They are coated with smoke
It excretes from their clothes so much
it feels as though their bones are made of it.
They are incorporeal, spirits afloat
only tied down by their fleshy skin and heavy skeleton.
They are uniform in their individuality,
every one of them rejects and rejecters of society
with their smirks sharp as pocketknives and matchstick laughs
They are children of midnight, their faces aglow in false starlight
and street lamps to show the way to the place others call home
They are unstoppable in their intense efforts
to bitter their throats as much as their souls
with that stinging liquid that sets hearts on fire while drowning
their hopeless owners, the false adolescents, somehow grown-up
come the nighttime but blissful idyllic children when the shadows of sunrise alight.
They wear insults and curses like badges of honor,
pinned across the open wounds of their chest like stitches
as though it will numb the pain, the pain of living, the ache of breathing
that somehow fades away, just as they do, when their sprits rise
up in the air, if only for a moment, to become the smoke
they so insatiably crave.