Siken Quotes & Sayings

Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death. — Louise Gluck

When you have nothing to say,
set something on fire. — Richard Siken

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. — Richard Siken

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

Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. — Richard Siken

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. — Richard Siken

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

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

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

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

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

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

you're all I ever wanted

and worth dying for too — Richard Siken

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. — 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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

We laugh & it pits the world against us. — 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

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

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. — Richard Siken

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. — Richard Siken

Someone is digging your grave right now. — 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

From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences. — Greta Salpeter

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

Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement. — Louise Gluck

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

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

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. — 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

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

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? — 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

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

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. — Richard Siken

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. — Richard Siken

Dear Forgiveness,I saved a plate for you. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — Richard Siken

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

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. — Louise Gluck

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Richard Siken

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

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. — 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

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

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. — Richard Siken

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. — 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

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! — Richard Siken

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. — 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

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

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. — Richard Siken

You a fever I am learning to live with — 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

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

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

I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation. — Richard Siken

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. — 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

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. — Richard Siken

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

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. — Richard Siken