sid branca - poem for april 5
how many panic attacks do you think i can have before midnight / it is still before midnight in california
I am genuinely astonished it is April again. I’m gonna be traveling a ton this month, but I’m really going to try and post in MM every day this month. and off we goooooo. - xoxo sb.
I was writing something in my head, but I’d rather stay in bed with you.
a scrap from last week:
the frequency with which I feel my body failing me / these things that should be hard but not this hard / the sear in my head, eating my dinner out of packets in my bedsheets / the anxiety that pinpricks me up awake from the rest I know I need / because I am not designed for best success.
I stayed up all night, holding on camera movements, on dismissing conversation for the dawn vision-glaze, on eye-fucking a rock star of that type of man I’ve always chased and never quite gotten, the kind that reminds me of my father, tall and gaunt and gothic, but with a face like a beautiful woman and hands like swans, built to dip into the cold waters of your body and sing you down to hades.
Today I walked into a pet store, my boyfriend smoking on the sidewalk, not to buy anything, everything about my life these days screams out the fact that I can’t have any more life to take care of, that I can’t remember to feed any more mouths than mine and his and the sometimes nights when I feel together enough to bring some kind and lovely people into my temporary house for roast chicken and other people’s booze, that for me right now it’s petting other people’s funny dogs and trying not to think of how the mean dog I finally got to come around to loving me is going to feel when one day I just don’t come home because I’m flying thousands of miles away, because how do you tell a dog “I love you, I love you, I will come scratch your funny grapefruit head in six or seven months, please don’t be sad” because dogs don’t speak english or anything else I could learn with an app, so I try not to think about it, or how maybe I like to be alone too much for any animal, maybe for people too, because I’m an animal too.
Inside the store, past the lizards I had talked to through the storefront windows, and past the first initial wave of pet store scent knocking at my face, past the doves and little singing birds, straight ahead and hanging at a strange angle, holding to the bars with its mouth except when it let go to cry out with shocking volume, a bird, one of those big ones, one of those huge birds that look like they will live forever, that they belong in a jungle some time long after we’re all dead, like they can speak a thousand languages but will only look at us and scream, the tongue like some small animal of its own inside the cave of the beak, full of cracks but so strong it could snap your fingers in two, and the cage was not much taller than the bird, and perhaps not wider than it was tall, and in that moment my humanness was a sin worth punishment, an unkindness to beg forgiveness for, a mark on my soul, a crime, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I talked to it quietly and I knew there was nothing I could do, because it looked at me and called out to me like it knew I wanted to free it, but birds don’t know about capitalism, birds don’t know that I am poor because birds don’t know what that means, birds don’t know that I have made some choices for the sake of freedom or the sake of health that are also choices that detract from my freedom and from my health, and because I do not have the money I do not have the bird’s cage, empty, in my front yard, which also does not belong to me, and also I wonder if letting a bird like that loose in the skies of Los Angeles would even be to its benefit, I do not know the predators of sprawling urban California, or rather I think perhaps I do but not the kinds that are relevant to gigantic and beautiful birds, but rather those of broken midwestern almost-still-youths who sometimes cry into their cigarette butts for reasons that are too complicated to ask a pet store owner about with my broken Spanish, but I suspect that even if a coyote or a condor or an airplane were to catch it, it would be worth it for that bird to soar over the 5 and over the river and over the buildings and over the parks and perhaps to the ocean and into the sunset.
It had eyes just like a crying man.
A lot of life has been happening, so I haven’t written much here. (In part because I’ve been working on writing elsewhere.) You know how it is. I’m going to try and get back in the saddle.
cw: gun violence
(I’m not really sure where this post is going, but I think I need to write it for my own processing. This is not a finished set of thoughts, but as it may never be, here it is as it has first come out. I don’t know. The news has been hard for me lately, I feel strangely very young and very old all at once.)
A fact perhaps few people know about me is that, on average, I listen to at least one song a day by Marilyn Manson. It’s not any one song in particular, although I do have my favorites, but his catalog of music is one I have found myself turning to frequently for years. He’s one of the few artists I consistently feel the desire to listen to, even through the circus music phases, the bubblegum pop phases, the almost-exclusively Kanye phases. There’s a little fangirl part of me that secretly hopes that, while I’m in Los Angeles for the winter, I’ll run into him at some late-night bar, and we can talk for a long time about our shared love of Macbeth.
In 1999, I certainly knew who Marilyn Manson was–I watched a lot of MTV back then–but I still mostly listened to this one Tom Petty record I had swiped from my mom, or tried to learn all the words to “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. When the Columbine shooting happened, I was eleven and a half years old. But even then, when the rhetoric turned to blaming Marilyn Manson, or Rammstein, or violent video games, it didn’t quite make sense to me. I liked horror movies, I watched a lot of them as child, in which people would do horrible, violent things, and I didn’t want to harm anyone. Did that mean there was something wrong with me? Did people think I wanted to harm them?
A few years later, as an angsty high school goth, my friends and I were made fun of for having “school shooter” aesthetics. As if wearing a lot of black were how you could tell someone wanted to do harm. As if by analyzing what someone liked, you could find the reassurance of patterns in what feels like utter chaos in the face of violence.
Now, it seems, instead of laying the blame at the feet of Marilyn Manson, we lay it before mental illness, or religious or political extremism.
I’m not a particularly religious person–if pressed, I might identify as an atheist, or a witch, depending on the day–but as a person who has been living with mental illness since a young age, there’s that feeling again. I have a mental illness, and I don’t want to harm anyone. Do people think I want to harm them?
When people are afraid of you, when you share the signifiers of something they think is a threat to them, sometimes they feel like can enact violence upon you with impunity, even with righteousness. You see this, sure, in kids hassling each other for fashion choices, but you also see this in hate crimes, in the treatment of refugees, in the passing of oppressive legislation. This, itself, scares the hell out of me.
If you search the term “toxic masculinity”, many of the articles that come up are about mass shootings. One of its features is, as phrased here, “the denial of men’s emotional pain.”
Some of that pain is, I think, fear that gets tamped down and tamped down, until it compresses into violence. Sometimes it’s loneliness, or sexual desires, so twisted by our social training that they become entitlement, repression, rage. When we grow up in a misogynist world, we are taught to hate and fear the things within ourselves that we think of as feminine.
When I think about this, it makes perfect sense to me that, all that time ago, a whole sixteen years past, a collective finger was pointed at Marilyn Manson. Not because the Columbine shooters were fans–they weren’t–but because Marilyn Manson performs a full horrorshow of masculinity. His femininity, the makeup, the glitter, the infamous prosthetics of the Mechanical Animals cover, all trigger fears of androgyny, of the feminine oozing its way out of the male form, of an acknowledgement that gender is a goddamn lie, or a game, or a weapon, or a garment to be put on and discarded. His songs tell us stories of homes disintegrating under the pressure of mediocre conformity, of the toxic worship of celebrities, gods, or guns, of children beating each other with metal lunch boxes on the playground. The romantic relationships of Manson’s songs are frequently a slurry of drug-addled or emotionless sex, self-abasement, misogyny, reckless BDSM, a sense of fated disaster.
There’s a lyric from “They Said Hell’s Not Hot” that I may have been mishearing for years, because the internet swears it’s “hurt” and my copy of the CD booklet has been lost in some move or another, but it always struck me as an encapsulation of this feeling I sometimes get listening to his music. A certain kind of isolation, a sense of what it might be like to be a man too locked up inside himself to actually process and communicate his fears and desires to another person, or to look at a woman and see her for whomever she really is, rather than whatever symbol she’s been built up to represent.
It was never about her, it was about the hearse.