I wrote your name on a cigarette.
And smoked it on my balcony.
Each lungful, thus ingested,
lets you reside in me.

Across the water
Allhallows gleams, unknowing.
Where, at some previous point
we were separated by simple geography.

If cigarettes were wishes
I'd have died soon death,
in rattling, emphysemic pursuit
of long-lost love.

Simple geography
can never trump
the complicated, honest reality
of time and place.

The cigarette glows in my hand
reminding me that, as love,
time veils promises
however potent.

There are only eight cigarettes left
in the whole world.
Perhaps I'll leave them, growing stale
in their hidden box.

Or, maybe, I'll smoke them all
today.
Then forget
what I ought to have forgot.

For sake of placid honesty
and goodwill, told in truth.
Time is a lying healer
and I'm on a liar's oath.

Sometimes I’ll rouse, in darkest night, to a twilit form, bending over me, so closely we’re sharing the same still air. I never startle, I somehow know, even before I’m completely awake, that it’s not mortal.

This malevolent force stalks time worn halls like disease. It thrives on inertia and stress, it drinks in fatigue like a vampire devours blood and slowly chews on fragile-hopes until they’re desiccated and smell like rotten flesh.

This death like thing waits for each of us, in tedium, as danger hides in shadow - growling with sullen impatience to smother us.

It’s name is failure. Sometimes, I’m so afraid.