Richard Siken Quotes

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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? ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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? ~ Richard Siken

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

you're all I ever wanted

and worth dying for too ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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 ... ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

Something's not
right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it -
living in the worst parts, ruining myself. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

Someone is digging your grave right now. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

Tonight you're thinking of cities under crowns
of snow and I stare at you like I'm looking through a window,
counting birds. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

I'm sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. ~ Richard Siken

We laugh & it pits the world against us. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects,
so what's there to be faithful to? I am faithful
to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats
in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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? ~ Richard Siken

but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless and he was running out of lullabies ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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 ~ Richard Siken

You a fever I am learning to live with ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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 no ~ Sarah Kay

Give me bullet power. Give me power over angels. Even when you're standing up
you look like you're lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to
tie your arms down?
Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary
like it's just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean?
Do you see what I'm getting at?
You swallowing matches and suddenly I'm yelling Strike me. Strike anywhere.
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? I know you want me to say it, Henry,
it's in the script, you want me to say 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 this time. It's mine, you can't have it, see,
I'm not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that's
as good as anything. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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 ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

We are at the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

We laugh & it pits the world against us. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Louise Gluck

I've been in your body, baby, and it was paradise.
I've been in your body and it was a carnival ride. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

You were drinking sangria and I was throwing oranges at you,
but it didn't matter.
I said my arms are very long and your head's on fire.
I said kiss me here and here and here
and you did. ~ Richard Siken

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

You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing. ~ Richard Siken

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

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. ~ Richard Siken

I am singing now while Rome
burns. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

This is the place, you say to yourself, this is the place where everything
starts to begin, the wounds reveal a thicker skin and suddenly there is no floor. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken

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. ~ Richard Siken