The Evolution of Love

The Evolution of Love by Michael R. Burch Love among the infinitesimal flotillas of amoebas is a dance of transient appendages, wild sails that gather in warm brine and then express one headstream as two small, divergent wakes. Minuscule voyage, love! Upon false feet, the pseudopods of uprightness, we creep toward self-immolation: two nee one. We cannot photosynthesize the sun, and so we love in darkness, till we come at last to understand: man’s spineless heart is alien to any land. We part to single cells; we rise on buoyant tears, amoeba-light, to breathe new atmospheres ... and still we sink. The night is full of stars we cannot grasp, though all the World is ours. Have we such cells within us, bent on love to ever-changingness, so that to part is not to be the same, or even one? Is love our evolution, or a scream against the thought of separateness: a cry of strangled recognition? Love, or die, or love and die a little. Hopeful death! Come scale these cliffs, lie changing, share this breath. Keywords/Tags: love, love and life, evolution, voyage, sex, sexuality, sensual, lust, cells, chemistry, electricity, biology, darkness, sea, night, stars, photosynthesis, shared breath, microscopic, amoebas, pseudopods, microbes, extended metaphor, creation