warning: suggestive content

he doesn’t smell of raspberries
but last night’s messy love-making
rolled into today’s listerine
coupled with coffee breath that you
despise little by little two months into a
house-locked love.

he’s not drop-dead gorgeous inside.
no more aftershave but
hastily-concocted axe with
rip-off boss/chanel/whatever
sickeningly manly to
choke on. it’s a
slow
unravelling
of fantasy-concocted boyfriend:
he snores a little too much. beard
is fucking ugly on him. wish he’d
do the dishes before he sleeps.

but if fantasy is sweet milkshake
then reality is that half-bitter coffee
that he loves/he loves with
his half-tilted
smile and crooked teeth
glinting under morning sunlight
eyes pale-green and
tired-red from
writing stanzas. sometimes he’d
tell you he stinks but you’d hug him
and he’d shirk away to the shower
where you’d follow like the last lap
of love and there’s only one truth now:

who cares about the beard, the
fake-minty
breath wearing thin by dinner, the 
hair too long to look
pretty. because if you wrote him as
poetry

you’d count the rise and fall of his
breath and find the sweet spot where
he mutters
your name, and you’d
call him back. you’d call 
sharing a bed as sharing one
soul. it’s true, since your
boyhood days, you
wanted a man who’d look at you and 
call your pimples as gleaming moon-craters.

david -- you’d got a penchant
for lying, you’d say. what lies.

poetry of love is a lie,
he’d write later that evening
but my love for you isn’t.