thisbedisaship:

I no longer know birthdays; aside from my immediate family, a few somehow-still-remembered childhood friends, my most recent exes, that’s the type of information I glean from my machines. I do not mind this. I do not think it signifies some end of sympathy, some un-fuck-giving of friendship. It’s more like the way I sometimes rely on autocorrect while typing—I have the ballpark information, and these funny little ticking beasts make me more precise. This does, however, occasionally lead to surprises.

I for some reason bother to click “and 1 other,” to know who else is turning something, who else is going to a fancy dinner or ignoring a barrage of notifications, who else is going to get way too drunk or get some jewelry. It’s you. You won’t be doing any of that. Not ever, no, not again. I don’t think I ever saw you on your birthday; our friendship was for summers, and for long-distance calls. 

You’re in the ground, or in some scattered ashes, I was no longer close enough to know. You are over, over, ended. But your voice is still playing through my speakers, like it always has. 

I suppose this is a reason to write music. So that even in the face of a sudden drop dead, even when the pieces of us that belong to you get pulled through our chests and plunged into the dirt, into the late-night waters of the Long Island Sound, even when I will never, ever see you again, not to laugh at our matching tattoos or smoke cigarettes in the driveway of my mother’s house or trespass in New York City private parks, even when it will never stop hurting to know that I should have gotten on that fucking plane to Texas like I said I would, even when the closest I will ever get again to holding you is your beautiful shaking girlfriend crying in my arms, even when my shit memory is fading and fading, I will always have your voice. We will always have the sound of you to hold us. 

Fucking hell, Jay. I miss you so fucking much.

I don’t even know how old you would be today. I guess I could do the math. Thirty-six. 

There we are, all those years ago, somewhere floating in time. And even when my body joins the pile, every grain of sand we stepped on will remember. 

Jason Rosenthal, I will miss you always. Thank you for everything.

—-

If you want to hear the sounds I’m hearing, here are links for streaming: 

On the Might of Princes - Where You Are And Where You Want To Be (2002)

On the Might of Princes - The Making of a Conversation (1999)

On the Might of Princes - Sirens (2003)

I suppose this date will always catch me off my guard. 

Miss you, Jay. Always will. 

so here, huh, the dream hovers above my lips. above the grey horizon. suddenly my desires are taking on new coherence, sweeping all my shuffling self up with them. a crystal, a laser, a shaft of sunlight, a clean sweep. 

for the first time in a long, long time, I feel like I’ve climbed out of the hole. 

sure, I’m broke as fuck and getting sick and always never catching up with all these little tasks like sand in my eyes and sure I worry that I’m in love at all the wrong times, that I’m in over my head at most times, that I’m a fraud and every time I forget someone’s name or accidentally say something bigoted everyone who has ever met me immediately knows and hates me now, and I’m still a little too preoccupied with getting everyone to like me and tell me I don’t need a nose job or whatever, but it’s fine. even though I need to get through this last winter-that-feels-like-a-winter. 

it’s fine. 

because I am excited about things, unapologetically excited.

because even if you don’t love me (who knows?), even if I owe lots of money to everyone ever (maybe one day I won’t?), there are such things as sunshine and good work and somehow managing to be a real adult and a little kid at the same time. 

I am still late to everything all the time, but I’m starting to have more to say when I get there. 

I suppose you could say I haven’t written in weeks, I suppose you could say that and in a certain sense it would be true, true, but let me promise you with wet-lip fervor I’ve been making my marks beyond missives, carving in the surface of my thoughts with the tongue of image–

here, you are seeing this, and while you may well forget it, this small cloud of time pressed itself against all your dumb impressionable wits, and all your pretty drunk amnesia cannot undo the fact. every cd skip, every lighter flicking on, every eyebrow arch and stone-cold cleverness, every shoulder that rests against another shoulder keeps on in you regardless. even if my words are full of lies, there’s a full life marching up behind them. 

and here I think I’d forgotten all my French
but when you whisper in the girlish quiet
the sibilant flood returns.

I want to pour language all over you
like a blanket
like cum
like how I want you to hold me. 

me and my tongue full of scraps want to set up shop in your closet, or perhaps at the foot of your bed, send words down from the window, bedsheets-long. we can call you Rapunzel. I’ll keep you safe. I’ve never kept anyone safe in my life. that’s a lie. we can call me Lady Witch Next Door. we can call us survivors, ethical thieves. 

(I’m not sure what I’m talking about, either, but these days it’s usually about you. well, okay, it’s usually always about me, but these days I seem to often think of you at the same time. I can be a narcissist for two.)

Steam rises from thousands of palm trees at once, except the steam is a strain of sound, a drip of guitar, a piano laugh. We catch a glimpse of it through the car window. I spend a foolish moment remembering what I have at various points described as love.

The sun is licking us like a big dog, and my heart is pulled pork disintegrating into tastes and small sounds of indulgence. 

Each of us is a royal princess on a couch cushion. We will build a blanket fort in paradise. I lay my head on your chest. 

I just want to be able to write love poems without feeling like a creep. 

I just want a place or two or five to put all this longing, all this affection I keep generating that has no path to run down. 

The gaping mouth of all my stupid loneliness encompasses everything around me.

It’s so trite it tastes like flat ginger ale, coating the inside of my mouth: I spend a great deal of time in crowded rooms feeling incredibly alone. 

Remember: this massive tide of desire that rocks itself within me always, this is not a shackle, this is not a punishment for wanting, this is a way the words can come forth. Dense-packed bricks of feeling press themselves out from under my fingernails, from the corners of my eyes. 

The sink and scream of a ravenous heart is what drives me to make my little marks on the world, so I should be thankful for my discontent. 

(the horrifying realization that I find myself needlessly alone so many nights because there’s a standing invitation that neither you nor I asked for but there it lays // when did it happen that pretty boys who are nice enough stopped being nice enough // I don’t know what I want but I know I want a lot of things // I should stop not leaving the house until it’s dark out // I should stop having sex dreams about ex-lovers // I feel like I’m going crazy most of the time, and regardless of anything I say or think most of the blame there is mine // I want to sell everything I own and buy a truck but I guess I need a driver’s license first, huh. )

Boys with Peter Pan faces and winter soft sweaters, warm cheek next to my cold one growing flush. My sidewalk rage. My dismissive wave. The thoughts that float on down the street to hold a hand. Lost mornings, messages unanswered, the sickly panic that follows through the days, let me tell you I don’t know how to be a person but I’m trying and I’m trying and I’m trying but I’m too sad to be around strangers but I don’t want to be alone but I’m trying and I’m trying and I’m trying. 

(of course the devil was the card I drew today)

some words on death

I’ve been so focused on the horrific political violence in the news and in the world lately that I found myself caught off-guard by feelings about other kinds of loss.

Seven years ago, in December, a boy I knew died. Young man, I guess. He seemed so much older than me, and it baffles me to think I am five years older now than he was then. An acquaintance, I guess, a friend-of-friends, very close to people I would later be very close to, a crush more than anything else, someone I wanted to know better than I did. Twice this week I’ve come across textual references to his suicide that caught me by surprise. 

How strange, when googling someone I met in college, for the absurdly innocuous reason of trying to accurately remember the color of her hair– I had somehow forgotten she had written his obituary in the school newspaper. 

Reading a book about death by someone who knew him better than I did, I should have known it was coming, but I was still so ill-prepared. The brief remarks hit me right in the guts. Thud, thud. 

I suppose the shock of losses do not fade, but rather they are joined by others and that changes them. A polyphonic chorus swells until the coda of its hearer’s death.

Sometimes I stop believing in time,

(sometimes lately I can’t stop feeling terrified that my father has died when I remember no one has heard from him in weeks, that he never called me back when I stood waiting for a stoplight to turn on his birthday and sang into his machine, that even though I know my uncles would know if anything really bad happened and someone would tell me, the thought keeps jolting through my brain)

(sometimes lately I can’t stop feeling terrified that this boy I spend some time with will get hit by a bus or fall off a building or any number of things I’m scared to write down because I don’t want them to happen, I get terrified that suddenly he’ll just drop out of the world and I know this is my anxiety talking, the obsessive-compulsive evidence of how much affection I’ve come to feel, and really I should just get some cognitive behavioral therapy and get laid more)

and I know that each moment that occurs hangs somewhere in time, and we are passing a handle of Jim Beam back and forth in someone’s living room until you fall asleep there and I stumble home, always. 

item: reading the news makes me depressed. 

item: declining to read the news makes me depressed. 

item: I’m still alive enough to feel like shit. 

item: I will likely die a violent death, but not likely at the hands of the law.

item: I feel embarrassed by my own emotional response to the news: instead of political action motivated by clarifying rage, I want to crawl into bed for at least a month with a man and two bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes and watch old French movies and cry at the car scene in Jules et Jim and then the movie’s over and we don’t have to feel sad anymore, or rather I can feel indulgently sad all I want, because the turmoil of lovers is a different sadness from genocide. 

item: I seem to keep walking from room to room, object to object, tab to tab, knowing I was just about to do something.

I want you to tell me you’re mine 
you’re mine you’re mine you’re mine
I mean sure, fuck a patriarchal sense of ownership and you can do whatever you want when I’m not there, but I want to spend days and days fucking you until you cry, the choked out sound that passes your lips a single word poem made of my name.

sidbranca:

hey tumblr friends, I am currently working on a massive project, and if you’re interested in learning more about it, please do check out my Patreon page! 

I am working on a large multimedia project based on the archives of a recently deceased popular singer and eccentric celebrity, Elektra Day. 

If you choose to make a monthly contribution to this project (which can be adjusted any time), you will get access to ongoing sneak peeks and exclusive content as I work on this crazy, crazy thing. 

http://www.patreon.com/sidbranca

reblogging from my main tumblr in case any of y'all are interested in learning more / supporting what I’m currently working on! 

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

This afternoon, waiting for dough to rise, for my mood to find some even keel, I think my tweezing thoughts and I have teased out a piece of the tangle of feelings I have around this holiday.

There are the obvious threads, clear to anyone with a stack of history books slightly less subject to whitewashing; people are less surprised as time goes on when my weepy drunk voice arcs out the spitting phrase–

our nation was founded on genocide– but perhaps because I find myself in better rooms, or the people in them know me better. 

There is, as always, the sticky sweet grip of capitalism, with its taking hand, with its great discarding arms. 

There is, as always, the rats’ nest of families. 

For those who know me a little better have heard the stories of my childhood: sleeping in a tipi beside a fire, burning sage twirling up my nose. Voices in the dark of a sweat lodge we had built that day. The day I learned to make fire with two sticks, the glass bead necklace I still wear. My mother weeping behind a rattle. My father’s eyes flashing angry under his Oklahoma hat-brim. There are no Native peoples connected to my family tree, as far as I know, but I was too young to know how to draw the lines between cultural appropriation and shared positive experiences that were so clearly important to the adults, mostly European-American, upstate New York hippies, around me. I may still be too young to know. These are the fondest memories of my childhood, stories by the fire, chants across the Long Island Sound. 

Today, however, a slight reframing in my head. Part of why this holiday makes me so emotional is the intense and necessary hope that something that emerged out of genocide, trailing a long history of oppression, falsehood, and monstrous capitalism, can somehow over time become an opportunity for genuine gratitude, for building community, for celebrating the love and the gifts that we receive and that we are given. That getting really drunk with your friends over a table of food, helping each other through the things that are hard and sharing the joy of the things that are beautiful, that this is something of great value even when darkened by all our bloody history. This is not just something I feel about Thanksgiving, but something I feel about America herself. The hope that something born of blood can one day be a place of kindness.

notebook scraps:

skyscrapers sway like trees in the wind. to attempt immobility, rather than simply stillness, moves from an attempt at presence to a physical challenge to be bested.

all the major trees of my childhood have lost much of themselves, or are gone altogether. 

all my words are stolen. the language of a scavenger feels good in my mouth.

all these shapes force themselves through my body, glowing scripts in some reaching–

I send long thick lines from my teeth through the air to you, all my languages the tongues of want, a bringing in of–

my body and my words are inextricable. the oceans of language that pour out of me into a dozen glowing boxes: they are all made of my blood.

the word, any and each, is never separate from the world.