Author Bret Hoveskeland

I’ll close out May with a couple more prose poems from the now 12-year-old The Oxytocin Opera. If this book were a music album, this one below would likely be considered a “single,” the title track. It’s also one of the “sexiest” poems I’ve probably ever written, which is a little comical because I purposely wrote it to hopefully sound and feel as “scientific” as possible. This poem also earned me a poetry slam first place prize once upon a time. Enjoy!

Oxytocin Intro

There was a feeling going through my body like writing a purified poetry when I’m only trying to write fast prose, and you said it’s only a chemical in our heads being released and bonding.  It seems so much depends on the way our chemicals read our minds.  Our heads are so full of them, how might one measure the ones that tie anything together?  What touches and tethers souls to nerves, synapses, and senses? 

Skin traverses skin and pores say hello, pouring sweat and salt forth for unfamiliar chemicals to meet and melt together onto night fabric.  Cotton sheets collect and hold them like memories, like cells on microscope slides, all that’s left behind after bodies arise and stumble out into late morning sunlight.  What exactly is left behind?  Dead cells and hair, residue and particles that were once parts of you and me.  Glasses and bottles on tables, clothes on floors, remnants of the night before.  We have left some of who we are behind in this bed, watching them now become a were.  But if such things are left behind, what have we now gained?  Chemicals and names?  Histories, family trees and philosophies on life and language?  Smiles, expectations… wishes?

I wish to see your life lived inside strong verbs and nouns. 

I wish to hear your voice diagrammed within active voice sentences. 

I wish to feel your history spoken from your tongue and pressed into mine.

I have asked my three wishes of the fickle genie found swimming inside that bottle of wine, at the bottom of that bottle of rum.  Should we wish to be more than our chemicals decide we shall be? For now, we have lost and gained bodily scientific reactions and we hold the start of the day in unheld hands.  The night ahead will be cool and calm.  It is enough to let me smile and not just wish for a thousand more wishes.