I'm just a kid.  No, scratch that - I'm just a punk kid; isn't that what you'd call me?  I've got a pierced eyebrow and a pierced lip.  My hair is long, shaggy, and black with purple streaks.  I've got over twenty tattoos and circles under my eyes from one too many late nights.  I'm just a dumb, punk kid, and you hate me, don't you?  You know I'm a user and an abuser. You know that if I didn't have this leather jacket on, you'd see a line of needle marks up my arm.  You know those circles under my eyes are from nights spent drinking, downing pint after pint, popping pills like candy.  You know that in five years I'll not be able to climb a flight of stairs without getting out of breath, I'll have smoked so many cigarettes, so many joints.  You know it all; you know everything about me.  And you're dead wrong.  The saddest thing of all is that you're dead wrong, and you know it.  And that?  That's why you hate me.  

You don't hate me for being a user, 'cause I'm not.  You don't hate me for my drinking habits, 'cause I have none.  You don't hate me for the drugs I take, 'cause I've never taken a single one in my life.  You hate me because I've never done those things.  You hate me because you have.  You hate me because I am simply better than you.

From the moment you see me, you know, and you hate me.... but what is it you see?  What is it in my tats, in my piercings, in my badly dyed hair and my five o'clock shadow that tells you to hate me.  You tell yourself from the moment you lay eyes on me that I'm a user, that I've got more addictions than you've had hot meals, and I wanna know why?  Is it my leather jacket?  My faded jeans?  The tats across my knuckles, the metal in eyebrow?  What's in a look?  Your boss goes home in his Versace suit and snorts lines of coke.  You come home to your wife with her pretty dresses and find her choking back nicotine and tar from her little cancer sticks.  You come home in your nine till five shirt and tie and you pour yourself a shot of whiskey, and drink yourself delirious.  Your clean cut neighbour with his slick hair and neat suit comes home every night from his affair with his receptionist.  He kisses his wife as he walks through the door and she never doubts him for a second.  You never doubt him for a second.  He's clean cut.  I'm not. What makes me a bad man, and him a pillar of society?  What makes you secretly wish you were him, and openly wish you could smash my face in.  I'll tell you what.  It's because these tats, these piercings, this dye in my hair, it's because they're not decorations, they're declarations, and you hate what they tell you.  They declare loud and clear that I have no inhibitions, that I am free, that I don't care what you think and that I don't care if you like me or not.  They scream to you that I don't need a Budweiser to strip away inhibitions, I don't need a line of coke to make me free, I don't need a cigarette lolling impotently out of my mouth for me to be happy with who I am.  I don't prescribe to your peer pressure, I'm not governed by your addictions.  I'm me and I am free as I am.  And that's what you hate.  You hate that if you don't have that 10am cigarette break that your hands start to shake, that if you don't puff back on that little cancer stick again at noon, that your patience will erode and turn you into the bad man that you wish I was.  My look is my declaration, and it reminds you, it screams to you, that whatever you tell yourself, I am still better than you.

You see, you and I live in two different worlds.  You live in a fantasy; your world is a painted canvas, hung over reality and pinned in place by your addictions.  Your reality is a fiction, a mere daydream in which your vices strip away everything you hate about yourself, about the world around you, and make it all that bit easier to swallow.  You wake up in the morning a less patient man, a less mellow husband as apt to scream at his wife as he is to kiss her good morning.  Face it, you yearn for that man to die, and so you kill him.  You reach for that packet of cigarettes as soon as you can and you choke that man you can't stand, you choke him with smoke, with nicotine and tar.  Throughout the rest of your day, those little reality bending cancer sticks get you from hour to hour.  They kill the trembling in your nicotine stained fingers.  They kill the urge to sock your boss in the face.  They kill you.  They leave nothing but a husk, and into that husk, you pour your fiction, your false reality where you're the good husband, the loving father, the loyal employee.  That's not enough, though, is it?  Despite how much of yourself you bury in smoke and tar, it's not enough and your reality still isn't bearable, is it?  So when you come home, what do you do, huh?  Do you kiss your wife hello?  Do you go see how your kids fared at school?  No, you go to the fridge, you grab a Bud, you crack it open and you drown what reality the smoke couldn't choke out of you.  Whatever was left of the real world to you is tainted now with amber poison, and you love it, you crave it, you don't care if it's poisoning you, because this furthers your release from the world you're not strong enough to live in.  After a few Buds, your wife looks a hell of a lot better, doesn't she?   Can't even tell she smokes sixty a day and has had two kids, can you?  That's the wife you remember from your reality, isn't it?  That's the wife you love, that's the wife you want, the other version is just a bad dream, right?  As more of that liquid death trickles down your throat, that incessant babble from your kids finally loses any meaning or significance to you.  What were they saying anyhow?  Was it about something they'd made you at school?  Falling grades?  Good grades?  Bullies?  You don't know and you never will.  All you know is the babble that just wouldn't stop pouring from them finally ceased to matter and that nagging reminder of reality finally became bearable.  The saddest thing is, you actually believe you're a good role model to your kids, too.  Despite your drunken delirium, your blissful ignorance of their existence, you actually think you're a good father.  When your wife's not around to nag you for the transgression, you even go so far as to encourage your little boy to drink, you give him his first beer and you actually feel proud as you and he down that amber poison, setting your boy on a road to the same delirium you live in, teaching him that it's right to rob yourself of reason, to drown out the real world in favour of a booze induced fantasy.

You warp the reality of who you are with your vices and you make that reality just a little more tolerable.  Me?  I don't live in your fantasy world.  I don't abide by your fiction and I'm not party to your obfuscated reality.  I live in the real world.  I live in the true reality.  What I see, what I feel, what I think is all real, is all true and all me.  My world isn't the product of a nicotine fix.  My reality isn't painted a brighter colour with a few pints of Bud.  Neither the grime of my world, nor the sunshine are the by-product of a hypodermic needle in my arm.  My world is real.  My reality is true.  It's not always pretty, it's not always what I want to see, but it is real and you can't take that away from me.  You can't stand that I live in a world you're too weak to spend more than a few seconds in.  While you steady your nerves with cigarettes, I'm living as the man I really am.  While you drown your reality in waves of stale beer,  I'm living in unadulterated reality. You're a fiction living in a pocket of custom built fantasy.  Who you are is maintained by your addictions.  The world you live in is perpetuated by your vices.  Nothing about you is real except for those insatiable cravings that slowly chip away what reality you'd preserved.  I'm a real person living in the real world.  I am who I am by my own will, not by the addictions that plague me.  My world is the real world, not a painted canvas of stale, liver-rotting booze.  I see my reality clearly, not from behind a veil of obscuring smoke.  You can take that bad man you wake up as and you can transpose his face on to mine.  You can grit your teeth when you see me and you can secretly fantasize about smashing my face in.  You can take all the addictions, all the vices that you know you have, that you know you're tempted by and you can transpose them onto me.  You can make me the monster that you bury daily with booze and drugs and smoke.  It's all okay; you can do it all.  You're not in my reality, you're not a part of my world.  Your lost in your narcotic delirium and how can I possibly expect you to tell the difference between the real me and the transposed you?

See, I want you to know something.  Despite everything, I don't hate you.  I pity you.  I pity anyone who can't face reality.  I pity anyone who has to drown their world in alcohol, has to choke their reality in smoke.  I pity anyone like you; anyone too weak to live in the real world, in my world.  Conversely, I don't mind that you hate me, I don't object that you despise me.  While my tattoos, my piercings, my look and identity are my declarations to you, your loathing is your unwitting declaration to me.  It screams to me that you know I don't share your vices.  It tells me that you know I'm not governed by your addictions, by your cravings.  It shouts loud and clear that you know I live in the real world, in a world and reality you can't bear to face. It tells me that I'm right, and you're wrong and you know it.  It tells me that you know I'm free, that you know I'm real in a way you can never be, and you envy me that.

So, yeah, I'm just a punk kid, and I'm better than you.