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… — Richard Siken Copy Share Image
“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,… — Richard Siken Copy Share
Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend… — Richard Siken Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Siken Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Siken Copy Share
“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… — Richard Siken Copy Share
“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… — Richard Siken Copy Share
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… — Richard Siken Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Siken Copy Share Image
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,… — Richard Siken Copy Share
