This is one of my series poems. The way this one was made was by taking random observations throughout a month's time, and then, through a process of elimination and combination, I came up with this crazy thing...*
Brick wall of smoke.
Spongy hair soaking up the stench.
It makes you cool. You look so sexy.
Vintage case. Awesome lighter.
Teary-eyed and stinging.
**
Silver or gold.
Menthol or ultra.
Regular or light. 
Short or long.
Hard or soft.
***
Delicate fingers.
Lipstick filter.
Hypnotic smoke.
Wrap your lips around that.
Inhale, exhale, shallow breath.
Worst craving.
I need one.
****
I didn’t have an idea for my paper, but I did have gin and cigarettes. I wondered what he would say if he came in the door to find me chain-smoking while drinking a dirty martini in front of a blank computer screen.
*****
Worsdsworth is waiting.
Cough into a passed on book.
Splintered toothpick.
Bent, saliva straw.
******
Can I bum a square?
Am I still here, Babydoll?
You wanna go burn one?
Can I get a light?
This is the poem I got 'The Perfect Table' thing from. I like it:A Glimpse of the Afterlifeby Chard deNiordI’m smoking a cigarette and having a drink
with the only woman who’s right for me.
I’m telling her a joke that isn’t that funny
but we laugh anyway as if it were, and then it is.
Ideal forms are everywhere, the chairs
on which we sit, the windows to our left
and right, our risen bodies at the perfect table.
It’s my idea of heaven to be with her on earth,
breathing the air in a smoke-filled room,
drinking tonic laced with gin, listening to the king.
The conversation rises to a deeper level.
She disagrees with me on a matter of religion,
as if religion still mattered in the afterlife,
as if there were no greater joy than to converse
with the one you love about an idea that’s impossible
to prove. I am drawn to her in direct proportion
to the differences of our opinions, ecstatic
to find our bodies have survived in heaven.
There is also time as the darkness thickens.
I retrieve her shawl from the back of her chair
and cover her shoulders which have begun to shake
in the chill of heaven. I have passed from one plane
to the next without detecting the slightest change,
except I know my body lies somewhere beneath
the dirt I walk on now as we leave the bar.
I know the greatest mercy of all is to be with the one
you love beneath a sky on which it’s written:
You’ve died ten thousand times and you’ll die again.
She decided to leave the candles lit while she went out for a cigarette. She gently closed the door behind her and stepped into the hall. The green, Berber carpet was almost too thick for her stilettos. She pushed the down button and listened to the buzz of the elevator as it climbed for her floor. It dinged, the door slid open, and she stepped inside onto the faux-marble tile. Her heels sounded great against the floor, but when she looked down she saw that her Gucci shoes were now ruined from the puddles that had bled through the leather. She pushed the button to the lobby and paused to look at her reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator.
She stood there with her head slightly cocked to one side as she swiveled on the smooth pads of her shoes. The top button of her coat had finally fallen off, revealing a hint of the flimsy material of her red dress that peeked out just below her collar bone. She pulled and twisted the frayed button string between her chipped, Twinkled Pink nails and tried to remember how long it had been since her last manicure. Grazing the tip of her nose, she reached to sweep her bangs out of her eyes and could smell the stench of the last cigarette that lingered on her fingers; now the smell was in her hair.
She studied her face and tried to decide if she looked pretty when she cried even with the black lines running down her cheeks. She furrowed her carefully-plucked brows and pouted her faded, Iced Raisin lips, mocking her own expressions. She practiced shock and sadness with her eyes, reflecting upon the details of her last exploit.
Watching herself, she reached into her shallow, silken pocket and pulled out a dull, silver lighter and a bent cigarette. Her eyes shined as she held the flame to the tip. She studied how she smoked. She pulled the cigarette to her mouth and wrapped her lips around the flattened filter. She watched her chest slowly rise as she breathed in the tar and nicotine, and she studied the lift of her chin and the extension of her neck as she exhaled a haze of white smoke. Her long fingers looked especially delicate when she held the thin cigarette.
Without finishing, she tossed the cigarette with a melodramatic flick of her wrist and ground it into the tile with the sharp heel of her shoe. Smoothing the front of her coat with her hands, she pressed her palms against the wool and slid them down from her breasts to her thighs. She wiped the lines from her cheeks, blew her reflection a kiss, and turned around to step into the lobby.
