but we learn that love comes
when the body splits open and
the words are reeled from the tongue.

love knocks in the sharing of the space,
in the fluttering of the pages,
and in the moving of a twenty-peso pen
until we shed our skins and our fingers
curl into half-formed sentences.

love, as we come to realize,
can mean something physical,
as whatever is left of a brilliant mind will dream easy
and write hard enough to bleed,
refusing to shrink to the point of grief.

i will tell you this only once:
there is still hunger to be understood 
and be hated less.
one of these days, we will let go of rage in our hands;
instead, we will spit our thoughts out
with a force of a thousand suns

we will finally never love in silence.
we will be in the process of becoming, 
revived from the dead, no longer feasted upon by the living.
tomorrow, when the lines intertwine like vines,
we will be revolutionaries nurtured by
a temporary salvation brought by a never-forgotten legacy.

because after a decade of loss 
which morphed into a quiet, hopeful glint,
we will be given nimble fingers by the divine once again
to touch each other raw 
and feel the vastness of where we can go.

wolves will finally be quiet and still.
the literary department is coming home.