An interview with a Cigarette
How do you cope?
Sometimes, I watch old movies
where I am a symbol
of rebellion and bike-sheds,
of good times had,
or a moment
of pensive freedom,
or a last request.
Or I recall
when you would call me
Gauloises or Gitanes
and I was the height
of left-bank existential angst,
nearly everyone
wanting to be seen with me.
And I ask myself,
Could I really have changed so much?
Which of your smokers
do you like the most now?
Those who buy my tobacco in pouches,
like vagrants, revolutionaries
and young romantics.
I feel the roll
of their gentle fingers, thumbs,
the lick of their tongues
on my skin –
not just plucked from a pack
by a stranger.
I know I’m still a product
of their desire to have me,
but at least we share some history,
and however imperfect
my newly formed skin,
they always savour me.
What do you think caused
your fall from grace?
People like you
starting to believe
you’d found within me
an obsessive need to be liked.
How could this be
when the heavier your drag
the more quickly I turned
into ash.
But wasn’t burning bright a part
of that success you so enjoyed?
Perhaps.
But it’s strange,
because in my dreams,
I am not this searing cylinder,
cured and oversold.
I am a leaf.
Tristan Moss lives in York with his partner and two youngish children. Over the past 12 years, he has had many poems published in online and paper magazines, such as Magma, Ink Sweat & Tears, Obsessed with Pipework, Snakeskin, Dreich, Poems in the Waiting Room, London Grip & Shadowtrain. He has recently had a pamphlet published entitled The Cold War (Lapwing Publications).
Kodama
Someone once explained to me
that the way to get what you really desire
is to envisage yourself there, at the winning line,
then carefully think back in time,
each twist and turn, every decision,
reverse-markers on the path,
and plot yourself a graph.
This way, imagination and mathematics
can be multiplied, combined
into a function, as the map spreads back,
its thorny fingers morphing into roots,
skin-crawling under your eyelids,
your spirit-level guide, a focused fantasy.
But I hold no cards,
the path is very long
and the branches closing in
cannot reverse time.
Here at the trunk
my
protoplasmic
words
lie,
a sticky mess.
David Van-Cauter’s pamphlet Mirror Lake is published by Arenig Press. He was runner-up in the Ver Poets Open Competition 2019. He is a personal tutor based in Hertfordshire.