There’s no room for boredom at the beginning.
It’s too crowded with thudding hearts raining against
taut eardrums, saltwater figures skating over clenched palms,
circus-like lumps shooting up and down a high-striker’s throat,
wriggly feet stutter-stepping before the life-or-death precision.
Somebody’s a “seasoned veteran” somewhere towards the middle or end,
but the exotic spices are right there at the pot’s surface in the beginning too –
it’s just a bit before the canine-toothed bite of your paprika has become indistinguishable
from the babbling brook of my slow soup.

At what point does abstraction take the chalkboard full of frantic Gestalt scribbles
and layers of elbow-stained revisions
and simplify it down to a simple equation to memorize for Tuesday’s quiz?
Is it after our ingredients have mixed sufficiently and condensed
into the textbook cacciatore sauce?
When does the nuance of your movements stop passing uninterpreted to my hypersensitive brain,
when I would still evolutionarily react to you as to the sudden rustling
of a snake amidst the neural undergrowth?
Is it when simulated annealing can no longer accidentally flick me onto some taller peak
along the mountain range of your emotions?

Tensor processing units be damned, I don’t want to recognize you
with this highly optimized mental circuitry!
Let’s keep things novel, so our story lasts long
into the flashlight-and-sweaty-bedsheets night.
Don’t worry. To reach such conclusions of grandeur at all, I hastily overgeneralize
but cautiously deduce.
The details might eagerly fit into neat boxes, but I assure you, the conveyor belts
carrying them to warring brickwall horizons are anything but simple –
an ouroboros of botched supply chain logistics,
in a Simician factory of bodiless coats swaying from mothball nooses.
Even the most hermetically sealed tupperware houses leaky abstractions.
The tension begins right when the layering starts to break down.
We’re just one little flicker across a familiar face
away from distributed inter-neural deadlock.
It’s time to loosen some tight ends.
What kind of ripples across this cooling soupy surface will inspire
my soul mate matador
to charge?