My heart is in the next room, asleep. I should be in there with her, but this machine body needs time to cool down before it can rest. I was standing guard in a near empty convention center in Atlanta, Georgia — a city about which I have nothing positive to say — when I finally understood that my body machine was was the only appropriate sacrifice.

I’d tried other things. I watch these other writers, believing they’re blazing a trail I’ve walked. It’s their trail too, and maybe it will lead somewhere else for them. I was a teacher. A journalist. A barfly. A wanderer. A factotum in factories, warehouses, offices. Always writing. Always scribbling. Decade after decade.

But the needs of the body machine — and more importantly — the safety and security of my heart sleeping in the next room, opened a road that led me to the river.

This body machine and the poet it carries is being rebaptized by fire and by water. My heart is being baptized, too, by time and the river.

To love is ultimately a sacrificial act. Over the years I’ve listened to people speak of what they had to give up for love. But that is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is giving your body machine to work to make someone else’s life easier. There is art in this, and craft to be learned.

I am building my body into a new machine. The engine is a poem. The heart is asleep in the next room.