Cigarettes Poems

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
...

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
...

So you think its Stephen?
Then I'd best make sure
Be on the safe side as it were.
Ah, theres been a mistake. The hair
...

Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
...

call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the
depression era.
...

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
...

(from a song)

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
...

To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine--
...

Who is he?
A railroad track toward hell?
Breaking like a stick of furniture?
The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool?
...

I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarettes don't smell bad.
...

I'll settle for the 6 horse
on a rainy afternoon
a paper cup of coffee
in my hand
...

I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even
so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much
to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin
...

They are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
...

The gay young men and the love-sick girls,
and the abandoned widows suffering in sleepless delirium,
and the young pregnant wives of thirty hours ...
...

I sleep a lot and read St. Thomas Aquinas
Or The Death of God (that's a Protestant book).
To the right the bay as if molten tin,
Beyond the bay, city, beyond the city, ocean,
...

Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.
...

So like a flower and a current of air
the flow of water fleeting shadows
the smile glimpsed at midnight this excellent evening
so like every joy and every sadness
...

My doctor, the comedian
I called you every time
and made you laugh yourself
when I wrote this silly rhyme...
...

Sometimes, I, too, tell the ah's
of my heart one by one
like the blood-red beads
of a ruby rosary strung
...

He didn't want to do it with skill,
He'd had enough of skill. If he never saw
Another villanelle, it would be too soon;
And the same went for sonnets. If it had been
...

Cigarettes are nasty,
They can be your friend when your real friends can't,
Cigarettes kill people everyday,
People have ownership over their own homes,
...

Cigarettes are often used to treat stress,
Stress can be caused many different situations,
Jobs are a major source of stress,
Bills can't be payed without money,
...

In the old days sexy smoking all the rage
Some feeling perpetually pressured
And trapped in a difficult mental cage
The bars of the mind tricking into agreeing.
...

with wages earned on the assembly line he stopped drinking cognac it's worth drinking only in the company of soldiers buys burgundy by the gallon cigarettes by the carton facing the wall in his living room in a chair he sits telling stories in the evenings smoke the silhouette of a woman dancing from tobacco tucked between fingers lips if i could just smoke while sleeping if only she could of stories told the gun he held to a general's head the general who cried hung my promotion i was supposed to be colonel the american officer who ate at his table he described the meat how tender it was simmering in a clay pot i told him names are for people a dog is a dog while on leave as if one could just leave he had his nephews stand guard with plastic rifles tin foil helmets they could have been officers if only they would listen of the stories the one he liked best was about a woman not just any woman my bride to be full of anger and spit and love she cleaved her finger the engagement ring intact in a fit of jealousy she returned it in a box with a note that read I return this ring for you have been taken she discovered my secret my mistress the war
...

She screams without her cigarettes,
She cries without her "man toy."
She complains about never having a job.
You know my mother sounds like a teenager.
...

Smoking is injurious to health warning advertisement has
Not stopped smoking tobacco cigarettes all over the world!
But its restrictions by laws of nations have considerable
Effects over world men and its expose by experts has stopped!
...

SMOKER

I use to be a smoker
Many years ago
...

Great people.


You have met your friends and smoke together.
...

He always smelled of cigarettes and wine
in his faded blue jeans and cowboy boots
whose smile was as bright as the day's decline
or a black hellebore plucked by its roots.
...