Richard Siken Quotes

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.

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.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that 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 didn’t even have a name for.

If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

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.

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

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.

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.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.

He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

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.

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.

Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

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?

You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not           harmless. You are not                     breathing.

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.

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.

I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.

And the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

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.

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.

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.

Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.

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.

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.

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

All night I streched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone ''Please keep him safe. Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces.'' Makes a cathedral, him pressing against me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.

We laugh & it pits the world against us.

I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.

with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because it’s all I have, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me ‘cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth.

Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.

You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.

The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.

You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.                  You wanted to be in love                              and he happened to get in the way.

I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.

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.

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake                                                                                 and dress them in warm clothes again.           How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses.                     It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,           it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,                               how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple                                                                                                                         to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means           we're inconsolable.                                                             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.

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.

Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.

We pull our boots on with both hands but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.

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.

You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet.

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.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty

Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love.

I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want. You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube…We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. 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.

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?

History repeats itself. Someone says this. History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of, I know history. There are many names in history... but none of them are ours.

I am singing now while Rome burns.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only fair.

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.

It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be.

In the dream I don't tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.

The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

You'd break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor... When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.

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.

Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.

We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that. I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that. You weren't supposed to.

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.

I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back.

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.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story. Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.

And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won't tell them, and you realize the person who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be, and you don't trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy. And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy. And the boy who loves you in the wrong way keeps weakening. You thought if you handed over your body he'd do something interesting.

I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

When you paint an evil thing, do you invoke it or take away its power?

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don’t want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making those long noodles you love so much.

There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.

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.

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.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you.

If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other.

O how he loves you, darling boy. Oh how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.

There’s a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.

and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold.

The Type Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. -Richard Siken If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at, you can let them look at you. But do not mistake eyes for hands. Or windows. Or mirrors. Let them see what a woman looks like. They may not have ever seen one before. If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch, you can let them touch you. Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for. Sometimes it is a bottle. A door. A sandwich. A Pulitzer. Another woman. But their hands found you first. Do not mistake yourself for a guardian. Or a muse. Or a promise. Or a victim. Or a snack. You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat. You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses. If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold, you can let them hold you. All day they practice keeping their bodies upright-- even after all this evolving, it still feels unnatural, still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine. Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you, admit they do not have the answers they thought they would have by now; some men will want to hold you like The Answer. You are not The Answer. You are not the problem. You are not the poem or the punchline or the riddle or the joke. Woman. If you grow up the type men want to love, You can let them love you. Being loved is not the same thing as loving. When you fall in love, it is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands. It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home. Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman men will hurt. If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along. It is hard to stop loving the ocean. Even after it has left you gasping, salty. Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night. And know this: Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours. Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place. You are a woman who can build it yourself. You were born to build.

God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.

I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything.

Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable — your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers — and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.

We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars                                                                                                                                                       as the road around us grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through the glass                     already laced with frost, but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of                                                                                                                                                                           lullabies. But damn if there isn’t anything sexier                                                             than a slender boy with a handgun,                                                                                                                                   a fast car, a bottle of pills.

The narrator blames the birds. And you want to blame the birds as well. I blamed the birds for a long time. But in this story everyone is hungry, even the birds. And at this point in the story so many things have gone wrong, so many bad decisions made, that it’s a wonder anyone would want to continue reading.

For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you.

Verse. Chorus. Verse. I'm sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?

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...

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.

I wanted to hurt you / but the victory is that I could not stomach it.

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.

Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it— living in the worst parts, ruining myself.

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.

Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other’s knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.

Someone is digging your grave right now.

Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?

Cut me open and the light streams out. Stitch me up and the light keeps streaming out between the stitches

You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.

You are here. You are here. You're still right here.

I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. 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?

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.

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.

Imagine this: You’re driving. The sky’s bright. You look great. In a word, in a phrase, it’s a movie, you’re the star. so smile for the camera, it’s your big scene, you know your lines. I’m the director. I’m in a helicopter. I have a megaphone and you play along, because you want to die for love, you always have. Imagine this: You’re pulling the car over. Somebody’s waiting. You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along. Imagine: Someone’s pulling a gun, and you’re jumping into the middle of it. You didn’t think you’d feel this way. There’s a gun in your hand. It feels hot. It feels oily. I’m the director and i’m screaming at you, I’m waving my arms in the sky, and everyone’s watching, everyone’s curious, everyone’s holding their breath. 'Planet of Love

You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along.

You are a fever I am learning to live with.

Anything past the horizon is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but you only see the sky.

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.

I will come back from the dead for you.

I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking.

You just wanted to prove that there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet.

I’ve been in your body, baby, and it was paradise. I’ve been in your body and it was a carnival ride.

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once.

This is my favorite part. It starts and ends here. The pebbles shine, the plan worked, Hansel Triumphant. Lesson number one: be sneaky and have a plan. But the stupid boy goes back, makes the rest of the story postscript and aftermath. He shouldn’t have gone back. And this is the second lesson I took from the story: when someone is trying to ditch you, kill you, never go back.

There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western, Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon. It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry, keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit. See, we’ve won again, here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please, for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up … But we both know how it goes—I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.

Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. You want a better story. Who wouldn’t? A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing. Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon. I’m not the princess either. 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. Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer. Inside your head the sound of glass, a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion. 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. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know. All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness. In the living room, in the broken yard, in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light, my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade, up the stairs of the building to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things, I looked out the window and said This doesn’t look that much different from home, because it didn’t, but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights. We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. 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. Okay, if you’re so great, you do it— here’s the pencil, make it work … If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing river water. Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you. I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again, years later, in the chlorinated pool. I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have these luxuries. I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together. I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes. Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you. Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty. I stood in the road looking forward and back, to see if it would change something. After a while, I went back inside and tripped over the box.

Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. One more tale to stay alive.

History is painted by the winners.

I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy.

I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful. It really is. I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want. You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube… We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. 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.

He had green eyes, so I wanted to sleep with him. Green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool. You could drown in those eyes, I said. The fact of his pulse, the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire, not to disturb the air around him. Everyone could see the way his muscles worked, the way we look like animals, his skin barely keeping him inside. I wanted to take him home, and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his like a crash test car. 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.

I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something, that he didn't love me, that I wanted to be possessed, thrown over, that I wanted to have the wounds nailed shut. I want to tell you this story without having to be in it: Max in the wrong clothes. Max at the party, drunk again. Max in the kitchen, in refrigerator Ught, his hands around the neck of a beer. Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more. I'm surprised that I say it with feeling. There's a thing in my stomach about this. A simple thing. The last rung.

Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?

The boy's no good. The boy is just no good. / but he takes you in his arms and pushes your flesh around to see if you could ever be ugly to him.

I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it.

Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. 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.

Makes a cathedral, him pressing against me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.

and you play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.

You cannot get in the way of anyone's path to God. You can, but it does no good. Every spy knows this. Somesay God is where we put our sorrow. God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

These are the dreams we should be having. I shouldn’t have to clean them up like this.

I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

Land a man in a landscape and he'll try to conquer it. Make him handsome and you're a fascist, make him ugly and you're saying nothing new.

In these dreams it's always you: the boy in the sweatshirt, the boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him you will want to get inside him, and ruin him, but he doesn't listen. You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours. So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved, he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never forgive you, and maybe now he'll leave you alone.

how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable. 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.

Even when I look away I am still looking.

The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.

I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem. 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.

But damn if there isn't anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.

It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same running from something larger than yourself story

I kept my mind on the moon.

But truth doesn't count / in law, only proof.

Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

There are so many things I'm not allowed to tell you.

you’re all I ever wanted and worth dying for too

Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.

It’s a blessing: every day someone shows up at the fence. And when no one shows up, a different kind of blessing. In the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness.

Oh, the body—its hungers, needs, and limitations. You look at somebody and you realize that they’re in there, inside there, somewhere, and how will you ever reach them, understand them?

the radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. it's thinking of love. it's thinking of stabbing us to death and leaving our bodies in a dumpster. that's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.

Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me? We can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?’ But we both know how it goes – I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.

A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. So you do. You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her and she leaves you and you’re desolate. You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. And you can hear the man in the apartment above you taking off his shoes. You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up, 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. And then the second boot falls. And then a third, a fourth, a fifth. A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. But you take him instead. You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich, and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you and he keeps kicking you. You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work. Boots continue to fall to the floor in the apartment above you. 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. A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Make it a double. A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Walk a mile in my shoes. A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying: I only wanted something simple, something generic… But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out. 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.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man, Can I tell you something? The other man says, No. A man says to another man, There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you don’t.

You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

I'm sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

This is also part of the story: how the story changes.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?

Can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? We do not walk through a passive landscape. The paint dries eventually. We collide with place, which is another name for God, and limp away with a permanent injury. Ask for a blessing? You can try, but we will not remain unscathed.

Someone is digging your grave right now. Someone is drawing a bath to wash you clean, he said, so think of the wind, so happy, so warm. It’s a fairy tale, the story underneath the story, sliding down the polished halls, lightning here and gone. We make these ridiculous idols so we can to what’s behind them, but what happens after we get up the ladder? Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that 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.

There are many names in history, but none of them are ours

Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted and worth dying for too... but I think I’d rather keep the bullet.

The hunter sinks his arrows into the trees and then paints the targets around them. The trees imagine they are deer. The deer imagine they are safe. The arrows: they have no imagination.

I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. A box made out of leaves. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless. Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else. I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon. From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale. I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority. Everything casts a shadow. Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.

He knows that when you snap a mast it's time to get a set of oars or learn how to breathe underwater. Rely on one thing too long and when it disappears and you have nothing–well, that's just bad planning. It's embarrassing, to think it could never happen. It happens.

We are all just trying to be holy.

You could love this boy with all your heart.

They are the same and they are not the same. They are the same and they hate each other for it.

and you don't trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy

There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with.

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

You will die in your sleep and leave everything unfinished. This is also speculation. I had obligations: hope, but hope negates the experience. I owe myself nothing. I cut off my head and threw it on the ground.

The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, sees you as a piece of real estate, just another fallow field lying underneath him like a sacrifice. He’s turning your back into a table so he doesn’t have to eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable, pressing against you until he fits, until he’s made a place for himself inside you. The clock ticks from five to six. Kissing degenerates into biting. So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine. It isn’t over yet, it’s just begun.

This is a story of loops, at least one. I stepped off the loop. I spent time listening, testing realms. I snapped a twig in my head and struck out. You know what it's like to be alone: gimlets and vermicide. You know what it's like to be alive, so forgiveness.

He was not dead yet, not exactly— parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting for something to happen, something grand, but it isn't always about me, he keeps saying, though he's talking about the only heart he knows— 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.

Anyone can paint a mask. It's boring. And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself.

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…

The Museum Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at a face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He didn't know how to say it. Years later he still didn't know how to say it, and she was gone.