March 2021

from Birds Hover the Trampled Field and Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

[text ID: The enormity of my desire disgusts me. / Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love.  It’s like a religion.  It’s terrifying.  Now one will ever want to sleep with you. /end ID]

[text ID: Think about what you say and ask yourself if you want to be the kind of person who says those kinds of things. Change your language and you change your thoughts. Change your thoughts and you change yourself. Imagine your possible selves and decide which ones you want to inhabit. /end ID]

cowboyunlimited:

richard siken, three proofs

paolo uccello, saint george and the dragon

[text ID: when you paint an evil thing do you invoke it or take away its power? /end ID]

[text ID: they’re trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything walks away. /end ID]

[text ID: But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily.  Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually find you. /end ID]

appleslice:

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” - Richard Siken
The Lament for Icarus - Herbert Draper

[text ID: You will be alone always and then you will die. / I’m sorry it’s such a lousy story. /end]

[text ID: Do you love yourself? I don’t have to answer that. /end ID]

[text ID:  I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in? /end ID]

[text ID: What did you really want?  Someone to pass this with me.  You wanted more.  I want what everyone wants. /end ID]

[text ID: He’s easy to desire since there’s not much to him. /end ID]

[text ID: He was such a colicky baby. Always fussing and crying.  As if he didn’t want to be here at all. /end ID]

[text ID: You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that /end ID]

wingful:

a siken quote that made me maybe cry

[text ID: What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive.  Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead. /end ID]

[text ID: Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of see me, not through me. /end ID]

[text ID: You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. /end ID]

[text ID: Even when I look away I am still looking. He is inside his body and I am inside my body and it matters less and less. /end ID]

[text ID: Because that’s how you cheat death. Well, maybe you could. If you messed it up real bad maybe death would get confused. /end ID]

[text ID:  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.  You have not made that place yet. You are here. You are here. You’re still right here. /end ID]

januaryhoney:

Richard Siken / The Language of the Birds

[text ID: the fear: that nothing survives. the greater fear: that something does. /end ID]

[text ID:  that’s one way to deflect the weight of the inevitable, to insist on possibility /end ID]

r-siken:

saying your names, richard siken

[text ID: I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending? /end ID]

[text ID: I made a shape of the shape he made, subtracted what he shared with anyone else. There wasn’t much left but it felt like him, wild and scared.  It was too much to bear. /end ID]

[text ID:  What did you really want? Someone to pass this with me. You wanted more. I want what everyone wants. /end ID]

r-siken:

love from a distance, richard siken

[text ID: (The body always betrays itself - it blushes, it trembles…) /end ID]