Humidor

It's been a while since I've posted any new poetry to the blog. So after so long here is something new. I actually had the first draft of this poem done a while back, but I've finally had a chance to sit down and revise it. I think it reminds me a lot of an earlier poem of mine called "Human Hot Box" in that it deals a lot with the same subject matter, but this poem "Humidor" takes that same topic, the smell of smoke in one's clothing, and romanticizes it. Anyway, enjoy.

Humidor
The smoke from your
cigarette isn’t the
smoke that haunts my clothing;
chokes, stifles, and drips misery
from coalminer lungs
like charcoal briquette flavored cola.

I’m in love with your smoke.

Every time you exhale in
wafting plumes,
blonde-haired, bespectacled mushroom cloud
erupting in
loveliness, a
figment of a steadily disappearing peacock.
Poaching Diane Fossey’s gorillas in the living room.
White stream meandering
up and over bulb of nose,
down the bridge,
into nothingness and
good thoughts

--seeming.

It tickles the
hairs inside my nostrils and ears,
fills me with old Europe or
what I imagine old Europe to be,
character-actor-type old men who
talk strictly en français and play chess,
pretentious artistic types who minimalize
facial expressions as effectively as
they do details,
broad-shouldered German ladies who
belt out tunes to
packed houses and
ask,
nay,
demand a hearty sing-along from a
receptive audience.

I don’t even know your foreign tunes.

Bar rooms suffocate;
casinos are nauseous, a
rainbow of stale odors and
creeping death, the
looking down the dark hole of
one’s own mortality.

You, I could sleep
inside your cloud and
feasibly dream of long
steamboat trips or
making love on the Seine, the
way it cusps and hangs in
wreathes
through these years in
your cosmopolitan sheath
can kill and
probably will;

call me a dead man.

Give me a tumor;
terminally in love with you.