Cigarettes

Image from pinterest.com

death dances

its lulling ritual

in the soft gray undulance

rising from my fingers

I nonetheless savor

warm Mesmer tastes of him

drawn from his embering leaves

around and across

my decadent tongue

pulled down

down and into

the centers of me

where I trap sticky filaments

gluing his powers

all his terrible powers

releasing the rest of him

thinned and diminished

encircling my taciturn face

while I wait

in my centers

wondering

when fortune or fate

will subsume

his ugly dark residue

(originally posted April 2013)

Habit

 

James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” 1955

 

 

I turned to it back at too-tender an age
when a dollar an hour was minimum wage
when the white house was home to Mamie and Ike
and my ride was a nameless old coaster-brake bike

it was unfiltered Luckies or Camels I’d smoke
and it took a few weeks to learn not to choke
we’d roll up a pack in our tight tee-shirt sleeve
like James Dean before his crash taught us to grieve

it’s quite likely that every word I ever wrote
had a nicotine birth in the back of my throat
though I might gain some years if I cold-quit today
what the hell good is time without something to say

 

 

(originally posted December 2013)

Sei Pagliacci

“Sad Clown”
Photo from lifeofanarchitect.com

one last stale rancid Camel passed among
six tattered clowns in wrinkled face-paint smiles
while one picked dung-clung sawdust from his heel
another stared beyond the hay-baled ring
toward mocking littered silence of the stands
the oldest three swapped tales of younger times
when circus played their sweaty days against
cool nights with eager girls in wagon beds
camp followers with no dreams of their own
the fat one drew a final burning drag
hacked up a thick brown sputum to the dirt
and doused within its slime the red-hot butt
whose drowning hiss so loud it stunned them still
and jerked the frightened sight of each as if
in death it shrieked “How will it end for you?”

(This was my first effort at traditional blank verse form – written more than 50 years ago – when I smoked those original unfiltered Camels.)