Quotes from Richard Siken

Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.

Names called out across the water, names I called you behind your back, sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable, the names of flowers that open only once, shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep, or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.

while desire, like a monster, crawls up out of the lake

It isn't over yet, it's just begun.

would you like to meet him there, in Heaven? Imagine a room, a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can't go through with it. I just don't want to die anymore.

I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want.

There's a thing in my stomach about this. A simple thing. The last rung.

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. It's thinking of love.

pressed into the gravel, pressed into the dirt, pressing against each other in an effort to make the minutes stop—

And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won't tell them

you're all I ever wanted / and worth dying for too

and the dark blue over everything

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.

People fall down and stay down

Here I am leaving you clues.

You had expected something else, anything else

But the minutes don't stop. The prayer of going nowhere going nowhere.

just mash your lips against me.

but you still can't get beyond your skin

and they're trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything walks away.

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets murky.

His shoulder blots out the stars but the minutes don't stop. He covers my body with his body but the minutes don't stop.

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.