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.

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. 

ghostmodernism:

Self-portrait as partial object / horrifying abyss. #kaleidoscope #mouth #abyss #partialobject #partialabject #selfportrait

GPOYOG-SOTHOTH

ghostmodernism:

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

Fun things coming soon. In the meantime, I have a ludicrous amount of work to do on many different things byeeeeeeee

It seems rude to write about your body, or yours, but all the words wrapped around my tongue each night seem to be about them. The curve of a hip, a widening blue eye, a stubbled jaw, a shade of lipstick. All the foolish purgatories I had dropped myself into, all sins real and imagined, sat up inside my chest and took note of this strange glut of fortunes. I guess I mean to say, I know my luck.

On haste, on failure, on the missing word. On when, oh on when, does the mind become still and thoughtful and when do the stories get up and finish themselves? When did it happen that I ceased being a person who writes? How did the text somehow become the thing I knew how to do, and thus left to the last minute, the afterthought of some construction? Here I am, staking claims of sincerity, of direct expression, and somehow I have lost track of the act of simply standing before the room and delivering a text. The forms have overtaken their content, and my voice has been lost. A horse without a cart is without discipline, without a certain kind of use, but a cart when the horse is lost is simply a place to hide, to take refuge from the beasts of night. Somewhere along the way I went safe. You learn to hide behind two dozen small labors to avoid the heaviest load. I talk a lot of game, I talk game so well I never get pushed onto the court, I spin all my clever ideas around like cotton candy, bad for your teeth. A ceaseless monster of attention and tenuous connections, ever-forgetting, ever-cleansing out the past. My institutional memory is a tribute to collapse, and my list of finished tasks is like a barren field on its best days, broken shit glimmering and we can call these fragments things of use. I do not know what it is to take pride, because I do not know what it is to look back on something– the things disappear and I cannot remember them. Palimpsest, palimpsest, my laziness will be the death of me in memories all over town. Let’s take the chance to avoid the fear of failure for five seconds. The words go unwritten because if they are the wrong ones– if they are not only wrong, but carefully, thoughtfully chosen and still wrong, then I will be the last to forgive myself. Let all choices be made in haste, for I’d rather be lazy, scatterbrained, forgetful, than seen to be the long laborer of foolish works.

I must learn to forgive myself my failures before they are made, and let the foul taste of fear wrap itself around my tongue. Remember to revisit the lingering word. 

I haven’t cried this very specific way since Spalding Gray’s death. It’s a particular pain when the iconic voices of your childhood go finally quiet, leaving only what’s been taken down, what’s been taken up in the hearts of the artists, the thinkers, the people that they influenced. Rest in peace, Roger Ebert.

Red lipstick, and your hair done coy, and a dress that shows the place between your shoulder blades that I am always wanting to touch and I think:

by god if we lived in a world without restraint you’d be up against the pinball machine, knocking bottles to the floor, cheap beer swilling on our shoes. I imagine every word as moaned around my fingers. You say something clever and I want to fuck you ‘til you sob. Up against the wall by your neck, in the front seat of your car, perched on the edge of my couch. Everyone else in this room will burst into flame. We eat slices of pizza, steaming hot, and I think about your cunt like a hunter. Fuck everyone, just get on top of me. Please, please, please forget the world and take off your clothes. I want to push all of me in. I want to fucking ruin you. I want to hold you after, your sweat streaking the floor of a hallway. Please. Please. Your lip in my teeth. I think I know exactly how your voice sounds. Come here. Come here. Come here.

what once was a part of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1 Op. 8 in E Major, “Spring”, the Ozawa & Silverstein recording, after some modifications by Sid Branca. probably not in E major any more.