"I saw you eyeing this"
       I wasn't.
"It's my writing journal. I'm a poet, In case you were wondering"
       I wasn't.
"I don't know if I'm any good. I mean, people say I am"
       Probably not.
Finally, I handed him the question he was fishing for:
       "So what do you write?"
"Oh, well, I did recently complete a poem
 comparing life to a game of chess"
        He had the smuggest most punchable face ever.

                      ...seriously?
You and every other 8th grader who got that prompt in Language Arts.
                        *******.
                                           Is what I should have said to him.

I don't know why he ****** me off so much
Maybe because he reminded me of a younger version of myself
       Always pushing my writing in people's faces
       demanding they have an opinion on it.
Hell, I still do that from time to time.
       Who was I to judge this poor guy?
                 but I did.

After a few years, I forgot about him entirely.
I couldn't recall his face even at gunpoint,
and all that is left in my memory of him
       is that stupid comment about life and chess...
                                         Chess takes strategy, and skill.

If you're gonna compare life to a board game,
It's more like chutes and ladders,
         pure chance
Like Battleship,
         dumb luck
Like Solitaire,
         all too often you're playing with yourself.
But when you aren't it's Charades,
         you're always trying to guess
         What the other really means
         and it's always simpler than we're making it.
It's Clue
         In that no one has all the pieces to the puzzles
         But if we work together,
         maybe we can solve the mysteries.
Scrabble
         It's a bag of incoherent consonants and vowels
        Having no inherent purpose,
        Developing all meaning through your design.

And yes, a little like Chess,
          In that I never learned how to play it.