This World of Chemical Signals

download audio
2 min 13 secs

Voles do the big it for 24 hours. Continuously. Same pairs licking their round-bodied lover until dirty coats shine with want. Romantic love is said to resemble OCD. I throw three pennies on the floor. Heads: love. Tails: not. The little portion of the brain that loves is also the spot that sparks with cocaine. So really mom left us for love, not powder.

Love as recipe: part contraction, part retention. Directions: whip pain until the constancy of pleasure and simmer to a piss. When desire’s chemical compounds are injected into test subjects, the serum has no effect. Our bodies made to take so little of the potion. Prairie voles are seen as rats with human attributes. But in truth. They’re better at it.

Even as this poem is written, two voles are molding themselves into a unity of fuzz.  Our brain’s three-party system is made to hold spouse, adulterer, and unrelated other. Simultaneously. Often, while having sex, I envision Neanderthals pounding at each other’s heads with rocks—enacting their need to know how it works.

What is that rattle in the chest? What is that light in the eyes? We were not built to be happy but to reproduce, says the vole expert at the Monogamy Institute. Even a vole will chop through an artery and scratch out the beady spark before losing vole. What is vole? That vole? Sound of a carrot eaten—the leaching of gardens—my teeth at my own wrists.
 
 
…………………………………………………………………………………………..………. home