Still Quitting

Yes, I still haven't smoked a cigarette since April 1, but I've been "tapering" (fooling myself? rationalizing?) with cigarillos ever since. My aim, though, is to make June 1, a week from today, my first totally smoke-free day. We'll see, and probably smell, too. One fear I have about quitting is addressed in this, the second excerpt from my magnum (or should it be king-sized, 100?) opus concerning smoking.


Smoking: A Eulogy In Progress (Part 2)


It was poets who
hooked me smoking
down in North Carolina,
where it's one's patriotic duty
to smoke, so I guess
it'll have to be poetry
to unhook me.
I haven't been able to quit
for my health, hygiene
or my wallet,
but maybe I can for poetry.
Silly fool me,
thinking on March thirty-first
that April first, Holy Thursday,
would be the day to smoke
my last cigarette:
Go through the agony
of initial withdrawal
during Christ's passion,
but most important,
give me fodder
for writing a poem
for a reading in less than three weeks.
Anything for a poem,
including my sanity.
But how truly foolish
to spite the the unofficial
tenth muse, Nicotina,
fraternal half-sister
of Erato, muse of lyric poetry,
and arch-rival of Melpomene,
muse of tragedy.
Oh Nicotina,
let it be an amicable divorce,
in flesh only, not spirit.
All the lines, stanzas, poems complete
that have come via
the dingy fumes
of your writer's unblocking instrument
of inspiration, that virgin white
nail of noxious nirvana,
while I stood shivering
outside of coffeehouses or the house itself,
where will they all come from now?
Undrugged, unversed in this abstinent existence,
I'm jonesing right now for a rhyme, a line,
a metaphor, a mere word,
something like, well,
something fitting.
Whence, dear smokey seductress,
whence now?

k.d. lang-Smoke Dreams