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Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

Richard Siken

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Richard Siken
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: February 15
Poet
New York City
New York
Standing
Flanks
Clothes
Shower
Hours
Showers
Hands
Pretending
Wearing
Skin
Skins
Hour
Shins

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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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If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.
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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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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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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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Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.
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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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I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
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I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.
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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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Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.
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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 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.
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