The politics of pot smoke

I knew our love was destined to fail the day you said
You’d rather not smoke at all than to smoke resin.
Before the, “I told her not to come here.”

I remember the embarrassment in your eyes
When I collected all your rich friends resin
to take home to smoke.

“Here, you can have it.”
They said with their type of smirks.
“You can have it all.”

There are two types of smokers in the world.
Those who can afford chronic.
The rest of us who still love weed.

And I was taught a type of education you never learned.


While you were buying grinders and scissors to break up your sticky
building your blunts,
I was daily smoke driving in the winter,
rotating defrost and rolling windows down with every hit.
We had bronchitis so bad that the free nurse threatened pneumonia
If we didn’t stop smoking the cigarettes.

And we thought that the weed would help,
hardly ever needing a spoof, but when we snuck,
we never looked at the brown dryer sheets.
I stopped my car every 8 inches, foot to the break,
coughing, coughing, opening doors.

Till the flame hits your throat and makes you throw up.
Till the very next quarter of mid-grade.

We saved every bit.
Every dime, every quarter.
We taught one another to let it burn until its white.
That joints burn up weed, just like metal pipes.
D.I.Y. gravity bongs,
A blunt is a special occasion.
That you needed to smoke once a day to make life work.
I learned the exact crackle of the last hit leaving,
That wooden pipes will break with a resin build up.
That plastic grinders are never the answer.
That you don’t need another one hitter, you need to save your money for cigarettes.

There’s politics in marijuana.
A poverty in resin.
You had never had to understand.
Never had to yearn
for a resin bowl.