February 2021

[text ID: But angels are pouring out of the farmland, angels are swarming over the grassland, Angels rising from their little dens, arms swinging, wings aflutter, dropping their white-hot bombs of love. /end ID]

[text ID: The world is full of things already, the world is cast nd wide and full of grace and you will always be given the benefit of the doubt. Except that it’s true now, is it? Fact is, the world is full of things that are trying to kill you. We do no walk through a passive landscape. /end ID]

heavensghost:

[text ID: I couldn’t make you love me /end ID]

[text ID: I was away, I don’t know where, lying on the floor, pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it. /end ID]

[text ID: You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that. I had a dream where you said that. Tanks for saying that. You weren’t supposed to. /end ID]

[text ID: Is this your sadness? asks the trashman. No, that is a fishbone and that is a soup can and that over there is no longer recognizable. /end ID]

[text ID: 4. ALEXANDER’S KNOT / Gordian.  Complicated.  Figure it out and you’ll rule Asia.  Sometimes, when you can’t imagine a solution, you need to imagine a larger imagination.  Cal it thinking outside the box.  Then again, swords work, too. /end ID]

heavensghost:

Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

(Taken from my Journal)

[text ID: You will be alone always and then you will die. /end ID]

[text ID: This boy, half-destroyed, screaming Drive into that tree, drive off the embankment, Henry, make something happen. /end ID]

[text ID: You close your eyes every now and then, just to test the waters, and find you’re still moving, being moved, walking through the tunnel with your eyes closed, help up and carried along by the crowd. /end ID]

bloodbuzzed:

richard siken - anyway // the worm king’s lullaby

[text ID: He was point at the moon but I was looking at his hand.  He was dead anyway, a ghost.  I’m surprised I saw his hand at all.  The moon, of course, is always there - day moon, but it’s still there, behind the clouds but it’s still there.  I like seeing things: a hand, the moon, ice in a highball glass.  The moon?  It’s free, it doesn’t cost you anything so go ahead and look. / He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand.  He was dead anyway, a ghost.  I’m surprised I saw his hand at all.  All this was prepared for me.  All this was set in motion long ago.  I live in someone else’s future.  I stayed as long as I could, he said.  Now look at the moon. /end ID]

[text ID: Someone put their hand in my heart and the didn’t take it back out.  If I died tonight, no one would notice for weeks. /end ID]

heavensghost:

Richard Siken

[text ID: I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me. /end ID]

Black Telephone    &   The Language of the Birds

[text ID: There are two birds in your head, raven and crow, and only one of them is yours. / A man has two birds in his head - not in his throat, not in his chest - and the birds would sing all day never stopping.  The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird.  The birds agreed. /end ID]

roadmotel:

Richard Siken, The Stag and the Quiver

[text ID: Everything is a target, says the hunter.  No matter where you look.  The hunter’s son says nothing, and closes his eyes. /end ID]

sikenarthistory:

Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Michael expelling Lucifer and the Rebel Angels (1622) / Richard Siken, You Are Jeff (2008)

[text ID: He reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist /end ID]

[text ID: I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickles with small lights. /end ID]

[text ID: Sure, we could reinvent the world, but can we do it twice a year and under budget? No, we can’t. So we compromise. We make our dreams more realistic, more manifestable.  /end ID]

[text ID: Do you have explicable or inexplicable needs? What exotic things exist outside of your vocabulary? What modes of thought exist outside of your syntax, your grammar? Is there a problem you just can’t get your head around? And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it? /end ID]

[text ID: Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it? /end ID]

[text ID: Sometimes people go to a place where few others go, places most people can’t get to, and then they get stuck there. /end ID]

[text ID: 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. /end ID]

sikenarthistory:

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509-1511) / Richard Siken, Dirty Valentine (2005)

[text ID: We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious /end ID]

[text ID: Sure, everyone wants the same things—to belong, and to not be left behind—but still, does it help? Perhaps. /end ID]

[text ID: So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. /end ID]

from Broken/Unbroken by Richard Siken

[text ID: People stuck in bodies moving through space and time. / You realize you’re a thing taking up space and casting a shadow. /end ID]

[text ID: 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. /end ID]

[text ID: It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same running from something larger than yourself story. /end ID]