/The Last of the Slow Burn
"I took my first smoke tonight"
By Ava Longfellow
I took my first smoke tonight. I've smoked before, in the cold, outside clubs, restaurants, beside people and alone while walking to my car in stiletto boots wrapped in long leather coats. Always, I have held the smoke in my mouth, breathing in a little, inhaling a little, and liking the feeling of that little phallus between my fingers. But, I was always disingenuous.
Tonight though, I sit in my office chair, cinched in my corset, warm in my furry boots, I smell you on my skin and I smoke a little cherry flavored slim filtered clove cigar. I taste the dark intoxicating sticky sweet of the slim stick, wrapped in black paper. It teases and entices with a virgin tartness. It needs oxygen for fuel, mine to keep it alive. Oxygen keeps it alive, but kills it also. The little cigar cannot and does not keep burning without the help of my lungs.
Every time I inhale, I watch the ring of fire advancing towards me on its inevitable warpath of cindering destruction. The edges of the paper burns away to leave that gray trail of ash that tells its own fleeting past. It is my first, real smoke. And it is like first love: the beginning is the best and the end leaves you wanting, unsatisfied and burned.
Newly lit, the first high is the first kiss. The first touch of poison, the chemical imbalance, leaving me heady and feeling dangerous. The toxic chemicals permeating through the buds on my tongue, through the pores down my throat. Tonight, when no one else is watching, when I am not trying just to be next to someone in the cold and borrowing their cigarette as an excuse for company, I sit, I smoke, and I feel it.
I watch the little stick of fire and I think of you. Within the smoke that hangs in the air, like a still curtain of cold, early morning mist on tricky highway roads that makes a
The first high is the first kiss.
Every time I inhale, I watch the ring of fire advancing towards me on its inevitable warpath of cindering destruction. The edges of the paper burns away to leave that gray trail of ash that tells its own fleeting past. It is my first, real smoke. And it is like first love: the beginning is the best and the end leaves you wanting, unsatisfied and burned.
Newly lit, the first high is the first kiss. The first touch of poison, the chemical imbalance, leaving me heady and feeling dangerous. The toxic chemicals permeating through the buds on my tongue, through the pores down my throat. Tonight, when no one else is watching, when I am not trying just to be next to someone in the cold and borrowing their cigarette as an excuse for company, I sit, I smoke, and I feel it.
I watch the little stick of fire and I think of you. Within the smoke that hangs in the air, like a still curtain of cold, early morning mist on tricky highway roads that makes a
Pierre dal Corso
person question his decision making process, I think about the future that I can barely see. And appropriately, like a fading, lingering scent, I am reminded of you.
I think of the end, the last of the slow burn, when I suck in the last breath, the scorch of the heat sneaks up on me. Playing with fire. It’s so literal, the cigarette. No wonder the success of it as a phallic euphemism, the tango with death, and our attraction to it. The smoke, the smell are like a faint memory like when you wake up from a dream that changed you, at least you thought so in the dream, you were affected, and like smoke, it disappeared, leaving the memory of an imprint, a feeling, a wandering thought and scent.
I think of the end, the last of the slow burn, when I suck in the last breath, the scorch of the heat sneaks up on me. Playing with fire. It’s so literal, the cigarette. No wonder the success of it as a phallic euphemism, the tango with death, and our attraction to it. The smoke, the smell are like a faint memory like when you wake up from a dream that changed you, at least you thought so in the dream, you were affected, and like smoke, it disappeared, leaving the memory of an imprint, a feeling, a wandering thought and scent.
- 02/05/2011
