They say that you're too inept,
too immature,
too young to know better.

Don't listen to them;
you're exactly the shade of green that I was looking for.

I'm the crumpled soda can you used to kick around when you were a kid;

I'm the shot glass you emptied into the pit of your teen angst;

I'm the wine bottle that's going to shatter over your skull and **** us both.

there were soggy, downtrodden cigarette butts
on the stairs leading to her apartment
where fresh ashes smoldered--
the remnants of her newly-cremated self.

No one told me that the taste of defeat
isn't bitter
or sour
or acidic,
but embarrassingly cloying.

The water was murky
with ashen clouds
and my thoughts were overcast
with fears of nakedness.

Once when I was at an age at which I was
embarrassingly old enough to have known better,
I feigned "coolness"
by taking drags out of the end of my pen
like it was one of those foreign, long, skinny black cigarettes
that was all the rage in some exotic country like Italy.

But I ****** too hard,
and instead of sampling a taste of ink-flavored air,
I dove headfirst into the real thing--

which is to say,
that I tried not to laugh for the next few days
lest anyone catch a glimpse of my ink-stained tongue
and think that my love for calamari
was anything other than platonic.