You stole my last cigarette and coughed red all over the ashtray. Fountain like it overflowed with our combined wants. Your limbs seemed annexed from your mind and flew all over the place, like across my shoulders, and I had to wriggle out. You drew sticky lines in ash and spit, into a ***** table.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in times like these.

All I could do was collect the half smoked butts and construct them into something not new but at least poisonous. I keep it far from you, though you’re paying as much attention to this as the last bi-election.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in any time.

My smoke creates a protective screen between us, unhappily easily broken by a waving hand or a breath exhaled forcefully. But it’s all we have, so we sit quiet and in our own worlds. You’ve got bats and old songs in your head while I have ****** in mine. Every second of silence is a plot to **** you, every puff, a breath, a gift, a warning. I’d give you anything you want because soon you will be gone and I will take it back.

Everything. The gifts, lies, memories. So your mindlessness won’t serve you so well.

The only thing you get to keep will be a coffin and a lonely name. Keep philosophising into your glass. You want a tin foil hat? Is that your last request? Let me laugh as I dig the hole, I won’t trust anyone else with your death. It belongs to me and I’ll take you and what’s due with utter carelessness.

I close my eyes as you open your mouth and I dream up a better world. It is better because you are not in it. It is better because you are in a grave I had commissioned and then forgotten about and your name is spelt wrong and I had done that and the headstone had been kicked over and maybe I did that or maybe it was some other random marauder with more beer in their veins than blood and an arbitrary rage to exhale.

I woke up into a smoky haze when you touched my arm, asked me for a light. You'd bought a new pack of smokes and two pints. Maybe I can deal with you now. You touched my arm and I started and punched you in the temple.

You don’t mind.

In fact, you laugh and snuggle up to me, take a sip of my beer and steal my cigarette and when I say I can’t wait to **** you, you laugh as if there is no consequence.

We forget about each other as we drink ourselves senseless.