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I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.

Richard Siken

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Richard Siken
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: February 15
Poet
New York City
New York
Feelings
Ends
Scars
Body
Scar
Something
Swear
Like
Search
Empty
Feeling
Taken

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Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
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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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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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Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.
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He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.
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When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.
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I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.
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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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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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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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Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.
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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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The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.
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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 am singing now while Rome burns.
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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.
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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
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I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.
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I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.
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You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not           harmless. You are not                     breathing.
Richard Siken