I started screaming In my sleep not too long ago,
Losing my breath in one final blow
Of caffeinated gulps and cigarette smoke.
He was lying alone with this heat in his head,
Passing around these dreams filled with dread
With nicotine in his blood and awkward hopes.
Then he woke tired and bitter, but never it grew,
Where it originated, nobody knew
So he sat young and bitter with nothing to do
But dreams of caffeine and cigarette smoke.
And days ran without sleep
Leading his feet
Towards pillars and pills
And some dreams about Greece
So it’s needless to speak,
Yes, it’s needless to speak
He’s an insomniac with anxiety at its peak.
This is when he started acting,
Both on and offstage
Yet he never much knew which voice to obey
And he’d toss and he’d turn speaking Shakespeare at night
And slowly he’d forgotten there were wars to fight
Of words and wisdom and cigarette smoke
Mosquitos and needles attached to their backs
And upon all of that,
That voice in his head, of heat speaking,
“Look deep in your eyes, how long you’ve been dead”
So he looked in his eyes with a magnifying glass
And sorted out the vessels and put them all back
With cadence and diction he spoke
“I haven’t been dead as long as I’d hoped,
Nor as long as the wheel,
I’m merely a spoke
So I hope that you see me, I hope that you hope
There’s alternatives to the slow suicide of smoke.”
And he woke young and youthful,
Renaissancing and coped,
And walked up to me.
"I know why you smoke."