Good Clean Romance

I liked the idea of you so desperately
Still praying that your ghost will take me to dinner
Be my respectable plus one
Show me off at other people’s weddings
I make small sacrifices to my rotting hopes for you
This fibroid pain so you’ll remember to text me
This Charlie horse so you’ll wake up howling and clutching your broken legs
This heartache so it will stop
I wanted to have sex with you and listen to alternative R&B
I wanted clean clean clean
Clean white starched shirt clean table manners clean crisp resume clean boy clean girl
Clean white smiles clean white sensibilities good clean romance
But these are the girls who get love stories, I guess
Girls without so much self
Without spiced tongue and noisy calendar
With more time to chase you into suitordom
Into meet my flatmates into time so abundant it’s mundane
God give me somewhere to go with these feelings
That my therapist cannot talk me out of
I still have a list of ideas
Hot chocolate, cold park walk, conservatory
These blue balled fantasy chapters of a relationship I still have with you
This open-faced contract that you broke
We were supposed to get married and live in a cold white house
Our kids would have smooth chocolate skin and my eyes
Your parents would eat them up and I would live on that love
Too American
In your ancestral home at Christmas
Feeling cold in a hot country
You were supposed to fall in love with me slowly, cleanly, proudly
With dignity and restraint
Gentle with my body like holding a prize
Like clout like a legacy
Our sheets dry and immaculate the morning after
Waking up with you like turning a page
Arousal like reading a classic
I translated your arm’s length attraction into a love language
The distance between us made us dance partners
I wore your WhatsApps like rings
My want was a polished beggar
Elocuting in an empty train car
You were such a rose possibility
A warmth and a shock, you left my throat dry