Stupid Smoke

It was raining again, too much tapping on the windows, stupid smoke coming through the heating ducts. Rotten time to get the flu or the blues or get one of those thoughts in your brain that just rotates like one of those apple and cherry pie slices on the counters of the lunch counters your uncle took you in the formative Sixties, one of those ideas you play with uselessly while trying to grab some brief period of sleep before you awake to rain rattling the roof . 

You want a cigarette but you quit smoking twenty years ago and yet you still want a cigarette because it would make you look noir and sexy and like a man who had a hard night and was facing a more brutal day that would be fierce with fists to the gut and the jawline. 

Here, let me reupholster your face you could hear someone say. Pow! Sapped like a punk trying to sell dirty pictures of your grandfather shaving in a wifebeater, his face lathered in spunky foam, a blade to his cheek, his head turned toward the camera with a tilt of his head, smiling through the shaving cream. He had no front teeth, but he could say cheese.

Still raining. Damn. It'll be a brutal cup coffee after a shower . Yes,  you live alone and you are  talking to myself. But  you don't listen to what you're trying to say. No one does.