One Last Cigarette

If. I. Could. Only. Feeeeeelllllll-

1.

Wild Men

With eyes like a pilgrim

Eyes on posters

Eyes in conduit drawers

Eyes on dice retired from gambling

I know you

You stapled a page from Gideon’s Bible onto a streetlight

In some place you swore was called Nowhere

And I believed you

Because you promised

That you’d burn for me

Burn-

BURN!

 

2.

Don’t mind me

I’m just a creep

Kissing a sample of your shadow

Pulling off under these gym shorts

To that beach clipping of you on Facebook

And I’m getting wet

Wetter than a mouth at a buffet

And I’m listening to aluminum versions of the Stones

Seeing you-

You seeing me-

Wishing you might have stayed

And smoked. One. Last. Cigarette.

 

3.

He sat on the edge of my pipe dream

Plucking the abacus of fate like a terribly tuned harp

With his Velcro eyes

And his painted lips

With a ceiling for a forehead

While I lay on my back

Counting the empty stars in the watershed sky

Wishing for a set of pure-bred blueprints

That just might save me

From another bloody night-

 

Reviews

[...]

1.
Wild Men
With eyes like a pilgrim
Eyes on posters
Eyes in conduit drawers
Eyes on dice retired from gambling
I know you
You stapled a page from Gideon’s Bible onto a streetlight
In some place you swore was called Nowhere
And I believed you
Because you promised
That you’d burn for me
Burn-
BURN!

… i’m writing this review after reading this verse for the fourth time … and my eyes are overflowing … we couldn’t have that last smoke together … sabby, emmah and i … three smoking-zone buddies in the corporate world of concrete cynicism … swearing by our idiosyncrasies and idiocy too … for the intrinsic idealism inscribed on our soul … which we could share only with each other … in our friendship of isolation … hidden from the world … as we stood and smoked on our island … and island where emmah and i are now stranded … but trying to invoke the interesting memories … the “sabby moments” … to intentionally stop mourning … because without intention we can’t … it’s so impossible to believe in intelligence over instinct …

2.
Don’t mind me
I’m just a creep
Kissing a sample of your shadow
Pulling off under these gym shorts
To that beach clipping of you on Facebook
And I’m getting wet
Wetter than a mouth at a buffet
And I’m listening to aluminum versions of the Stones
Seeing you-
You seeing me-
Wishing you might have stayed
And smoked. One. Last. Cigarette.

… we wish he was here … and … we wish we could listen to pink floyd’s “wish you were here” … and smoke that one last cigarette … and look at his ridiculously bizarre studio pictures … and giggle … our greatest luxury … in lives that constantly reminded us of how the way we lived them was way too quaint and way too chaotic for even those who professed they had a penchant for the “orginal” and for the “unique” … we miss how we made sense to each other particularly in our nonsensical chatter and our insane taste in music … making the word eclectic look timid and shy … we heard, we drank, we danced, we laughed …

3.
He sat on the edge of my pipe dream
Plucking the abacus of fate like a terribly tuned harp
With his Velcro eyes
And his painted lips
With a ceiling for a forehead
While I lay on my back
Counting the empty stars in the watershed sky
Wishing for a set of pure-bred blueprints
That just might save me
From another bloody night-

… one of us is dead … and the remaining two are silenced … looking in the blue-prints of poetry for the signs of our lives … numbed by the pounding pain of our own heartbeats … breathing with effort … writhing effortlessly … the strain is so telling that sometimes we forget to speak … to say anything of consequence … and just pause … to make a humungous effort to turn time backwards … with our will … to return to the day of the accident and keep sabby awake on the wheel … we fail … and then we start talking to him again … we recount all the funny things he said and all the songs he loved … and he succeeds … in keeping us alive … your verse is about all this to us … we connect with it at a soul level and feel indebted that you wrote it … thank you … p.s. ... hence the unconventional review ...

(serah)
(editor, the fourth dimension blog)

[mrityunjay]

Congratulations! This entry was awarded a "VERY SPECIAL MENTION" in the WISH YOU WERE HERE (POETRY) CONTEST created by THE FOURTH DIMENSION BLOG (http://thefourthdimensionblog.blogspot.com/) for members of The Writers Cafe. To read other entries and reviews, please visit:
http://thefourthdimensionblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wish-you-were-here-contest-results.html