It’s not alien abduction,
a mediation of chemical processes:

it hurts, it feels awesome,
cerebral preferences,
each to their own.

Oxytocin, chemicals and pheromones
give you a queasy feeling
That’s love!!!
Screw love!

Every moleculewears off
the beats of your heart;

I would have traded my life
for 30 years of the scent of unity,

a heightened sense
after infatuation,
a transformation
deeply deep.

You still get nervous to this day,
you covet stability,
shopping for groceries,
buy a dog
they usually last 12 years.

Surrender.
Zero score.

A hot metal rod slowly ripping your skin off,
it can cool down,
leave you cold,
it will never be the same,
a waste of time and energy
Honestly.

If they had no limbs on their body you would still stick with them for ever.
You think about them sometimes, and you hope they are happy.

The object of such an enthusiasm
it’s an evolutionary gift,
a hoax created by poets,
a taste,
just a WORD,
life’s one sole purpose –

that’s my opinion on love.

Source: Words borrowed from the first page of Yahoo Answers threads asking, What is love?

Method: My method for constructing the poem was to simply scour these threads and pick out fragments from the answers. I put them together wondering if, by distilling these crowd-sourced definitions from the most earnest people on the internet, I would accidentally get an accurate answer to the question. I corrected some misspellings, except where the misspellings formed existing words (as in ‘scent’).

Rebecca Parker is a writer and proofreader from north-west England, living in Scotland. She has recently joined the small team of an independent publisher of poetry pamphlets, and her own poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have appeared in a number of online and print publications.