Rolling Virginia loosely between fingers and thumbs,
my lungs are the living slums full of nicotine.

I've seen adverts on the TV about what smoking can do for me, how time has moved on.

No longer cool to light up in fancy wheels or ride horses through long pleasant fields with a cigarette in your hand.

(Slogan.

Oh doll
what a menthol can do for you,
in the light blue pack
it's the brand on your back
the all new.
Canceroo,

available in the flip top box.)

We smoked pipes in the sixties
hipsters and hippies
a tiny bit of **** for
the need in us.

And then fashion struck the pipe
like a lightning strike and
you
don't see them anymore.


A woman I knew
died at age one hundred and two
smoked forty a day for forty five years
and fifty for forty more,
she swore it was the
smoking that kept her from
choking on fresh air
and Vegans.

We become the pariahs of
society, but the clean air act never
satisfied me
I like a long cool cig with my first
cup of tea,

I live in the slums of my lungs.