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Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

Richard Siken

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Richard Siken
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: February 15
Poet
New York City
New York
Holy
Clue
Night
Rome
Back
Lips
Trying
Leaving
Going
Silent
None
Mash
Forward
Clues
Singing
Burns

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Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
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Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.
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I’m not suggesting the world is good, that life is easy, or that any of us are entitled to better. But please, isn’t this the kind of thing you talk about in somber tones, in the afternoon, with some degree of hope and maybe even a handful of strategies?
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Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t. You are pure at heart or you aren’t. If you are pure at heart, or lucky, you might catch a break.
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When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.
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The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
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Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?
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I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
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The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.
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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 up to answer the phone. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.
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If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.
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I am singing now while Rome burns.
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We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.
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You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not           harmless. You are not                     breathing.
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I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. 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.
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