Tim Seibles > Quotes

“Sometimes I miss you
the way someone drowning
remembers the air.”
― Tim Seibles

“Some days I can go nearly an hour
without thinking of the taste
of your mouth.”
― Tim Seibles, Hurdy-Gurdy

“And if
the air is chilly
she feels it - in fact, if you
put your hand on her arm
you would know she still remembers
how touching changed the weather,
how a hand skimming the wrist
was once a window
opening onto a better season
where people did better things
than be lonely, where the wind
was a river of candlelight
pushing the blue silhouettes of trees.”
― Tim Seibles, Hurdy-Gurdy

“what is the lesson of history, if not
that we owe each other more bread, more
friendship, fewer lies,
less cruelty.”
― Tim Seibles, Hurdy-Gurdy

“...so she stays there
remembering the warmth of honey
between her toes, with her blood
not humming, with the sound
of the name almost always coming to her.”
― Tim Seibles, Hurdy-Gurdy

“I remember holding you against the sink,
with the sun soaking the window, the soft call
of your hips, and the intricate flickers
of thought chiming your eyes. Your mouth,
like a Saturday.”
― Tim Seibles

“Some days I can go nearly an hour without thinking of the taste of your mouth.”
― Tim Seibles

“First Kiss' (for Lips)

Her mouth
fell into my mouth
like a summer snow, like a
5th season, like a fresh Eden,
like Eden when Eve made God
whimper with the liquid
tilt of her hips—
her kiss hurt like that—
I mean, it was as if she’d mixed
the sweat of an angel
with the taste of a tangerine,
I swear. My mouth
had been a helmet forever
greased with secrets, my mouth
a dead-end street a little bit
lit by teeth—my heart, a clam
slammed shut at the bottom of a dark,
but her mouth pulled up
like a baby-blue Cadillac
packed with canaries driven
by a toucan—I swear
those lips said bright
wings when we kissed, wild
and precise—as if she were
teaching a seahorse to speak—
her mouth so careful, chumming
the first vowel from my throat
until my brain was a piano
banged loud, hammered like that—
it was like, I swear her tongue
was Saturn’s 7th moon—
hot like that, hot
and cold and circling,
circling, turning me
into a glad planet—
sun on one side, night pouring
her slow hand over the other: one fire
flying the kite of another.
Her kiss, I swear—if the Great
Mother rushed open the moon
like a gift and you were there
to feel your shadow finally
unhooked from your wrist.
That’d be it, but even sweeter—
like a riot of peg-legged priests
on pogo-sticks, up and up,
this way and this, not
falling but on and on
like that, badly behaved
but holy—I swear! That
kiss: both lips utterly committed
to the world like a Peace Corps,
like a free store, forever and always
a new city—no locks, no walls, just
doors—like that, I swear,
like that.”
― Tim Seibles, Buffalo Head Solos

“Power is the capacity to turn people
into money.”
― Tim Seibles, Hammerlock

“Isn't that what courage is for?—
to lay claim to your life, to roam beyond the grasp,
beyond the rule of whoever means to use you as fuel
for bad machinery. Break open your eyes!”
― Tim Seibles, One Turn Around the Sun