"I'll let you in on a Secret - I don't know when I'm joking."

We go to a fancy-type restaurant. A nice sit-down place. My baby blues are bottled on dark wood shelves and this isn't a detail that you plan to miscount for. Waiters in black ties and the plates are already on the tables and I know that you are relentless in their shining reflections.

"Wine and Dine my Sensibility."

My seventeen-year-old skin does not belong here. Follicles producing my scent are premature, to say the least. Cultivated romance looms beyond a horizon of pale-brown clouds littered with mid-highway makeouts - I expect you to paint me a brand-spanking-new Southwestern sky.

"Let's talk about You" -
A past-prime Adam's Apple says to me. Gnarled birds' nests perch atop my faintly skin-encased splinters - I flex in hopes of a migration, but not too
Far
Down
S
   o
       u
          t
                h

"They're coming."

Barely flinching teeth rattle around my peripheral and then You Are Gone! - or perhaps I am. We drown quickly in dim red-lighting, brick-laid air swallows and belches out a humidified and much sweatier you and I - and I'm getting turned on.

"You look nice today,"
they chant. Spay-legged spiders tumble out of dank eyesockets and nest somewhere deeeeeeeep in my brain tissue.
"Yellow looks good on a jealous, jealous girl-"
You laugh and call them back home.
Lock eyes with me as I impale upon a salad fork.

"Talk ***** to me."

Third-World Countries have been delicately dropped into what I thought were love poems to you. Vines grow around your mouth, soggy with the meal that I think is over. They chase each other through your teeth and I want to strangle myself with their slim and tender necks - like you wish I had. Dark green darlings giggle in my direction - such a Naive Little Girl!

"Ha."

Six lines later and I'm reeling you in.