Smoke and Ashes.

My thoughts - all in a single cigarette. Smoke and ashes.
The routine of overlooking Moulsecoomb Hill from my garden has seemingly become about expression. I smoke to create; ash dancing in updrafts fighting to stay captured in thought waves now separated from its source. The smoke: twisting and swirling about my eyes and body. They dissipate, much like my thoughts as soon as I can reach for a pen.
I wonder about those before me breathing the Sussex air and what it might have been they contemplated on similar nights. Did they have my thoughts? I can't say.
I always seem to be the last to go to bed in my house - even if the people I live with have been out into Brighton. It's as though I am waiting for some prolific development. I wonder if you know or whether you never really "got" my depths. There isn't much to get, really.

Sometimes it is difficult to know you are alive despite so much life around you. Perhaps it is due to this bustling that life becomes forsaken.
The trees bare, the animals still and the people asleep. You, your thoughts, and the night. There is a jingling sound that comes across the garden to the right and I don't suppose I'll ever know the cause of it - I don't, in fact, need to know.

The cigarette ends and I stub it out on the wall to the conservatory. It dies in glitter and resistance. I retire.
Have I sealed the fate of a youth's death; to become a memory in those minds I met fleetingly? Or perhaps worse, to become old and still clutching this cigarette thinking still about all that was and all that might never be. Possibly bitter, with me as the one reminiscing with old faces that I once knew; all in the end of a cigarette.

Shelter in the memories of love, knives in the wind now feel dull.
At night shadowed phantoms steal embraces from the pitch black depths of the corners of my room. The general buzz that life emits seems quieter.

Tonight held fearsome winds and upon the demise of this night's nicotine appeasement the embers flew toward my face. Surrounded by the possibility that the land might tear apart tonight, the expression of emotion to my fellow man seemed distant and unimaginable. A consistent squeaking from above seemed company enough to invite myself out for a final cigarette at 3.05am.