Breathe

9:12 p.m.

tobacco stained breath

Dusky smoke rolling in nightly gloom

keyboard missing letters T, R, H, U

and that same sombre silhouette of a stranger poisons

the discoloured wall of his past poetic smiles.

Knuckles blue,tirelessly the words are drafted

Words born out of clouded memories,in the company of an empty liquor bottle-

Only he knows the magnetic seduction of his lies.

1:28 a.m.

the woozy smell of fermentation instilled in his tongue

is bleeding internally through the left saturated nicotine lung.

In that space he cannot romanticize a drunken-drenched word to call it poetry

Puff a cigarette ablaze again.

And again.

Another page has scorched

from the dying embers of cigar that slowed his internal clock;

contemplating those smoky memories,surreptitious in the folds of his mind.

4:00 a.m.

and the ardent absence of those memories burn in his mind

Like decomposed adrenaline coals

seething from his briny pen and contracted, sooty irony

dribbled across the unsung limerick of his narcotic poetry .

He sighs, a sickening sigh of discontent

coiled in the mouth of his stomach

aching to rumble with the thunder out in the cerulean sea

6:23 a.m. liquid amber morning and salty breeze

In his nostrils and cracked lips

He sits in his red wooden chair, wistfully

digesting the words composed in the furtive hours of the night

He once wrote with child-like splendour

upon the crumbling walls of his childhood home,

imagining what life could mean in mankind’s metaphorical eagle wings

How translucent is the delirious view of a child?

Believing in everything while knowing nothing at all

6:53 a.m. and it’s a cruel, cruel world when poetry tastes

like adder’s poison under his lips, down his jagged throat it slips.

Anemic fingers twitched on the computer screen, aching to be released

There he sits, in that red wooden chair smoking his silver fire of madness

combusting the paradoxical answers to life

He recalls, in the humid swirl of perspiration and thick formaldehyde

the click-click-clicking sound of his parched typewriter

knowing that art is sacrifice, love and hate

all in one breath

He inhales and exhales

Poisonous comfort to an empty mind,

his heart and lung,charred with black, rebelling in futility

The world grew darker, by the minutes,he saw his words flashing

The final glimpse of futile life lay bright before his eyes

An impossible struggle to just B R E A T H E

‘Yes,'he says- to the ethers,eyes ablaze-'It is the air of contradiction.’

The common human contradiction to adore what inflicts the most pain.

(Just breathe)