An ashtray wouldn't do.

Teasing a cigarette,
feather-waisted smoke
giggles past the computer screen
licking lustfully the lot of
chronic wreckage
left over from past fist fights
with willful poems.

The lamp shade guises a 40W sun
singing copper-bellied ballads
to passing bird flocks,
too impatient in their flight to befriend
an autumn of deflated color.

Random evenings, cross-legged on the floor,
creep in like the voice of a woman,
wailing,
light scent of lilac and coffee
renewing an invitation to rummage
under more than her skirt, in abandonment
yellow socks wake to
play hide-and-seek with a single
stuffed mattress of scribbled notes.

To cremate on nights
smoke crouches between eyelashes,
purple and tight like a ribbon
around which one man has weighed the darkness
without her, too long,

"does anybody care how we love,
darling,
with all this time left
to miss?"