This piece had been written in the form of spoken word poetry, but I haven’t gotten around to recording it. So here’s the text. It’s also a piece that means something to me and it makes me happy when people read it.

The smoker lights his thirteenth cigarette of the day and sets his life on fire. He poises it in between his lips with the tenderness that he rocks his baby with. He tastes the bitter tobacco in his tongue and closes his eyes in indulgent.

Besides him, the baby closes her eyes, trusting her life on the burning man. His lips part open for the smoke to escape and cloud his face like lust and loss used to when he was a boy.

When he was seventeen, he learned from his friends that it was cool and his parents never taught him of the dangers. So he took up smoking like he had taken up basketball ten years earlier, bouncing smoke in his lungs and dribbling toxic in his veins, shooting a three-point death sentence through the hoop of his mouth, until it slides down his throat and is lost in the labours of his kidneys.

He took up smoking like he had taken up basketball, bouncing smoke in his lungs and dribbling toxic in his veins, shooting a three-point death sentence through the hoop of his mouth.

Brown are his teeth from nicotine and tar, not white as they used to be and whenever he beams smiling, a row of broken houses and ruptured dreams. Sadly, not charming anymore. Dark is his lips, like the colour of his future with his baby daughter and the happiness that is robbed from her every time her father lights his cigarette.

And somewhere inside, not far from where he used to place her hands to feel the steady rhythm of his beating heart, his lungs are fighting a rigged battle in which they will never claim victory.

Ashes cover every inch of his body, kissing his forehead like a lover’s goodnight, clinching his neck like the arms of a beloved daughter. Ashes in the crevices between his elbows and the nook behind his ears, hiding in obscure places like the cracks of his chipped fingernails and the folds of his daughter’s white skirt.

The smoker does not know how to stop even though he knows that the next roll could always be his last or that cigarette may be the last thing he will ever taste. He does not know how, or he does but he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to, or he does but he doesn’t have the strength. He doesn’t have the strength, or maybe he does but not the courage, because in truth, he is afraid.

He’s afraid to lose another habit, the only thing of his passion, the weapon that took away his time and his money and his breath and one day, a father from his daughter. He is scared that he will forget how to inhale smoke as he now forgets how to hold a basketball.

You see, forgetting is a dangerous thing, like when his daughter was in sixth grade and he forgot it was graduation day. I’m sorry, baby, he said, I was in the drug store.

And his daughter grows up to hate the smell of smoke. To despise her father’s clothes that reek of death and the puff in front of her father’s face, concealing the browned teeth and darkened lips that one day will turn cold.

And all because of a stupid cigarette stick, his stupid friends who told him it was okay, and his parents who didn’t warn him of the dangers.

All because of the ashes in his lungs.

His lungs, black, bruised and beaten, pretending they are strong when the smoke have brought them to their knees. She knows, one day the lungs will betray their master. One day, they will make ashes out of her father. One day, when humans can survive with only one lung, she will gladly give him hers.

One day, the lungs will betray the master.

One day, they will make ashes out of her father.

One day, when humans can survive with only one lung, she will gladly give him hers.

But until that day arrives, the eternal footman awaits, lingering in the corner of their living room, a tiger in the shadows, ready to pounce.

The smoker lights his fourteenth cigarette of the day and his daughter holds up her hand to his mouth.

Dad, she says, if you loved me, you wouldn’t kill me like this.