You look like trouble.
It's not the leather jacket.
It's not the many piercings.
It's not the tattoos.
It's not the weird hair.
You look like trouble.
It's not the cussing.
It's not the beer bottles.
It's not the cigarettes.
It's not the cans of spray paint.
You look like trouble.
It's not what we see on the outside
That scares us.
It's what we feel
Radiating out of you.
Through your pores, through your mouth, through your ears.
Like a smoke
Pouring out into my mind.
The fogginess spells out the words
Trouble. He's trouble.
But it's more than that--
It's the look in your eyes.
The look of despair
The look of sadness, the look of defeat, the look of fear and of rejection and of pain and of hate and of uncomprehending and of confusion and of loss and of betrayal and of so many other things that you should never have had to endured.

So take off the coat. Unhook the piercings. Get a new hairdo. Cover the tattoos. Throw away the bottles and boxes and cans and empty jars. For you are one of those empty bottles--brown and hollow and made of fragile weavings that threaten hardness and sharpness and pain if broken. But once you are broken, you are fragile and harmless. Just shining dust upon the floor for me to trod on and grind into the carpet like a cigar stub. Like ash from a fire. Like the glass fragments your life has become. Then you are not trouble anymore. You are simply a discarded memory, thrown away like so many other careless things. That's what you are. You are an empty bottle that will soon become less than nothing if you don't stop being trouble.

Stop being trouble.
Do not become glass dust.

Glass dust is pretty.
It is harmless and easily forgotten.
People like it.

People look down upon glass bottles. They sniff them and wrinkle their noses. They cast them aside without a thought. No one dares touch them. Do you want to be like that? That is what you are.
Stop being troublesome, bottle.

Be good.
And you will not become
Glass Dust.