I wish I were your cigarette: hard to quit, glowing between trembling fingers like sin. To live between bitten knuckles, to be branded as calm.
My faults just fed the craving you never really tried to fight.
But what is a man to you? I burned down into smoke.
Every cigarette is a stand-in: one more pressed against your mouth. Same flavor, same poison, ash thumbed off on the sill.
Inside, the lungs protest, he wasn’t even special.