Realm of Realness

The warm smell of buttery bread filtered through my nose and tickled the little hairs on the edges of my nostrils. It smelled like home, a safe and warm place that ushered in only good thoughts and ideas. Cigarette smoke burned it out of the comforts of my lungs and in its place, was a new comfort followed by a sudden rush of nicotine and tar over-flowing the tangles of the inner respiratory system. 

The nervous system, however, was speeding and slowing all at once. Cardiovascular increased the blood flow, nicotine and small traces of O2 bubbled and spread, increasing or causing the speedy-slow feeling felt everywhere else. Shaking, stiff and iffy, my fingers wrapped firmly around the tanned leather bearings of a dusty, dank book. Whose pages turned from a new-white into a brownish-yellow with traces of coffee, liquor and cigarette stains. 

Frost-filled and red, my fingers steadily held the crumpled white cigarette as the smoke drifted and swirled, some kissing the tips of my black-lined, dirty fingernails, wisping onto the off white pages of the book I had memorized, onto the old, encrusted roses, curled down in scarlet waves, into the sharp edges of the unrealistic looking stem. 

It looked too safe, the scarlet rose wallpaper, like the burnt brown backsplash behind the free-falling roses suspended it into safe obscurity. Unlike life, unreal, safe. What would make it unsafe? I pondered this on lost afternoons, losing myself in bottles of whiskey and cartons of lung damage. This safe, unassuming, suspended in the realm of impossibility object could not have been further from real. 

If it were, it would hurt to look at, to touch, to write about, to ponder, words to describe such an immaculate object would be scarce and much difficulty would lie in existing in a realm that held a real, harmful expression of truth. Safe, unthorned roses, suspended on a backsplash resembling the colour of the book I held in my hands, aged and loved so dearly that I had never gone a day without caressing the soft linen infused pages between my index and middle fingers, getting soaked with never-ending knowledge and experience enveloped in each page and reading them as though it were my first. I loathed the roses, the fakeness of them all, their neverending repetition on a square foot of cheap paper, plastered in glue, held to the wall by my father's sweaty, tobacco kissed workman's hands and left there, just like everything else to rot and curl into the realm of safe obscurity.

Author's Note

This might not be a poem, but it also might be a poem. I just wanted someone to read this. I don't like letting others read my things normally, but this time I will.