Six times the speaker insists she wants one person and not another, and six times the sentence ends on the person she is rejecting. That small quirk of grammar drives "I'm Such A Good Liar" by DiaryAnnie. On the surface it is a love confession addressed to "you", someone she has been with before ("to be with you again"). Underneath, it is about the gap between what a person feels and what she lets anyone see. The final line, which is also the title, pulls the floor out from under everything before it.
The construction is simple and deliberate. Lines one to six share a frame: a statement of longing, the word "you" somewhere in the middle, and the same closing phrase, "and not him". There is no rhyme in the traditional sense. The repetition does the work of rhyme instead, so "him" lands at the end of each line like a drumbeat. The lines are long and conversational, and none of them ends in punctuation. They tumble forward like someone who can't stop confessing once she has started. The effect is odd, though. The poem wants to erase "him", yet it gives him the last word of every line. The speaker is announcing that he doesn't matter while building her whole poem around him.
The imagery is small, physical and domestic. "I wish it was you I could smell in my hair" makes the other man's presence something she carries on her body, a scent she can't wash out. "When I take off my clothes" is blunt, even uncomfortable. It places her in the most intimate moment with him while her mind is elsewhere. Then the poem shifts from touch to something quieter: "When you speak to me now, I love only that." The word "that" is vague on purpose. She does not say she loves what he says, only the fact of his speaking. The "now" suggests they still talk, and that a voice is all she gets. Judging by this line, she is living on very little, and that makes the longing in the other lines feel less theatrical and more tired.
The vocabulary of truth piles up as the poem goes on: "The fact is simply", "In truth", "only ever", "forever", "I would give anything". These are absolutes, and they are working hard. People rarely say "in truth" unless something in them is braced for disbelief. The speaker keeps swearing to her sincerity, and the more she swears, the more the poem sounds like someone persuading herself.
Then comes the seventh line, and everything changes. After six long, heavy sentences, "I'm such a good liar, though." is short, casual and finally punctuated with a full stop. The refrain disappears. The word "though" works like a shrug, or a door closing. It can be read in two ways. In the first, the six declarations are true, and the lie is the one she lives every day, acting content with "him" while wanting someone else. The poem then becomes a rare moment of honesty, spoken where no one can hear it. In the second reading, the confession itself is the lie, and we have been performed to. The poem doesn't settle this, though the intimate details lean toward the first reading. The doubt it plants is the real sting, because after that last line we can't fully trust anything we've just read.
This is what makes the poem worth studying. In seven lines it shows how form can undermine content. A refrain meant to push someone away keeps him present, and a title turns the whole text into an unreliable witness. It also captures a feeling many readers will recognise, saying one thing and feeling another so smoothly that no one notices. The name DiaryAnnie suits that private, confessional tone, and the poem reads like something written to be kept secret. Its last line suggests that the secret is kept very well.