How a dinner helped

Our acquaintance began with a staged coincidence.
Perceiving her pretty eyes, I changed course
to collide with an old friend. He was kind enough to
have an inconsequential talk with me,
and my efforts at wit, produced a smile
and an inquiry from her. He introduced me
as an old friend, and hurried away without
mentioning her name.

A week later, I was stirring my coffee,
when her smile flashed before me.
Without my friend about her, she made words
that were music and comedy at the same time.
The shimmer on her nosering, the mole
at the root of her neck and her hand movements
made an impression.

When she left, I realized, I had missed
a job interview. The job was meant to help
me pay my bills. Yet I was happily in love
with the idea of dinner at her place.
Romance makes misfortune look so attractive, and
the spirit so dainty.

The rice was undercooked, and my jaws hurt
after making valiant attempts at chewing them.
The vegatable curry was Americanized
by presence of undercooked corn, and lack of spices.
A human system can never digest any cellulose,
though here I ate like a donkey on drugs, who munches
dry stalks of crop, thinking its green grass. She raved
about how little time she spent in preparing what she
though was an original recipie.

Our conversation moved through trails like lost desert storms.
Her stories began to behave like grains of sand in my eyes.
I soon realized that the mirage of her eyes now stirred
no emotion in me. Within ten days, my first impression
had turned into my intellectual embarrassment, and of course,
like a true old friend, I helped that guy, in winning over
the woman with the original corn concoction.

People ask me why I spend so much time in these pursuits.
I tell them that there is merit in learning from ones own follies
and understanding how the unexpected rules the events
related to women in general. The girl remarked later,
that it was splendid for her husband to have such an honest
and dedicated friend. I smiled and pretended that I was delighted
to be of service.