if you could've kissed the pretty boy,
you would have done it too,
she says it like beauty were a fact
and not an opinion, but i know we
are the same- both caught
in the act.

my days suffered anticipation that he
flattened in a minute's time,
a foolish giddiness that should have been
a schoolgirl's instead of mine.

in the doorway of a bedroom at a
crowded party he lights another cigarette
and i fall jealous for the filter he
brings close to those lips i haven't touched yet.

around boys like you, i can feel
so
ugly-
clumsy in unfamiliar territory,
using some lame conversation to stake a claim
in someone who won't bother to remember my name.

i have this crush on you, but it
much more resembles the verb
rather than the noun.
and you don't even see the
pressure of all the waiting
dragging me down down down.

we wander down the road alone, but only
because that's where the car is parked;
he holds my hands in his own, but only
because they are cold.
he says i'm going to kiss you now, and
(although i think i might be
in love with your forever) darling
i'd really rather you were not so bold.

he smokes me like his cigarette,
but i'm just now remembering how to exhale--
watching the smoke curl skyward and dissipate entirely
as our alcohol-drenched love affair quickly grows stale.

he pulls at me saying let's just make out-
because romance recently took a bullet to the head.
i could wish for such luck now, oh how i envy
the gunshot wound that left her for dead.

fifteen years from now, all of this will just be
two kids in the street at two a.m., i even wonder if
she will still be me and he will still be you.
and when i look back, i'll just think how
i needed a new jacket, my hair smelled like smoke,
and we probably both needed some type of curfew.

this is the story of something-like-a-whore-
the girl that repeatedly gives herself away,
convinced everyone else comprehends
how emotional it all is,
when really they just see her as easy prey.

so i kissed the pretty one beneath
the cold steel sky, lost in the pretty
green of his eyes, then froze
like a con-artist in the act;
you would have done it too for a few
butterflies in december, but
beauty is still just an opinion
and i know this for a fact.

(2004)