Today's cigar tastes like a mouldy old
accordion's esophagus. Tastes like
a vent extruding from a nameless building
you're walking by at night and out it comes,
a stale, metallic gust of ghastly air
that's pushed into your lungs; like hacking coughs
unleashed on crowded buses as they climb
uphill from downtown toward the hospitals.
The outer leaf is cracking -- smoke escapes.
The taste improves with time. Neck, lips and jaw,
with stogies; less the throat, and not the lungs.
These poems, they are better than the life
we lived for them, which gives the stupid life
an even sweeter aftertaste. Two thirds
gone, it's lava streaming out a mountain.
And here the trees, in porch light's testy ink.
The maple, skinny skeleton with gestures
out of Noh. The cypress leans away,
as if it's ill-disposed to smoke. Would that
my whiskey helped these trees against the cold.
And their reply would be, If you'd been born
a plant, you wouldn't need to smoke a plant.
~
(previously published in The Hollins Critic)
