This bed is a ship

26 March 2019 / 6 April 2019

The absence of a regular writing practice -- the kind that isn’t really for any particular purpose, no deadline, no frantic scramble in a particular direction, nothing especially good most of the time, but just allowing the space for language to happen in a way that is both solitary and not -- the absence of this feels like all the toxins that should be pushed out and processed through heavy-handed metaphors and unnecessary obscenity are all just collecting, pooling up in the small of my back, in all the places I would like to be touched but am always too tired--

language that picks up the slack for all my insufficient organs, the only way the obscure workings of my fallible body can be parsed through into sense // 

my sense of touch is a sense of language // 

I like to kiss with both eyes open (so the sense of touch can once again be sorted into a sense of communicated language, even if of the silent and physical variety) // 

my depression lives inside my body and language is the puncture wound that allows it to flow out // 

perhaps too long I have confused writing for longing, for an epistolary form of unrequited design (I meant to write “desire”, but perhaps the mistake is too telling to ignore, so it stays), and not a biological process that is ultimately about the system of myself // writing as a means of recalibrating, writing as a tool of strengthening, not as a tool of seduction, not as an endless scream that does not require breath of the drowning //

the image over and over of the body breaking its borders // of the velocity of desire // of the mutable form 

I have never known the illusory comfort of being just one thing at once, and I wonder what is wrong with me // writing as an act of bridging, of overlay, again of recalibrating (where do your boundaries lie) // 

chaos in the blood // the flat refusal of the closed door // the longing, the longing, the way I am forever being reshaped in the image of desire // desire both for the desired, and the desire to flee (the desired, the landscape, myself) // 

I spent too many years writing poetry because I was in love with poets. // I thought somehow that if I spoke their language (forgetting that it too was mine) then we could stave off the inevitable moment where all communication breaks down, where we have nothing to say. // to have finally found a lover that does not make me want to write poetry, but to simply to look then in the eyes and always tell the truth. no ciphers. how strange, to be seen. //

now I can return to all this dashing my words against the rocks for everybody else, knowing that I will no longer turn to sea spume with the dawn. 

a dream, 11/17/2018

content note: accidental death 

I had a dream about the large extended family of a woman who had died young. On the anniversary of her death, I was watching the family explain what had happened, in the place where it had happened. 

The young woman was nineteen years old, and had just been married. The newlyweds moved into a modest but charming house with a big yard. The yard had quite a few trees, some fruit-bearing, some not, and so they set to work assessing them. The young man decided to chop down a tree to clear the space for a garden, and the young woman had climbed up a very tall fruit tree to check its health and the quality of its fruit. They were a bit like mangoes, but larger and more green. 

As I listened, the young man stood at the stump of the tree, pretending to chop at it with the axe he held in his hands. He explained that he had never cut down a strong old tree before, and it had proved much more difficult than he anticipated. As he kept chopping, he heard a terrible sound. A thud. His new wife had fallen from the tall tree, struck the ground, and died. 

I listened from the branches of the tree, which still stood, and looked toward him, where he stood at the stump where the other tree had been. The whole family was there, grandparents and siblings and honorary cousins, and the young women were in the tree. 

But when it came to the part in the story when she fell to her death, the young women of her family stepped out of the branches with billowing sheets of white fabric, parachutes, gliding softly through the air in graceful arabesques until they touched the dirt. 

Some of their movements were less like gentle falls and more like flight, their hands guiding the fabric in the air in a dance that was brief but slow and meditative, mournful but also with some touch of joy in the action. It was as if by recreating this tragic event in safety they could defang it somehow, defuse its power. 

Watching their skill I realized, this was not the first anniversary of this event. I looked at the young man and I realized he was not the widower -- perhaps that was his grandfather, or his great-great-uncle, and it had been decided that this year he would play the part. Each year they told the story of the woman who had died, and each year they would keep her alive, floating softly to the ground on homemade wings. 

I have been thinking a lot about memory lately. Someone very dear to me had an attack of amnesia this week, and while it has passed, all is fine, it is so strange to be reminded of the fragility of recollection. I have a very poor long-term memory, and have for a long time. Entire events, entire eras of my life lost in a mist. I try and revisit the books and films most important to me about once every year or two, so I can restart the timer on how long it is until I have only the knowledge that a work is something I love, something that formed me as a person, with few details of its content left to cling to. The list of things I have forgotten is long, written in languages I once knew. I try to write things down, I take a lot of photographs, I am lucky enough to have friends who will remind me of our funniest stories by telling someone new. This photograph is from seven or eight years ago, about the distance when my sight gets truly hazy — worsened in that era by gaslighting and abuse and overwork and undersleep and mental health and the wrong medication and self-medication and and and and and. Sometimes I feel like I have made the same mistakes over many times (how can you learn from something you barely remember?), but sometimes, like today, I look back on the past and I realize that I am no longer the person in this photograph. Yes, sometimes I feel desperate and afraid and ill-equipped, sometimes the limits of my own mind close in or bow out like warping metal or a photographic lens coated in oil that I can’t wipe off, yes. But I am stronger now than I was then. I am stranger now than I was then. I am older now, and for that I am grateful.

I am sorry to say that now, when I think of you

it is as if I were opening a box, unsure of its contents, and suddenly cut my hand on a ragged edge, I am swearing and I am dripping blood on packing tape and I am feeling very stupid

I am berating myself for making a mistake that has caused pain, while also knowing it is ridiculous to blame myself for a series of events that led to an accident 

this metaphor doesn’t have quite the legs I thought it did, but I can do no better, I am too busy bleeding, or trying not to think of the fact that I am wincing when I move my hands to type

this of course has not actually happened

I just accidentally thought your name instead of someone else’s--some years of lexical habit are slow to break--and it was like a knife in three syllables in my side

I can say that these truly dark months have been the result of poverty, of a crisis of calling, of the loss of stability and certainty and sunlight  and yes that is of course also true  and it is true that these new sufferings are at least a release from the aches I felt before but yes, there is a vast black hole running through my chest and three years of my life that I refuse to look at  a dead field that I have cast so many glamours over  so that my eyes may slide over it, beyond it passing by each day neglecting

I do not know if this will ever stop hurting but this is the only way I know how to heal: like a shark.

1/10/2018

I imagine myself a small animal, nestled in a little hole. I have been making a nest out of discard, out of whatever is left around. A few seasons go by and I move country, I head south or west or into the forest. I make a new nest. I do not spend a great deal of time wondering about what kind of animal I might be; I am too busy surviving. In the winter, I spend much of my short day asleep, or in the haze of near dreaming.

I consider what I know of animals, and note that I think of their relationships as all or nothing, prairie dog or lone wolf. I am sure this is not actually the case, on the level of a species, on the level of an animal. I consider the possibility that I am projecting. I consider getting a pet.

I have a tendency to be all or nothing, on the level of a person, on the level of people. Spending so much time alone feels like trying to catch up on sleep after years of being under-rested: a groggy feeling tinged with vague guilt, but all blended in with great relief, and with a certain curiosity about who it is that I might possibly be, occupying space simply by myself.

Crouched in the field, I listen to the wind in the trees.

11/27/2017

as my heart splays and threads itself across town I wonder why gravity pulls me hard to broken men -- perhaps they remind me of my father, or the broken man inside myself or because the tools I sharpened to repair myself ache for use I will not give them

I ask the moon, a shining bowl tipped and full and it says:       because you are empty       because you are too full and it ducks behind a building leaving me quiet I imagine an altar covered in needles and ash

the moon adds a parting shot: maybe you should try dating a Taurus or maybe truly well and good no one at all to pour yourself out in different ways to find that verdant field within yourself that you are forever seeking out in others

build yourself a rough-hewn house of good strong wood so you have somewhere to turn to when winds blow rough off course build your home up safe from flood, protect yourself from fire though you are made of all most flammable parts learn what you look like in the mirror and you finally won't need one you will see clearly through the steam

you like the broken because you yearn to enter in but remember, not all points of entry must be made of shattered glass sometimes you can simply walk in through the door

10/31/2017

The horrific realization that one thing that has made me the way I am is the fact that I have forever been accustomed to instability, and that this in turn has made me accustomed to all decisions being reversible. When all is chaos, when the people around you forever turn their emotions on a dime, scream and kick walls and then ten minutes later profess love, beg forgiveness, this has the strange effect of making everything fleeting. The meaning sucked out of all action beyond the present.

Your parents tell you they are getting divorced, and then they don't. Ten years later, they do. Years and years ago, your lover leaves you, and the next day acts like it never happened. This happens at least five more times in four years. You are threatened with death, clinging to metal screaming on the street, you are threatened with money being shoved at you and with money being taken away, you are threatened with sex being shoved at you and with sex being taken away, everyone is too fucked up on something and in this and you are taught that these are romantic gestures. That the turmoil is a sign of care.

And so, now, a thousand lives away, you learn you still carry those lessons in your heart. That breaking up with someone is a way to show someone that their behavior is unacceptable, that you will not stand for this, but also it's a tool you use because it isn't capital punishment, not the nuclear option. That's the slow, mature, and measured voice you use when severing the limb in surgery, not the heated cries of battle. And now, you are devastated because someone kinder, softer, more genuine than you finally took you at your word. And you don't know what your words even mean, let alone what desires lay beneath them. Ash falls quietly from the sky.

11/20/2017

Let the death of Charles Manson be an opportunity to discuss the ways in which many men prey on younger women, use sex and love and drugs and religion and fear as weapons of gaslighting, as the carrot and the stick they use to control them.

Charles Manson's favorite book was "How to Win Friends and Influence People"--a book read and obsessed over by many businessmen, politicians, and other people in positions of power. One of the most notorious murderers of America's history used the same prescribed tactics as many of its CEOs.

We think of Charles Manson as exceptional, but he was on a certain level a perfectly ordinary result of the cultural systems that produced him. He simply took what was given to him by toxic masculinity, systemic racism and misogyny, a broken prison system, his religious upbringing and damaged family, and the sad spiraling out of the end of the 1960s, and he mixed it altogether into poison. Manipulating vulnerable people, mostly women, some barely more than children, into enacting your violence for you is, unfortunately, nothing new.

The more I learn about cults and serial killers, the less I think of them as outliers, freak accidents of society, and more as the terrifyingly logical extension of omnipresent and insidious cultural tendencies that we need to push back against in all their forms.

Let this news also be an excuse to listen to the solo work of Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy who thought he could get love by giving people gifts at a never-ending party, and instead found himself with Charles Manson and his Family living in his house, meeting his well-connected friends, borrowing his cars to commit robberies, until Wilson finally cut ties. It wasn't too long after that when things got very, very dark, and it seems like Dennis never quite got over his past enabling of a man he eventually discovered to be such a monster.

The Beach Boys drummer drowned to death in 1983, diving off the pier in Marina del Rey over and over again, supposedly trying to recover a photograph of his ex-wife that he'd thrown off his boat long before. In the 1970s, however, Dennis Wilson recorded some really incredible solo music that has gone fairly under-appreciated. "Pacific Ocean Blue" and the unfinished "Bambu" are really worth a listen.

http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/6/9/charles-mansons-hollywood-part-3-the-beach-boys-dennis-wilson-and-manson-the-songwriter

https://open.spotify.com/album/08CyNpU6VJMtGmR7DYjNmQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB6REIZ5GbM

10/29/2017

maybe I love all those stories of dead things and elder gods and long thin knives in overcoats and the snarl of fangs and portals opening up into some dreadful other realm because it helps me to avoid the truth of fear, the ultimate horror that love is not enough.

I have loved, deeply and truly, and been loved in return, but the hard work of living, the many betrayals of time and of the body, these little cuts the world makes, the thorns we grow from within, the many ways we self-destruct and the ways we fail to disarm or to heal or to understand ourselves or anyone else, on some harsh scale all this stacking meets love's weight.

We are, each one of us, small and sloppy collections of mistakes and scar tissue and our attempts at happiness, our attempts at kindness. I'm a cracked shell. I'm a dead bird dried flat in a tupperware. I am an idiot. But not the way I was five, six, seven years ago. Things change. We learn. We find new ways to tear ourselves apart. New ways to find ourselves reflected as monsters in a lover's wet lips. New ways to fail each other despite love.

10/18/2017

crying at wavy leaves trembling, catching an eye like a frozen Nordic pond I consider drowning: emerging from the deep heat of a birch wood sauna bare sinews stretched and slicked with sweat plunging into cold blue waters simply sinking there numb toes in silt a ghost

committed to loving a stranger who ever remains resident in some foreign country I cannot access where his body sways two feet from mine

my stare grows small limbs to clamber over the back of his neck my heart streaking wet thuds across a pockmarked table straining to nestle between head and shoulder a sloppy gargoyle of devotion, all full of dark blood

until he notices and moves away replaced by little bits of leaves, cigarette butts sticking like straw to open ended wounds watching from behind as he walks off I look at his face and suddenly realize-- we are older than we were when this began.

(heads up: contains stuff about health and bodies and dysphoria and stuff)

This week I was told I have PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), and because I am the type of person I am, I have spent much of the last two days doing research. Trying to understand what is going on in my body, and trying to figure out which of my multiple chronic health issues might be tied in with pcos. For those unfamiliar and now worried: it’s not something life-threatening, and it’s actually extremely common. There is no cure but it’s manageable, although my odds of developing some other, more dangerous things, like diabetes, are now higher than normal.

This is scary, but also a relief; a known problem can be addressed in ways that a nebulous feeling of something being wrong cannot. Maybe dealing with this health issue will clear up some others. I feel sort of hopeful and excited in addition to worried and overwhelmed. 

The thing about this diagnosis that is somewhat taking me by surprise is the dysphoria of it. So much of the information about PCOS is focused on concerns about fertility, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, passing on genes. The issue itself is often framed as “too much testosterone”, “excessive body hair”, “masculinization of the body”. (From what I understand, this could *also* be framed as “too much estrogen”, because if I’m not mistaken PCOS causes high levels of both testosterone and estrogen and low progestin, but also I’m not a scientist.)

As a genderqueer person with ovaries in my body, I am not loving spending this much time thinking vividly about those ovaries, and--the bigger problem--the expectations and attitudes put upon my body. 

So here are just a few things I want to think through in type, mostly for myself. 

Not everyone with a uterus wants to bear children. (Many do, and I absolutely wish them health and happiness in that endeavor! But this shouldn’t be your default assumption about strangers.)

Not everyone with ovaries is a woman, and some women do not have ovaries. Gender is not determined by genitals, or hormones, or secondary sex characteristics, or even by deliberate decisions you may make about genitals and hormones and secondary sex characteristics. 

A hormonal imbalance is something to be addressed due to the stresses it puts on the body and the potential hazards of underlying problems with the body’s systems that may be causing that imbalance--not because it’s inherently “bad” for a female body to be “masculinized”. 

I am still myself regardless of how much hair I do or do not have on my legs, or how I feel about my body, or how my moods may fluctuate. I am still myself regardless of whether symptoms I have been dealing with for a long time get better, or worse, or stay the same, or change. I am always myself, regardless of how I feel about my gender. I am always myself, regardless of any and all diagnoses I have received or will receive. I hope to heal my body, and to learn that body’s needs and serve them as best I can, with love and without judgement. 

even though I know in my head gender is over, some little part of me feels convinced that a mother is someone who stays, and a father is someone who goes

and I want to take my boyfriend’s strong jaw in my hand and say baby, I’ll be a better daddy than mine could ever be 

back in my mother’s house, shifting through long-abandoned stacks of paper from my foolish youth:

I regard my intellect with a rotten eye. Blood on your hands like a bedroom stain. A new hyphenated love of comparative emotion. A new unbinding of a tangled rope. An immense detachment convulsed and split to give you entrance. Give hope to your butterflies and let them consume me. I am amazed at my kindness and at my cruelty. I am chipped, I am scratched, I am unbalanced. I have remarkable potential for failure. You have a remarkable capacity for pain. We’re no two of a kind; I’d have slit your throat by now. I don’t know the space between tolerance and cowardice. Indecisive, I tear myself to bits. I don’t need to make a choice but I need to know what I want. Disjointed, yes. A plane flies overhead. Fidelity is nothing in the face of desire. We will see where my desires lie. You will contain all my irrelevant secrets. Sending desperate messages over temperate climes. Encompassing a world in a few cluttered lines.

December 2, 2016 (written for [Trans]formation)

confession: whenever I am taking up space in a space made officially queer not just in practice but in title, in queers only I am seized by the panicked certainty that I’m not queer enough to be there in any of the relevant ways

because I don't feel like a woman but I sometimes feel like a femme or like a permanent drag or like a circus clown

and so people look at me and see long hair and lipstick and the stubble on my partner’s cheeks the broad shoulders on his tall frame they recall the man before that they forget the one before

they do not hear my thoughts they do not know that no woman I have ever fucked or loved has deigned to date me to make me hers despite my best efforts

they do not know that when I picture my body it is exactly the same except not defined by illness, or by anyone else and maybe I have abs and my hair is ten inches longer and my dick six

and I say I changed my name to be more easily googled and I guess that’s true but as time goes on it gets less so

and as I get older I get less butch but more masculine whatever that means like I want to put on a skirt and interrupt you in a meeting I don’t know

I am feeling not only a little adrift but like my writing is truly suffering from being this direct like I’m embarrassed, like it’s crass like I don’t have the right to get up and say hello my name is Sid Branca and I’m genderqueer and you can use they and their when you talk about me because you and I and anyone with eyes most days we all know I’m femme as fuck

and while we say presentation and identity are not the same if you’ve been around for a minute you may have noticed that if you were born with a vagina and you like to wear dresses and kiss boys it doesn’t matter how much hair you grow out or how many girls or how many more complicated constructions you are kissing or how many more complicated constructions you build yourself into and destroy and build again you will be seen over and over again as straight and as a woman

even if in your mind you’re not even human but more like something that fell like a meteor in a field or crawled out of a tree, all sticky with sap

I picture myself a thing made out of mud and whispered over bits of sapling trees and string or the workings of igneous rock or a robot built out of spare parts in a desolate future where we don’t have time to give a shit about gender because we are busy scouring the desert for water

or I come from an alien planet where all sex is telepathic and genitals are things that morph with thought and not a fixed item to be compared with your fashion sense to determine which diversity grants you can apply for or who yells at you in the street but when I look to the oracle of the internet to show me a reflection of myself to see what I should call me I google genderqueer and I do not see an ocean the size of a body or a person carved from wood and given life through sheer will

I scroll through masculine people, whatever that means, who have vaginas and short haircuts like I used to and I see beards paired with lipstick and truly they are all so beautiful and handsome and good

but I’m not genderqueer enough to be here because the bodies that I see the most of myself in are those of certain trans women which is surely some kind of offense some kind of thing I should not say when you consider that when I was born they said it’s a girl

even though in my fantasies they say dear god what is that thing it must have come from the crash site or they say, look what I made at school today or they gasp quietly into the laptop night because finally, after all these years, they found the extremely specific porn they were looking for and they wept

cw medical shit, gross graphic metaphors for pain

Someone is taking a long thin needle and piercing the skin just behind your left ear. They push it through slowly until they reach the sinuses, the eyes. 

Someone has given you eyedrops of hydrochloric acid. 

Someone has taken two small vices and gripped them to the throbbing tendons at the back of your neck.

Someone has made a mortar and pestle out of you, someone is slowly grinding stone against your temples until you are made of powder, a fine flour that will cake with weeping.

A single candle strikes the whole house blind. A whispered word an agony. Two floors down you can tell someone has a television set switched on. The sound is off but you can hear it, the high-pitched whine of a cathode ray tube obsolescing in someone’s living room. The filaments of every light bulb are screaming at you, ready to burst. The refrigerator that keeps your ice packs cold is a dull roar you can not satiate or escape. 

You piss in the dark because you cannot stand the light. 

You sob in the emergency room of every hospital in town. 

You actual use personal massagers for their marketed purpose.

Benadryl, Motrin, Reglan, Imitrex, Amitriptyline, peppermint oil, hot showers, tepid baths, neck rubs, your mother’s expired painkillers, someone else’s brother’s weed, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. 

An entire day gets disappeared. 

But this is something you are used to. 

Since you were small. 

Sitting in English class scraping plastic forks and safety pins and the crescent moons of your fingernails across your body just to stay awake. The doctor’s note that said nobody knew what was wrong with you but that you had a tendency to faint and when everybody else got mono from smoking Rob Percarro’s weed they got better and you didn’t. You slept for most of two years. You were so tired. You are still so tired.

And then in college they tell you your blood doesn’t work, that it’s cute and small and broken just like everything about you but don’t worry, it’s an asymptomatic form of the disease, I don’t care what all those people on the internet say, you’ve got bad blood with no symptoms, you’ve got bad blood but it doesn’t matter.

and then later your baby brother loses his mind and swings his fists at the air in the hallway full of lockers where you used to take caffeine pills to keep from falling down and they tell you that you’re almost ten times more likely than everybody else to develop schizophrenia and any children you might have would be five times and that’s if the thalassemia doesn’t get them but don’t worry you have bad blood but it doesn’t matter.

but you wonder if that’s not why someone sticks a needle into your skull or grinds away at your temples and disappears days into pain and exhaustion and terror and you wonder how to turn this all around into something good, or at least something of use. 

Justin O. Schmidt is an entomologist at the Center for Insect Science in Arizona. Since the 1980s, he has been getting himself stung by bees, wasps, and ants, on purpose, so that someone with the proper scientific training can write down what happens when you get stung by bees, wasps, and ants. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is something you can look to when you want to know what a human can survive. The sting of a Tarantula Hawk wasp is completely agonizing, overwhelming, utterly devastating in the moment, but thanks to Justin we know it only lasts for five minutes. The bullet ant sting is almost as painful, but lasts for hours. He describes it as “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.” For five hours. 

But now we know. And if we find ourselves stung by a bullet ant, we know we can make it. I’ve endured five hours of intense pain dozens and dozens of times. And I know I can make it. And I can write about it, I can say to someone else who might be afraid hey, look, you may be a fucking mess and so am I, and having this human body is so strange and dangerous and confusing and painful but you can take more than you know.  

We are all so much weaker and so much stronger than we think we are. Pain is both frequent and surprising and somehow not the end of us. And so we describe the stings, to let the others know.