Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover… Read More →

The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. … Read More →

Imagine this: You’re driving. The sky’s bright. You look great. In a word, in a phrase, it’s a movie, you’re the star, so smile for the camera, it’s your big scene, you know your lines. I’m the … Read More →

There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you. I touch myself, I dream. 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, … Read More →

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear Read More →

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, … Read More →

I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was. […]  […] Is that too much to expect? That I would … Read More →

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from Read More →

I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer … Read More →

You and I, who yearn for blameless intimacy, we will be unwilling to speak even the first words of inquisitive delight, for fear of reprisals. Everything desperate will live behind a joke. But I swear that I will stand within the … Read More →

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live … Read More →

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response […]  […] In time of … Read More →

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose Read More →

@astory-untold Jāy-e shomā khālīst ‘Your place is empty’ It’s a way to say I miss you. But I feel like its smth more than just that. It says ‘your place’ as in smth personal smth that belongs. It says … Read More →

Mr Neville, noting the minute alteration in her attention to him, leaned over the table. ‘You are wrong to think that you cannot live without love, Edith.’ ‘No, I am not wrong,’ she said, slowly. ‘I … Read More →

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, … Read More →

Translated by Daniel Weissbort, appears in Twentieth Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel […] I care nothing for battle odes, The enchantment of elegiac conceits. For me, all poetry must be malapropos, Not as people … Read More →

Erik Satie never used to open the letters he received, but he always answered them. He would check the sender’s name and address and write a reply. After he died, his friends found all those unopened letters and some felt … Read More →

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; … Read More →

From the window, a boat in the bay, but still I stay. I keep unlacing your boots, checking your mouth, looking in your dark places for bites. A cat’s cradle crowds the sky. There is a difference between dying and wanting to die, … Read More →

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to … Read More →

After the many-colored but mostly blue Seasons of our two solitudes—the hours Of longing and the flight from longing, the years Spent remembering as if memory were true— We stand together on a balcony Above the city of losses, the … Read More →

Insatiable April, trees in place, in their scraped-out place, their standing. Standing way. Their red branch areas, green shoot areas (shock), river, that one. I surprised a goose and she hissed. I walk and walk with cold hands. … Read More →

Dearest, […] I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the … Read More →

Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And … Read More →

Beautiful books are written in a sort of foreign language. Beneath each word each one of us puts his own meaning or at least his own image, which is often a misinterpretation. But in beautiful books all our misinterpretations are … Read More →

i am a restrained person. otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. instead i mumble, i gnaw myself. i lose hope. and my mind is burning. Read More →

And if you should leave me I would say that the ghost Of Cassandra Has passed through My eyes I would say that the stars In their malice Merely light up the sky To stretch my torment And that the waves crash On the shores To bring … Read More →

What kind of happiness do you foresee for me? Paint me the picture of your happy Antigone. What are the unimportant little sins that I shall have to commit before I am allowed to sink my teeth into life and tear happiness from it! … Read More →

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic? The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms … Read More →

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You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating … Read More →

Oil on canvas, 82 11/16” x 8’ 6 3/8”, 2018. Read More →

I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain, that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the … Read More →

Each time I pass under your window I am struck by the fragrance that still floats through your house. Each time I pass the cemetery I am pulled back by the strength that still blows through your bones. Read More →

i love you dad, i say to the cat. i love you dad, i say to the sky. i love you dad, i say to the mirror. it rains, & my mom’s plants open their mouths. my dad stays on the couch. maybe the couch opened its mouth & … Read More →

Women learn to veil things. Who likes to look straight at real passion? Read More →

I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. i could heal myself. Read More →

May 27. A great deal of unhappiness in the last entry. Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily. […] April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of … Read More →

Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and … Read More →

I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand on its dangerous banks and watch it carry with it every twig every dry leaf and branch in its path every scruple when we see it so swollen with … Read More →

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Whoever writes the scripts plays games with them: It’s me all right, very intensely me but I’m in some different stories from the daytime ones and you’re there too—I’d know you anywhere— but it’s … Read More →

We aren’t now so badly situated to face up to the truth of these just sentences. There’s a good chance they will turn disastrous. Perhaps the condition of clairvoyance which they demonstrate was much less a gift of … Read More →

Life turned pale, a violet knowing nothing of a second bloom. At times a thorn would emerge pathetically to prick the sun. Point zero has struck in the sky, no gong could have announced it. Like the dead awakening elsewhere, the … Read More →

Sometimes I Pretend I’m not me, I only work for me. This feels like a secret motor chirring inside my pocket. I think, She will be so glad when she sees the homework neatly written. She will be relieved someone sharpened … Read More →

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You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, … Read More →

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which … Read More →

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening … Read More →

Every time your grief cries, you pick it up, cradle it like a newborn. But your pain isn’t precious, not your life-long responsibility. For each doting moment, your soul refuses to sing for days – and the world needs … Read More →

If this is the truth, I want it. Listen: I have wasted my little life— on spectacle, on golden lies, on dust. I know now what your hands knew when you did this: Love is the daily bread, the make-it-work. Touch me till this world … Read More →

it is your almost birthday. you are reading richard siken, which is to say you are homosexual & panicked by your existence. you have ice cream for breakfast & cry into the evening. you tell your mother im sorry, ill pay … Read More →

We don’t know how to say goodbye, We wander on, shoulder to shoulder Already the sun is going down You’re moody, and I am your shadow. Let’s step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead Why are we so … Read More →

You’re here. We Breathe the same air. Your presence here is like the city, like quiet Kiev wrapped in sultry sunbeams there outside the window. It hasn’t slept its sleep yet, but struggles in its dream, unconquered. It … Read More →

I say, ​I promise I won’t do anything awful, and he says, ​you are something awful, but I’m keeping you anyway. does that make me your bad thing? your wild thing? something worth hunting across the county? you want to kill … Read More →

Love, today my lip has slipped on your name like a foot on the last step… Now the water of life is spilled and the long stairway must be climbed again. I have traded you, love, for words. Dark honey fragrant in diaphanous vases … Read More →

I’ve loved you like a man loves an old wound picked up in a razor fight on a street nobody remembers. Look at him: even in the dark he touches it gently. Read More →

From the pale silence of morning and the din of afternoon. From the flight into darkness of those I continue to love. From my inarticulate body and the syllables that clog my mouth. From having to say “nothing,” when a … Read More →

Deliberately, long ago the carcasses of old bugs crumbled into the rut of the window and we started sleeping here Fresh June bugs batter this June’s screens, June-lightning batters the spiderweb I sweep the wood-dust from the … Read More →

Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, … Read More →

I suffer from a chronic nausea—after i’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened. […]  […] My library is an archive of longings. Read More →

I saw them hiding in the yellow field, crouching low in the varnished dark. I followed them pretending they were me because they were. I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and … Read More →

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You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors. But why the last? I ask. Why not live … Read More →

Queer state of nerves. I could sleep all day & I dream all night. Sexual excitement, tears, depression. No work done. Nearly 28 & no work done. […]  […] Two months spent in hard living. Time to sum up … Read More →

Aubade by Louis Macneice […] Having bitten on life like a sharp apple Or, playing it like a fish, been happy, Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue What have we after that to look forward to? Not the twilight of the … Read More →

At this precise moment of the winter of 1967–68, she is probably not thinking of anything, absorbed in her enjoyment of their self-contained unit of three, which a telephone call or the doorbell would disrupt, and her temporary … Read More →

“Is that all? That is all. Is there no explanation of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel? Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death. – Farewell.” Read More →

“It is the phenomenon somethings called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is … Read More →

as in, I wish anything I’ve lived through would finally end. As in, I wish I could say what the other side of grief looks like but I’m still wading through the relentless center of it. As in, I’ve removed … Read More →

Am I in love? –yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever … Read More →

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the … Read More →

I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little … Read More →

When they say Don’t I know you? say no. When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then … Read More →

I never understood why my father Prolonged his goodbyes. My mother Would have her coat on, waiting by the door, My brothers and I bundled up and ready to leave. But he always had to have one more drink, One more laugh, one more … Read More →

How quickly we’re skimming through time, leaving behind us a trail of muffin crumbs and wet towels and hotel soaps like white stones in the forest. But something’s eroded them: we can’t trace them back to that meadow where we … Read More →

When all else fails, fail boldly, fail with conviction, as a hammer speaks to a nail, or a lamp left on in daylight. Say one. If two does not follow, say three, if that fails, say life, say future. Lacking future, try bucket, … Read More →

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself. I will dig up the pride. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me. Just like a jigsaw puzzle, I will put Him together … Read More →

“If you wish to move your reader,” Chekhov said, “you must write more coldly.” Herakleitos recommended, “A dry soul is best.” And so at the center of many great works is found a preserving … Read More →

If it’s any consolation, when your wife took me in her mouth, I closed my eyes and pretended I was a piece of wedding cake. I was the instigator, bringing her flowers so often her co-workers nicknamed me carnation hands. At night, … Read More →

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. […]  […] The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that … Read More →

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, ____the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me … Read More →

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school … Read More →

He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming … Read More →

You might as well haul up This wave’s green peak on wire To prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air In quartz, as crack your skull to keep These two most perishable lovers from the touch That will kindle angels' envy, scorch … Read More →

I Don’t Want to Lose I don’t want to lose a single thread from the intricate brocade of this happiness. I want to remember everything. Which is why I’m lying awake, sleepy but not sleepy enough to give it up. Just now, a moment … Read More →

Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell … Read More →

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap … Read More →

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty … Read More →

I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of … Read More →

To my daughter I will say, ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’. Read More →

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so … Read More →

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—— A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I … Read More →

What I told you about saving people isn’t true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself. … Read More →

Not all days. But most days I do. Most days the garden’s almost enough: little pink flowers on the sage, even though the man said we couldn’t eat it. Not this kind. And I said, Then, gosh. What’s the point? The flowers themselves, … Read More →

I am going to fail. I’m going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow. I’m going to fail binoculars and conjugations, all the accompanying musics: I am failing, I must fail, I can fail, I have failed the way some women … Read More →

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and … Read More →

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece … Read More →

It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own … Read More →

I’ve done that. Dive into someone’s arms. Or body perhaps. Or perhaps the space where I thought a body should be, falling into nothing, not being held, in the end. And yet falling still. I’ve cried out more than once, this being … Read More →

The summer my cousins return from Nairobi, we sit in a circle by the oak tree in my aunt’s garden. They look older. Amel’s hardened nipples push through the paisley of her blouse, minarets calling men to worship. When they left, I … Read More →

desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self . . . is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a … Read More →

Your daughter is ugly. She knows loss intimately, carries whole cities in her belly. As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her. She was splintered wood and sea water. They said she reminded them of the war. On her fifteenth … Read More →

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture … Read More →

But yes there are good things, too. Don’t think my vulnerability precludes me from small felicities: a very cheesy egg, like warm sunlight on my tongue. Listening to Balmorhea’s Bowsprit alone in my apartment, barefoot, eyes … Read More →

Isn’t the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn’t the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole … Read More →

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. Read More →

Dear C., I know what you mean by life being intolerable. It is a weight you carry. It comes and goes. I have had times of euphoria though, which is a goddamn jolt of joy to the system, but it is quite painful once you’ve come down … Read More →