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
- Richard Siken


there are two facts upon which you ground your love:
     1. you are damaged
     2. they are going to leave

you do not come screeching out of your mother’s body believing this about yourself
     you learn how
     over time
     over minutes and months
     over years

you meet people and take them into yourself
     wrap them in your chest so deeply
     you know they will never escape.
     they may exit your life
     walk away,
     go where you can’t find them;
     but not the presence of them
     the core of them
     the feeling of them inside of you
     beating and glowing and sighing
     like a heart
     not that. that will stay. you’ll make it stay

you’ll teach yourself to grip onto those final remnants
     the way a dying person grips onto breath

you will hold and hold and hold
     not letting go, not knowing how to

you’ll grow a well of absence inside yourself
     and nurture it into a great and incredible yearning:
     this hall of memories within you
     these faces you cannot forget

you will call it grief. you will call it
     *mine

the girl who shows you the truth is
     ballet and brilliance
     you watch her sideways on the bus
     where she sits with her mother,
     face swathed in light,
     profile outlined in radiance
     like the ring of a solar eclipse
     and you have only been around the sun
     nine times
     but god,
     the quiet, uncomplicated
     beauty of her,
     the straightforwardness of
     her warmth—

she is the first person to whom
     you are not biologically linked who sees
     something more in you
     she notices your fire and tends to it
     until it becomes a towering
     blaze

but the last night you see her
     you are sure you are going to die
     caught in the seats of theater
     in front of a stage on which
     this girl dances
     like she has nothing left to give
     but love
     and an utter lack of
     fear

the last night you see her
     she embraces you
     and her hair is curled
     and her lashes are lined
     and her lips are rosy
     and you could scream out with what you
     feel
     but cannot explain

the last night you see her
     the elevator doors close
     between the two of you,
     splicing your longing,
     sending you off onto your own
     barren continent

the last night you see her
     you learn that you love
     and people leave
     and that the people you love leave
     and that this is a truth you almost
     cannot bear


[how to turn my grief into something
     powerful
how not to equate my longing with something
     flawed, something ugly
how to
     rise again
how to
     survive]

these are the things you ask yourself now
     when you are naked and alone in your loss

these are the questions you stay alive to answer
     because yes, you are damaged
     and people leave
     but that is not everything there is to
     this filthy-heavenly existence
     you cannot seem to
     escape

you carry your sorrow like an old handbag
     but you are growing tired of its weight
     preparing to incinerate it and spread the ashes
     the way you spread your devotion:
     bravely, and now,
     without remorse

you are learning that you are damaged
     and wonderful, scarred
     and sacred
     bruised
     and divine
    
they are going to leave
     but you will go on in spite of it
     you will go on because this is
     all you have

you and your heart
     and your overwhelming forward momentum

your love

I don't write as much or
read as much as I did
in between classes and on
busses or under the bed
at three a.m. with light from
those glow-in-the-dark spoons
out of cereal boxes.

I forgot what it's like to
say i love you to family
and friends and they forgot,
too, around the time dad
stopped smoking and we
lost the house to a gambling
addiction -- they don't know
I know.

I missed the class on making
decisions and holding my
ground and learning to love
myself in that way that
the important people love
me.

I wasted time on drugs and
empty wants, promises--
ruined parts of me I see
on bookshelves and in
B flats on sheet music.
I sleep, I dream;
I tread softly, and I steal
the words better suited to
someone else but I missed
the class on expression, too.

Students and bosses and ones I met
for a moment on the street
laugh and it's always at me,
even when it's not; even when I hide in
plain sight, shoulders hunched, head
down, reciting
Yeats or Siken under my breath
like some mantra of
people with bigger, more
painful, beautiful pasts.

Here we are, now, who are we this time?
The sentiments are still the same, aren't
they always? We listen to the radio top
20 and we sing along, brazen like the
best of them. Today I'll be Achilles and
you can be Odysseus. No, not Patroclus,
this isn't like that and neither are we,
there's no room for speculation on what
we could be because that was last time,
last time I sat on your white bed and
you pinned my wrists down, I was ten
and you were twenty and god told you
to **** me and it ate you alive, when I
left you to go to the countryside, pregnant
with someone else's baby, was I ever your
baby? Maybe a few other, separate, parallel
lifetimes ago. If I'm Achilles then you have
to tell me when to go to war, you'll know
that I'll fight you every step of the way and
no, we don't love each other, but this is the
role you play this time and you'll do it for
me, won't you? Yes, and the next life, I'll be
a nice jazz tune that you turn on the radio
to and find yourself crying and aren't sure
why. we're still connected, even metal covered
in copper covered in your skin and sweat.
The next I can taste it, because you'll be the
****** drip as soon as it kicks in, but you have
to be the one that gets me dead at twenty-five,
so make sure you wait for my signal, my white
flag, like before when you watched me in the
garden, like before when you dragged me off
the dead body of my wartime lover, or when
we met in the rain in the romance novel yet
to be written and kissed and kissed and kissed
and, kissed. you are my friend. we will never
be separate. you are the love of all my lifetimes,
even the ones where we will never touch or
laugh or look each other in the eye, and even
especially then, because I'll still feel your atoms
and my atoms, the only home that can ever have
a name: the touch of something familiar. Siken
was right, I won't be waiting forever, there are
a hundred other me's to match you's and if this
ends all bright-white nuclear i'll still be standing
with the skin melted all off, poised and ready to
receive the next generation, and that's what i
thought of when you asked me if we were ever
sky giants, if we ever met before this moment,
and you thought because i was silent that i didn't
feel the same but baby, i do, and here is all of it,
our mythology, don't you feel it? the constant
reaching of me to you? the small hands covering
every inch of our mouths even when we don't
touch? Next time, I'll be a small hand and you'll
be a small hand, maybe then we can love properly.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to **** me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
Richard Siken

and if this parking lot is the sole spectator of my heart attack,
i’m okay with it.

and this feels like something siken would wax poetic about,

you’re sitting in a ****** sedan with broken windows with a pretty girl in a parking lot-

but again and again, i’ll beat him to it.

i’ll wax poetics about you until your shoes are shiny and your ring is gleaming.

for once in my sixteen years of life, i love you becomes a real, tangible thing i can touch.

for once in my sixteen years of life, ten years from now doesn't matter, because twenty-six will not feel like this.

and if you’ll throw away this memory in three months, i’ll pick it up and store it in a glass jar next to my bed.

because at sixteen, all you are is real.

Richard Siken


A man with a bandage is in the middle of something.
Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield.

Red. And a little more red.

Accidents never happen when the room is empty.
Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a place.

People like to think war means something.

What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think.
Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.
We know who our enemies are. We know.

"If I'm still single by the time I get my first grey hair, I'm marrying you."
When it’s morning and I’m sober and rummaging through my bedside table for painkillers, I’ll wonder how you didn’t take offence at that.
So inconsiderate and foolish and deluded.
You smile like you know something I don't—a language I understand but can't speak, a puzzle I can figure out only when you point out where to start.
"What makes you think I'll be available by then? That I won't already have a dog and a white picket fence with someone else?,” you say.
"Oh, I'll just show up at your door one day, all sad and alone and holding up a single grey hair, and you'll feel so much pity that you'll leave everything behind to run away with me.
And we'll get one of those dogs you love
(a Beagle, you say)
and we'll go to that one country you like—
awfully cold, no fun, city names with fifteen letters,
(Iceland, you say)
and you'll be the one to break us up when I become too much,"
and you laugh,
and (you say, the only reason
I would dump you
is because you smoke like a chimney,
and I'm not marrying into tobacco-smelling rugs and lung cancer at forty two)
So I tell you I quit, pinky-swear on it,
and when you make a face in disbelief,
I take out the last pack of cigarrettes
sitting in the back of my trousers
and toss them from the balcony we stand in,
watching them rain down on the sidewalk
in some sort of dramatic, contaminating declaration of devotion.
When I find the painkillers and I'm back in bed, I'll wonder why I can't remember the rest of the night.
Maybe it couldn't hold a candle to the way you looked when I promised you my own version of a white picket fence.

You walk in after work
to see me sitting in your kitchen floor,
neck craned up,
staring at a cookie tray as it cools down,
and I wait and make a list in my head
of all the reasons why you will finally snap:
1) I used the emergency key you gave me
2) and let myself in with no warning
3) to use your stove and your pantry
4) and I'm inconsiderate and foolish and deluded,
but you drop your bag by the door,
toe off your shoes on the hall,
and take a seat next to me
to watch the steam rise from every cookie at once.

“I can’t have a family.”
“Oh, well… We could always adopt.”
“No, I mean—I can’t have a family. Just can’t.”
I tell you it’s not too late yet, you know? You can still take off your ring and leave—it would break my heart, but I’d get it.
When we're back at the hotel and I'm clear-minded and you're rubbing my shoulder in that spot you know is always tense, I'll wonder how I can be so self-centered.
I made you love me, promised you bureaucracy and an after party and a possible forever, and then I tell you the thing you've wanted your entire life is the one thing I can't get myself to give to you.
“You promised me a Beagle, remember?”
(I did, I say)
“So, how about we start there?”
And in our hotel room, when you press down exactly in the right place, I'll look at you as a bead of sweat rolls down your neck and I’ll think we’re young. We know time passes, but we are yet to find out time weights.
"Dog it is, then"
And it is.
And I’ll wonder how I didn’t realize before what you've really wanted all along.

I try to go about it in different ways.
Once, I read you Siken before bed,
and I take my time when I tell you love always wakes up the dragon,
and when I look up from the page I expect you to say it,
(You're the dragon, you should say)
but all I see is you frowning, pointing at a line you want me to go over,
and I once again say,
Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love.
It's like a religion. It's terrifying.
No one will ever want to sleep with you.
The pity in the white of your eyes makes my head spin,
and I wonder how you can feel compassion for the inconsiderate and the foolish and the deluded.
And then it hits me.
And then I pity myself too.

"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
"Then everything that can, will," you say, and you hold my hand.
I don't think that's how it works.
"Us. We can," you go on.
And I wonder what you'll do if our carpet ever smells of smoke or we never adopt that dog.
"Then we will," I say.
And somehow, we do.

it is in the moments where we want to scream
and yell
and wander the streets like a madwoman
screaming your declarations for the world to know
but instead
we must sit in silence
and stare at the wall
acknowledging paint flecks
like Siken said
laughing till you feel no more