No Smoking

In the restaurant there's no smoking
Except the kind from the cafe next door
That lingers in the air and stinks up your nose
And burns through the good champagne.

It's a half life for a cigarette, the small shoulder to cry in,
the addiction with only drawbacks to behold,

As they're meant to be a tool.
Sitting as a halo in my studio,
Surrounded by stone and brick and steel and bustle from the square.
Jumping into ecstasy, it helps gather the salutes to be penned.
Rather, it is killing me twofold:
Once in my lungs all the mundane impurities are charmed away, like snakes from a basket.
The second is suicide in a most literal sense.

She smokes after sex the same way Humphrey Bogart does:
2 parts emphasis, 1 part release.
Coupled with the glow of the city,
Silent onlookers and unwitting voyeurs,
It is a swill too intoxicating to bear.
The apartment enveloped in electric poetry,
Both passion and knowledge in a lightning package.

She will leave. Let it be known.
One way or another, the goodbye kisses she so freely gives
Are sobering and smoke-filled too.
The habit she left like a stain across my floor, rising from a grave and into any mouth
Agog in my room.

Last it will capture is the owner of its earliest memory,
When emphysema overpowers its creator.
The desk is still here of course,
Sitting in the middle of the brick wall and the skyline,
Still teetering when an elbow presses its right side.
It's still being used, by God, it's being used.

I press an elbow tentatively to the top,
Thinking through last lines.
Wheeze. Pause. Think. Wheeze.
Wheeze some more. Think. Blink.
I thrust my quill into the hole in my throat,
Drawing out ink.

They told us no smoking.

Author's Note

Inspired by Lynn Emanuel's poem, "Walt, I Salute You!" and Halsey's "Hold Me Down".