Ahead

A low-ceilinged, crowded room...smells

Compete for forebrain dominance;

Each odor a history of that day, sent vainly

One waft at a time.

Fragrances battle malodorous foes redolent

Of antediluvian battle 'tween angels good and bad;

When the bespoke pheromone targets me with surgical precision,

One angel makes me whole.

Her scent is a carpet of pageantry rolled out

To open synaptic gates for nerves, cranial,

To welcome optic and acoustic, facial and trigeminal, and vestibular enough

To knock me off my feet.

Oculomotors turn my eyes, dilated sympathetically,

They adduct her way, accommodating sweeps of survey;

My depth of field narrows along a funnel of scintillation, illumination

Floodlighting my tunnel vision.

All of my brainy parts agree, when the data for sight and sound

And wherewithal and eurekas meet simultaneously,

Join olfactory, aligning organic tumblers, unlocking to free me

With loving chains of amino acidity.

Adrenaline fuels my heart, oxytocin erects my longing,

Prolactin instills my bonding; vasopressin alerts me to vying suitors.

Cortisol picks fight-over-flight, synapsing propagations to lead me with valor

Against them and their unworthy, unwelcome fetor.

Sight and sound seal the deal and

Norepinephrine inhibits everything in the way,

Honing my senses, toward-her, while giving sway

To disregard all things not-her.

Innovative innervations grow horns on Homunculus

That straddles my sulci disproportionately.

Probing parts amygdaloid is my patient hippocampus

Rising above the void.

There's limbic salvation above ill-winds

That support the room's feckless entropy;

Breathless, I fall to her by way of the alchemy

That dooms me vaguely, vagally.