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.

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

I’m saying your name
in the grocery store, I’m saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that’s
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that’s sinking to the sound of mermaids
singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.

There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages,
I’m bleeding, I’m not just making conversation.
There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars.

but I think I’d rather keep the bullet.
It’s mine, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s
as good as anything. You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it
out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest,
covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry
and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your
slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue
and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet
was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.