake, with wanting and inarticulate touch. I will code and code and quiet. I will let and let and listen. The mystery is worth the mystery.
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.
dream (counting without words)
I have, as ever, unlearned the ways of sleep. I spend my nights slowly turning into sand and digging my way through the mattress. The dawn licks me with her fingers and I am finally comfited, sweet and dry. You were in my dreams last night.
We had set up desks in the mud alongside a pond, old fashioned desks of blonde wood, arranged in columns and rows. You were leading us in something. You made your way to each desk, down the line, and as you paused at each the person seated there would count to three, one two three, each in a different language, some even blending two or three or more. It was not terribly hot, but the sun was bright. You came to me and I was crouching in my desk like an animal, all predator and grace. I lifted myself up on my arms, raising up from the seat, one, two, three times. The counting of time in the strain of the body. I wanted so badly for you to be pleased, so understand exactly what I meant, but when I tried to look at you the sun was in my eyes. So I looked down, and I saw a stream winding its way around our desks, and the sunlight playing on the water.
Somehow it was much later and I was in a rehearsal room in a vast building, done up to look like a boy’s childhood bedroom. The lights were off, the only light came through the windows looking out to the hall, where busy looking people passed by. The man I was with (not you, but he reminded me of someone we know) had lifted me up into the air, and I raised myself up higher one, two, three times.
It was later again and I was navigating through a crowded event, looking for a bathroom, not because I needed one but as an excuse to keep moving through the crowd, to see the whole space despite the many acquaintances I passed. I finally found it; the sign was a woodcut of a woman, dressed as a cowgirl. I looked around for someone to point out the lovely sign to, and you were right next to me among a throng of people. I couldn’t speak, and tried to convey how I was feeling by pushing scraps of torn white paper into a trash can, but wound up dropping my telephone in as well. I got flustered, tried to reach it, and then I looked at you, and you looked back, and I realized I didn’t need it, that I was better off without it. You leaned toward me as if to finally speak, to whisper something to me, but you stayed silent and pressed your mouth against my ear. The corner of your mouth was on my neck. We stayed this way a moment, and then you stepped back and we walked in separate directions, not looking back. I held my hand to the place where you had touched me in your silence, and it was so hot it burned my fingers.
Sid Branca - Jolene (Dolly Parton cover), quick & dirty demo version
look you guys I made a thing? glitchy karaoke murder ballad covers of everything alwaysssssss.
reblogging from my main tumblr because I made noises for the internet.
anonymous answers to “what makes your nervous” and “when has a part of your body felt outside of your control”?
v = = = ~1
+11 v!!x
- x + 2 ~1-
crushes make me nervous
I don’t like the mole on my back being pulled
spitting blood in the cvs parking lot
my clit during orgasm is out of control
At 3:34pm on February 1st, I was surprised by someone, a person I didn’t want to see. I felt invaded. At one point, we became engaged physically, and rage began to direct my body. I felt unconscious. Out of control.
“This could be our last night on earth,” he said. “I thought I’d wear a tie.”
sometimes i am dicking around in fauxtoshop late at night for no reason and make something that feels like it’s from a comic I wish existed.
the first of her kind, she's losing her mind.
Dream:
The first human child to be born on Mars is coming to earth. In a plan decades in the making, members of the first Earth-to-Mars colonizing mission are due to return. Their ship has been programmed since its construction to make the return journey after twenty-five years, arriving on this exact date.
Contact had been maintained for some time after the departure, but the difficulties of distance and failing equipment eventually lowered the curtain between us, and only faith remained. Debate raged; they had died and would never return, they had gone rogue to found their own anarchist country, the Russians/Koreans/Mexicans/Chinese/etc. had taken over the colony, the theories were ceaseless. But in a quiet, interior way, we had all settled into hoping, hoping they would return, whole, sane, bearing mind-numbing charts of data, and knowing, knowing in our hearts that they had died, with vast swathes of space between their bodies and home.
And so the day is upon us.
I am in a huge building, sprawling halls and white rooms like a hospital, part of the team dedicated to receiving the travellers should they arrive. There is preparation, anticipation, cleanliness and certainty of protocol.
And a door opens, and hell arrives.
She is alone, she is the only one, and though we know she should be grown her face is still a child’s face, peering desperate through the window of her helmet, swollen with fear and anger and making sounds, sounds like words, like the babbling of a baby or a stroke victim but screaming her attempts at speech so loud, so loud, somehow through all walls and skulls and piercing into us. And in a flash we know; they had all died, but this child kept living, a scavenger alone on Martian soil, mutated and deranged, building a world in the dust and the nothing, seeing no one but the memories of a child and whatever mysteries the planet held, perhaps some strange life came to her, or from her, for this was not quite human, and did not understand how she had come to be torn from her home, and she was lashing out like a hurt dog with no master. She stumbled around a corner, reaching for me, and her straight black hair was sticking to her cheeks and I could feel madness blossoming in all the bodies around me. This was a brain-sickness running rampant, spreading at the speed of sound. I ran. I ran. Long hallways, locked doors, shimmying out of windows. But the world outside was no better; madness had everyone in its grip, and I had to find a way to be, like her, utterly alone.
words / sid branca dot com
I am very slowly working on getting some of my writing up on my website in a more formalized way. The process is making me go through a lot of piles of unfinished poetry and prose and do some assessing and editing that feels really satisfying, and I’m excited about doing more of it in the coming weeks.
Self-portrait as partial object / horrifying abyss. #kaleidoscope #mouth #abyss #partialobject #partialabject #selfportrait
GPOYOG-SOTHOTH
that’s meeeeeeeeee
bein a creeeeeeeeeep
Sid Branca in a rehearsal image for the performative installation Radio Radio Radio
Photo by Leo Selvaggio, edited by SB.
wooooooooo
DJ Pastelematics gettin’ weeeeird