[text ID: I had obligations: hope, but hope negates the experience. I
owe myself nothing. /end ID]
[text ID: If
you want your dreams to come true – as my grandma always said – then don’t sleep. /end ID]
medeae:
Richard Siken, Wishbone
[text ID: Cause I couldn’t make you love me / And I’m tired of pulling your teeth /end ID]
[text ID: How
are you? Fine, and you? It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we’re terrified
that someone will actually break down and tell us. Everyone I know is in some
kind of pain. Everyone. How do you like them apples? And so, another reason to
lie, because we’ve all agreed not to tell the truth to each other, not about
that. /end ID]
[text ID: We knocked the heads off the
statuary, deprived the landmarks of any meaning.
Victory swelling in the occupation. History is
painted by the winners. Keep your paints wet. Trust me,
I have things to say. /end ID]
[text ID: This is the map of my heart, the
landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness,
which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold. /end ID]
[text ID:
When
I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no
confusion. The dead will make room for me. /end ID]
[text ID: Let me tell you a story about war. A man says
to another man Can I tell you something? The other man says No. A man says
to another man There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other
man. No, you don’t. /end ID]
[text ID: Why
make a map? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy, series or
sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it
solve? /end ID]
[text ID: 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. /end ID]
[text ID: You are a fever I am learning to live with, and
everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel. /end ID]
[text ID:
In 100 years we’ll all be dead. That’s kinda creepy, if you think about it, but what can you do? We are all here, now, feeling these things and saying these things, and if these pages sit on the bedside table or the bookshelf, traveling through time at the speed of time, gathering heat and light, and arrive, years later, in the hands of a reader, perhaps even you, dear reader, then hurray for us. We love you, we do. But there’s this space between us, always this space between us. We’re stuck in our skins and singing, and no one really knows how long it will take for the sound to reach you. /end ID]
[text ID: I like dead things, says
the landscape. They cannot hurt me. /end ID]
[text ID:
Let’s say you’ve swallowed a bad thing and now it’s got
its hands inside you. This is
the essence of love and failure. /end ID]
[text ID: I’d
like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there,
either. So far, it hasn’t come up. /end ID]
[text ID: A man takes his sadness down to the
river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness
and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands. /end ID]
[text ID:
Its roots in the ground and its branches in the air, a tree is pulled in
two directions. /end ID]
[text ID: If there is a Truth out there,
to be had clearly and definitively, I’m not sure I’m the kind that can get to
it; and if I can get to it, I’m not sure I should be the one entrusted with it. /end ID]
[text ID: Gold foil has tricked many
people. Think: religious paintings. Often, people with halos get listened to. /end ID]
sikenarthistory:
Mary L. Macomber, Night and her Daughter Sleep (1902) / Richard Siken, You Are Jeff (2008)
[text ID: Take the light inside you, like a blessing, like a knee in the chest, holding onto it and not letting go. Now let it go. /end ID]
[text ID: All
stories end the same way, and if you think they don’t it’s only because the
narrator you’re listening to quit talking. But what choice do they have, these
narrators, captaining their ships against unbearable odds? What do you want us to do? They ask. Tell them
it’s hopeless? /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,
held up and carried along by the crowd. /end ID]
[text ID: I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. /end ID]
[text ID: Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is. /end ID]
[text ID: They’re hurling their bodies down the freeway to the smell of gasoline, which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so. Yes, you did dear. /end ID]
[text ID:
A boy spills a glass of milk and his father picks him up by the back of
the shirt and throws him against the wall. You killed my wife and you can’t
even keep a glass on the table. The wife had died of sadness, by her own
hand. The father walks out of the room and the room is almost empty. /end ID]
sikenarthistory:
Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl, Zwei Hände mit Stock (1844-1900) / Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet (2005)
[text ID: He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He likes the feel of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw? /end ID]
They went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see? she asked. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at a face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later he still didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.
from War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
From Meet Me at the Page Where by Richard Siken
[text ID: Sometimes words don’t help. / Is help what we should be looking for? /end ID]
[text ID: When they ask you the question, you must not hesitate: do not wonder, do not ponder, do not consider the vast array of grays lurking inside the interrogative, and above all, do not affirm or vacillate. / “Are you a danger to yourself or others?” / “Probably.” /end ID]
[text ID: Two brothers are fighting by the side of the road.
Two motorbikes have fallen over on the shoulder, leaking oil into the
dirt, while the interlocking brothers grapple and swing. You see them through
the backseat window as you and your parents drive past. You are
twelve years old. You do not have a brother. You have never
experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person. Your
mother is pretending that she hasn’t seen anything. Your father is
fiddling with the knobs of the radio. There is an empty space next to you
in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you
need. Now say hello. /end ID]