Richard Siken
I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.Collection: Dream
You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.Collection: Prayer
Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.Collection: Wall
We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.Collection: Stars
You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.Collection: Love You
Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube?Collection: Stars
He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.Collection: Moon
Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.Collection: Sides
Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.Collection: Grateful
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.Collection: Together
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.Collection: Sadness
Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?Collection: Forgiving
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.Collection: Light
Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.Collection: Want
I wanted to be wanted and he was very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving. You could drown in those eyes, I said, so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.Collection: Beautiful
I don't know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It's the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.Collection: Skins
You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.Collection: Joy
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.Collection: Needs
I'm saying your name in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that's been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails in wind and the slap of waves on the hull.Collection: Animal
Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.Collection: Sorry
I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.Collection: Taken
Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.Collection: Night
I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.Collection: Morning
I’m not suggesting the world is good, that life is easy, or that any of us are entitled to better. But please, isn’t this the kind of thing you talk about in somber tones, in the afternoon, with some degree of hope and maybe even a handful of strategies?Collection: Degrees
Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.Collection: Dream
I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.Collection: Giving
Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.Collection: Mouths
You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything's okay and you tell them you're just tired. And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.Collection: Tired
He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place – well then, game over.Collection: Heart
A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us, only pretending to be invisible.Collection: Kids
You are playing cards with three Jeffs. One is your father, one is your brother, and the other is your current boyfriend. All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep. Your boyfriend Jeff gets up to answer the phone. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.Collection: Brother
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grain of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.Collection: Sorry
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.Collection: Desire
Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody.Collection: Forever
We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven...Collection: Stars
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.Collection: Hero
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.Collection: Dragons
I am singing now while Rome burns.Collection: Rome
Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t. You are pure at heart or you aren’t. If you are pure at heart, or lucky, you might catch a break.Collection: Princess
I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there, either. So far, it hasn’t come up.Collection: Believe
Someone is digging your grave right now.Collection: Digging
From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.Collection: Landscape
Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.Collection: Sleep
Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.Collection: Running
Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.Collection: Wall
The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.Collection: Monsters
Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.Collection: Dream
...you're waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we are in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn't make sense.Collection: Weed
The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.Collection: Light