The wife hated me smoking.
I hated her cooking.
The taste of my choking tobacco helped aid it’s consumption.
The slop grew as grey and disgusting as the woman that served it;
a lumpy convergent mess with a thick skin that covered the surface.
Nicotine discoloured the curtains until our walls were marked
with sprawling darkness stained in a micro-layer of jaundiced tar.
The porcelain vase sat in the window hoping tomorrow’s arrived
a constant reminder of how hollow inside I was with my wife.
I’d cough in reply to her silent treatment with unhealthy disdain
through teeth as yellowed with age as the daffodils she seldom displayed.
The smell of the stale benignant smoke foreshadowed disease
as it’s cancerous reach gradually creeped into the very fabric of me.
The daffodils genus is Narcissus, which was apt with a codependent
so pretentious she’d grown obsessed with her own reflection.
The smoke ascended until a leaden sky formed overhead
every coarse toke that entered my lungs saw me draw close to death.
It’s warmth slowly eddied until nothing quite was left
but a silent memory of what once was when she took her final breath.
My then lover, wife, and friend became a trinket to behold
unflinching as her cold dormant gaze stares into the window of my soul.
I hear her whimpering at low volume jeering me with past advice
it’s never easy when you have a wife, even in the afterlife.
She peers at me from at the side of the void that she left
with her disappointment as stressed as her voice in my head.
I don’t enjoy cigarettes so much as I do pissing her off
by flicking the phosphorus ash into her skull as she’s wittering on.
I’ll quit when I want,
not when you tell me enough’s enough.
I stub the nub on her cranial cavity,
coughing
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”