Slow Rot Holy Heat

and our faces, my heart, as brief as photos

Desire is a hand that confers being,
a small immortality.
And even here,
in the ache of absence,
what is saved is presence,
a breath lent back to the living.

I am desperate in my plain waiting,
threadbare under the weight of time.
Berger said the past is a well from which we draw to act—
but I feel myself tipping into its dark water,
the echoes swallowing me before I can drink.

Your thought speaks to me
and makes me deliriously lost;
I am not ashamed to say it.
Help me find a solid present,
a single stone on which to stand,
so I am not scattered to the universe
but held, even for a moment,
inside something real.