“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole."
- Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium*

We take gashes within ourselves
to be a symptom of us halves,
unwholed. Tending towards completion,
Plato made the diagnosis, prescribed
the solution. We are agreeable patients,
building marriages like altars to Eros,
a religion given public space for practice.
Bus-seats, cafés and amusement rides
become two-seated observances,
and the streets are sized like wedding aisles.
The private pain of lovelessness
approximates to a phantom limb, presumably,
six inches too short. We perform penance,
making grand, untenable promises of eternity.
In return for our piousness, we ask
to find wholeness, but find only our selves
in some stranger's bed.

                                          Some share these beds
for life, attend them like churches,
find no answers in two arms cleaving two arms,
two legs cleaving two legs.