About Love… in scientifically accurate poem form.

The heaviest weight
my neck should bear
is a 22-bone skull,
100 billion neurons,
100,000 miles of blood vessels, myelin,
and long, dark hair.

 
The face is the paragon of practice,
inextricably its own
expressive gestures,
made of response and stimulation,
sensory intake and integration.

The life is so short, the craft so long to learn.
During learning and collective memory,
all caricature and conjecture,
expectation,
projection,
preparation,
metaphor and meditation,
use
cerebrum, thalamus, hypothalamus,
tectum and tegmentum,
cerebellum, pons, and medulla.

Oh, oxytocin, neuromodulator,
chemical messenger of trust,
reinforced by fantasy,
in favor of a fairy tale:
you render love blind
while the dopamine machine
we call the brain stores
memories
as a synthesis
of facts,
interpretations
of facts, emotions,
the arrangement of interpretations as an outcome of experience,
and the either spontaneous or willed
act of feeling,
provoked by emotion.

Parallel imaginary visions and events,

and love as a behavioral pattern
in elemental layers
also become part of the memory.

Beware what you believe.

The neck represents
expression
and balance,
connecting the head to the body,
the spiritual to material.

The neck,
within which lies the larynx,
very vision of voice,
is not meant to bear
heavy memory and its brain,
chemically dependent on itself
and it’s experiences,
both real and imagined.

Yet my neck,
that scruff and scrag,
holds consciousness, sentience, and wakefulness
aloft,
facilitating blood flow to the brain,
thoughts to song and sentence,
and memories to mosaic, mirroring.

The life is short, the craft so long to learn.