You had a 21 year-old loofa
tucked into the pocket of the hunter green terry cloth robe
I’d used on my way to the bathroom.
The loofa had come as a stunt, you said,
in one of those Sunday edition inserts, way back
when the hunter green of the robe
bespoke middle class propriety
and a soap for all your 2000 parts
made everyone momentarily stop to account for themselves
and come up perpetually,
woefully
short.

You readily admitted
you should probably get a new one, because
diseases, bacteria, yeah
it’s probably (no definitely) disgusting, but the thing was
every time you got a new one —
sometimes fancy ones even — it really didn’t matter
they would always just
break,
disintegrate, go to pieces
so quickly
you’d always end up back
with the same old loofa
you hadn’t even bothered to throw away quite yet, until
it became
the 21 year-old loofa
you refused to get rid of,
that had made you finally just give up worrying
about what anyone said about it, because damned if that loofa
was ever going
to fall
apart.

And as I lie
next to you, thinking
about how you’d said, yeah,
you’d seen this other girl for a minute, yeah
you’d been talking to her, but just– yeah,
I was still the last person you’d been with since the last time,
and how you’d said the same thing the time before that,
and the very same thing the time before that, and
it just
hit me —

Fuck.
No.

I don’t want to be a fucking loofa
in this goddamn terrible metaphor.
I don’t want to think
about this fucking loofa at all.
I don’t want
to tidy this up
into something I can deal with, into something
pathetic and kind
that forgives him,
not anymore
because, 
in my own goddamn poem,
I should always get to be
so
much
more
than some crappy thing
someone just finally stopped wanting to get rid of.