what did exist

I need to be alone,

rguiden:

betweenthefloorboards:

but I can’t seem to do it.
Even when there’s no one around, I never feel alone.
Maybe that’s just the city.
Maybe that’s just me.

I want a tent. Tarp ceilings and leave carpets. I want to boil water to kill bacteria, and green mint tea, while I wrap my torso in wool, and peel back the sky with my right, and peel back my scalp with the left.

the rain, robert creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

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.

Richard Siken

interstates