Writing with a cigarette.

He is a man standing alone in front of the whole world dressed only in his words and the ash from a thousand cigarettes, judged by seas and mountains, scorned in bars and barred from homes. 

He holds tightly onto his name. He repeats that name as clearly as a youthful church bell tolls under a smaragdine sky in the western desert at daybreak, with only lizards to hear its righteous peal. 

The world acts as if he never wrote at all, never smoked. But all the marks are there, unmistakable on the paper as brave testament to a love deeper than melancholy. 

That man used a lit cigarette dipped in anguish to write his stories. Now when I turn the small pages he left behind they're still covered in the purple ash that used to fall during his long, motionless periods of thinking. 

The words he wrote rasp on the page when I look at them, but in my ears they are as soft as a curl of the blue smoke he breathed out that spread, as vapours do, to invade every corner of the parlour where I sit to read; they stain my soul as I breathe them in to irrigate my mind.