You're getting out of a long day
at work, strolling downhill,
smoking a cigarette or, vice-versa,
the cigarette turning you into smoke.
A man draws near and asks
for what you already know he wants.
You hand him over a ciggie
and notice he's naked,
in sheer alcoholic terms.
Do you have time for a chat?
Why not hear his story out.
And his father had beat him down
brutally when he was first found
smoking at the tender age of 7.
The anger was gone now at 46,
but that anger had been at work
until 15 years ago.
Anger has a tendency to linger,
as smoke does long after you quit
smoking or put the ciggie out.
In Angola.
He witnessed his grandpa,
Lugger pistol in hand, not shooting a man
who had just tried to stab the Lugger
holder out of the African universe.
We are nothing, me and you,
he tells you amid the story
of having fought for UNITA and killed
men with archaic firearms.
Bulshit, it crosses your brain,
is the abundant richness of mankind.
But yet you equate it against the details
he provides on rudimentary guns,
and it matches up. He lits another fag
you had hand him over in the meantime.
In Portugal.
Not quite a war hero,
he found solace in heroin
and quit it those 15 years ago.
His aspirations are set in Tibet,
and if I go I might not come back,
he thinks, and suggests you to read
one of those books with a third vision
inside, as you know it, into your guts.
You shake hands and part,
saying goodbye. And, by the way,
all the way, here you were more of an I.
