now is not a good time to quit smoking. just look outside. the world is in the palliative ward. i wonder if this is my final drag. exhale through my nose. feel the radiant mentholated char lining my sinuses. dear invisible breath machine, so much damage we do can’t be seen. john wayne had his left lung cut out in 1964. and the marlboro man died where the flavor is. it happened to them, it can get me too. i’m no duke, just a dude riding hard to lose the cowboy killers. kicking up dust in my nicotine dreams, a giant cig rides a strawberry roan. he says slow down, hold me, breathe me. i never thought i was invincible. my apathy just outweighed my fear. now it’s more like slow burn murder. self-pity torpedos rolled up in my own undoing. i wake up and before i know it my wranglers are on and i’m blocking the wind, dart in hand. i’m only an animal. an animal with a conception of its own death, miragelike on the sandy juniper horizon. sometimes it looks warm and inviting. funny even, like a chimpanzee puffing away on a heater. but i remember how every smoke costs eleven minutes of life. then i think of all the poetry i may be burning. verse won’t mean much to me when my lungs collapse. but each poem and each raspy second prove that i’m still here. like the shrinking white space of the last sheet in the ream, everything is more precious when we feel it running out. the more i think it over, today is a perfect day to stop killing myself.