Third

Between the academy and the cemetery, exists another classroom—tendrils of language in study, a pedagogy prose poetry of ghosts. There is Sun and there is Earth, but what of the land swelling inside Sun—petaled umbras, unseen heat to feast. We are never only hungry. After three years of Non-Alignment, Fidel says Our revolution does not rely on men. It relies on ideas and ideas cannot be assassinated. Besides life and death, there is the third option: to idea. My mother says it’s not too late for you to fall in love, don’t assume it will never happen. She forgets another possibility: all this time I have already been in love. Mundanely, a red bird chirping e c t o p i a, my heart listens outside the body in order to be shattered daily, to become more porous, in constant preparation to hold everything. Ho Chi Minh said the nation has its roots in the people. The people are not quite dirt not quite map made sovereign, the people are something that happens—a third event: we be peopleing, to rooster to cum and social music. Not taken, not given, but shared—the third gesture. After the interrogation room, after blinds of cursive yes or no, lawful purulence and the yellow wound, there always was a third option: I’m in love with you right now.