It is humbling,
how the hands clutch at air,
as if to sculpt absence into permanence.
What is it, this hunger?
A tide that swells too high,
lapping at the edges of another's sky,
pressing against the glass of what is never mine.
I see her in a room full of faces—
does she love them, does she love them more?
The thought curls around my ribs,
twisting, tightening—
it is not love, only the shape of longing.
I have made a wreckage of patience,
pressed presence into possession,
forgotten that a bird is not a fistful of feathers,
but the wind it rides, the breath it borrows.
I must be more—
more than the weight of my wanting,
more than the hands that grasp instead of open.
Let me be the clash—
the bull and the matador,
moment and motion,
red cloth and horn.
Let me be so much,
so much,
that nothing is held too tightly,
that even love may pass through my fingers
like light through leaves,
untamed, unbroken, free.
