Quotes from 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

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.

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

I am singing now while Rome burns.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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...