Siken Richard

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

These, our bodies, possessed by light.

Tell me we'll never get used to it.

We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me

spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls

right out of my mouth.

but I want it back now, baby.

An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night

is thinking. It's thinking of love.

It's thinking of stabbing us to death

and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.

That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey kisses for everyone.

History is a little man in a brown suit

trying to define a room he is outside of.

I know history. There are many names in history

but none of them are ours.

I stare at you like I'm looking through a window,

counting birds.

here we are
in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.
You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do
long division,
and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless
he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you
didn’t do,
because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.
You wanted to be in love
and he happened to get in the way.