Falling

One of the few post-college slam poems completed.

 

 

Falling in love is pheromones.

Falling in love is pheromones, it’s a fact, it’s ugly and unfortunate and nothing at all like what we were promised by our mums and dads and Disney, but it’s a fact. Falling in love is the feeling pheromones make when the maternal material hidden in my ovaries matches what’s hidden in his testes and all of a sudden my womb decides, before I’ve said I’m willing to consecrate it to creation, that it would be a good home.

I’d say in the face of outright rebellion that I’d run from love, but…But falling in love doesn’t feel like pheromones, doesn’t feel like a con to convince us that, despite the evolutionary abnormality we call a conscience, we still want to have sex. No, it doesn’t feel like pheromones.

Falling in love feels more like, more like, more like confetti that sparkles, or cotton candy at carnivals if we ignore the blacked out teeth of the carnies who sell us our lesser sins of sugar and dreams, falling in love feels like Christmas and strings of light spanning the spaces in your soul. It feels like a Ferris wheel and how on a roller coaster your heart drops out of your chest at twice the constant of gravity here on earth, and then, and then, it lands in someone’s hands.

Falling in love feels like fifth grade blindfolded birthday parties with princesses and piñatas, falling in love is spinning and spinning and hands on your shoulders and sides (and then, when you’re older, on your breasts and between your thighs), its spinning and whirling and laughing and loving and living and striking at the sky with a stroke and and and 1 2 3 crash. Collision. The guts of the god who made love cascading onto the concrete.

Pheromones can make us fall in love but they cannot form a feeling more full than the fear of the sky falling.

Falling out of love is the loosening of the blindfold, silk sliding and settling on the cement, it is the bat resting against raw blisters in a loss fist. It is the sting of sunlight in eyes with pupils too wide, staring at the shattered pieces of the piñata, just pink paper pasted to cardboard, not a pony anymore. Just desolate on the cement while children scrape sugar from the sidewalk with sticky fingers. And falling out of love is wanting nothing but water while watching these children who are utterly innocent and never in love.