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Table of Contents

Scheherazade

Dirty Valentine

Little Beast

Seaside Improvisation

The Torn-Up Road

Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

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Visible World

Boot Theory

A Primer For The Small Weird Loves

Unfinished Duet

I Had A Dream About You

Straw House, Straw Dog

Saying Your Names

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Planet of Love

Driving, Not Washing

Road Music

The Dislocated Room

You Are Jeff

Meanwhile

Snow and Dirty Rain

Note: this is compiled for educational purposes only and NOT for resale or profit. Formatting is as close to the original typeset as possible. Louise Glück's introduction is not included within this document due to lack of online availability. All poems belong to Richard Siken, © 2005.

I

Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.

How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,

how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces.

Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable.

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.

Dirty Valentine

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, these soapy flanks.

The musicians start the overture while I hide behind the microphone, trying to match the dubbing

to the big lips shining down from the screen.

We're filming the movie called Planet of Love-

there's sex of course, and ballroom dancing,

fancy clothes and waterlilies in the pond, and half the night you're a dependable chap, mounting the stairs in lamplight to the bath, but then the too white teeth all night,

all over the American sky, too much to bear, this constant fingering, your hands a river gesture, the birds in flight, the birds still singing outside the greasy window, in the trees.

There's a part in the movie

where you can see right through the acting,

where you can tell that I'm about to burst into tears,

right before I burst into tears

and flee to the slimy moonlit riverbed

canopied with devastated clouds.

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.

You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

Lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, I didn't want to see it this way, everything eating everything in the end.

We know how the light works,

we know where the sound is coming from.

Verse. Chorus. Verse.

I'm sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

Little Beast