Ode to my beautiful Samantha…

We met at a franchised coffee house,
During breaks in our working days.
Hiding behind a book and an academic long black,
She wanted peace and quiet,
Which I disrupted with a clumsy interjection.

“Post-colonial theory, eh?”
[PAUSE]
[BLUSH]

To which she replied with a look of who-is-this-boy?

Exchanges of over-the-counter coffees,
And over the counter accounts
That she thought of dubious accountability.
I had previously regailed her with stories,
Of drunken toga parties, illicit late-night trists,
And later-night drag racing in the back streets of Fremantle.

Proud and proper in my service industry,
service-station, ready-to-serve-you uniform,
She replied with a look that said out-of-service;
I must have smelt like cigarettes, petrol,
And seven hours of a ten hour shift completed.

[COUGH]
“I have a few readings about identity that I won’t need anymore.”

A mere curiousity or a monstrosity?
Delicate questions running through her delicate person.
We caught each other’s eye,
As if we were criminal to the other’s policing.
Love isn’t an interpellation,
But a feedback loop of depthless intensity,
A polarity between a tension tensing.

“Oh.”
[BLINK]

Word. She spoke. ‘Oh’ means nothing,
Besides as an order-word, ordering the event,
To modulate, like the soft flutter in a nervous voice,
From an embarrassing soliloquy,
To a becoming-dialogue of fragile futurity.

And without intending to,
Without helping it,
Without knowing how,
We still speak,
To each other’s heart.