Name: i do know some things
ISBN: 9781556596247

richard siken

i do know some things

sage lynn

Her boyfriend at the time was a walk-in: a man so previously sad that his original self had left its body and something else had grabbed the wheel.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. We are what we say we are. What am I? I’m not sure I want to know anymore and I’m not supposed to say that. I’m tired of telling this story. Let’s put on a show. I’ll throw my voice and populate the landscape. Let me invent an imaginary friend so I can talk to myself, or at least take the ghost of my missing friends and pretend that they’re still here. 

Hey buddy, you’re gonna be fine. We’re not going anywhere.

 Let me say it in the third person, talking about myself: 

Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It floods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you’ve made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away.

When you fall into a well you have to sit there for a minute. You have to respect the well before you try to get out. So what’s there to be learned? There’s nothing to be learned. This isn’t a lesson, it’s just a fact.

i think this might be the kind of book you have to read front to back more than once to get the full effect. i have not done that. i have individual favorites but i don’t think i was able to trace the weaving all the way because i read it only once, too slow in the beginning and too quickly in the end

i do know some things

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