It’s a basic inside/outside problem. I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body. Crush, at its core, is about rupture. The desire to touch, the gesture of touching, becomes dangerous, damaging, after the hand, withheld for so long, finally makes an attempt at contact. Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity. Physics is unforgiving. Nature is predatory. We do not walk through a passive landscape.
Richard Siken, here. (via muscovite)
stopbeingacliche:
THE ILLUMINATED CITIES AT THE CENTER OF ME
“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.”
Saying Your Names - Richard Siken
Imaginary Book cover design painted and drawn and scratched on an old book I would never read again. Done with acrylics, gouache, indian ink, gold ink, pens and markers.
susanmoved-blog:
(iv)
Let me tell you a story about war:
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.
(v)
Let me tell you a story about love:
There was a place on the floor where they could lie together, on the floor together, backs pressed to the carpet, where they could look out the window together and see only the tops of the trees. They would do this. They would lie on the floor and say things like Now we are in the country! or Oh, what a far away place this is! Then they would stand up and look out the window the way they usually did, the houses reappearing in the window frame.
She had a soft voice and strong hands. When she sang she would seem too large for the room and she would play guitar and sing which would make his chest feel huge. Sometimes he would touch her knee and smile. Sometimes she would touch his face and close her eyes.
—War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
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.
Journal, Day Three: Weakness, Truth, Swearing, Precision, More Lies, and the Social Contract by Richard Siken
x
abecediary:
Wordcloud of Richard Siken’s poetry, created by me at this awesome site a while back. I went on a rereading spree of Crush yesterday, and, besides leaving me emotionally devastated (again), it reminded me to post this.
The font used is called Scheherazade, and was chosen for precisely that reason.
This isn’t a quote but I thought it was interesting.
What does everyone think? I personally, love Richard Siken Supernatural graphics, but I know not everyone does. I don’t want to post graphics that people aren’t going to like especially since they don’t exactly fit with the purpose of this blog.
Opinions?
There have been mixed reactions (to say the least) about Siken Week so I’ve come up with a compromise I hope people will be happy with.
Something Ive wanted to do for a while but haven’t found the time for is to create a Fandom Siken blog. To start that off I’ve made a new Siken Week blog that I will run and reblog to instead of this one. It can be found here. And if there’s interest, after Siken week I will keep it up to reblog other fandom Siken posts made in the future, since those are things I reblog on my personal blog anyway.
Siken Week Blog (as linked above).
If anyone’s interested, I post a lot of Supernatural Richard Siken on my personal blog here.
Hopefully everyone can be happy with this. As always, feel free to send me any messages with opinions, thoughts, anything really.
