TNG reader Mike B. submits this poem, the seventh in a Thursday series. Illustration by Ryan Blomberg.
First let me say that I don’t even social-smoke anymore. But who among us hasn’t tried something in an effort to fit in?
I wrote this a few years ago after one of the last times I had a cigarette. Even though I can’t bear even the smell of cigarette smoke anymore, there’s still something about the scent of a fresh, unlit Camel Light, which was the first cigarette I ever smoked.
Just smelling the tobacco itself brought back a flood of associations and memories, not all of them bad, and I wanted to give them a chance to come out.
Ode to a Camel Light

I asked for a cigarette
(Even though I don’t smoke)
And Chris handed me a Camel Light
From the pack he had just opened.
It was fresh
And it smelled delicious.

It smelled like high school
When Jason and Jol and Bill invited me to the woods for a cigarette
(even though I didn’t smoke).

They handed me a Camel Light.
It felt like fuck you
And it smelled delicious.

Soon we were having smokes behind
The pizza place. Sometimes the delivery guy
Saw us, but he never said anything. Yeah, he saw
Us, and we looked right back at him!

We only smoked Camel Lights
With their blend of Turkish and domestic tobacco,
Their scent of souks and wailing minarets,
Languid expatriate bars with aimless ceiling fans,
Clandestine keg parties
And friends forever.
We only smoked Camel Lights.

I don’t smoke anymore.
I try to eat right
And exercise.

But I still hang out and drink beers
And joke and laugh and act stupid,
And (even though I don’t smoke),
I’ll sometimes allow myself
A Camel Light,
Waving it unlit
Underneath my nose
To smell the thing.

I’ll close my eyes
And picture scenes from Casablanca
And pizza places
And people twenty years ago
Who let me be cool
In the usual, desperate ways
Of young men.

And it is delicious.

Read more Thursday Poems:

Depressing Lesbian Gift Shop
Snapshot
Subway Muezzin
On Failure, and To It
She flips the page
I Never Told You

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