Day 641: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: swirls of cigarette smoke

“Death is a rainbow of colors, and beautiful if not mysterious in some of its stages.”

My friend is a rather morbid poet, who smokes. He knows it is going to kill him. Yet, he makes of it what he makes of everything.

“Tobacco is green in the leaf, coming from the rainbow of good soils, and, in the beginning in this country, grown by the rainbow of blue-black to brown to bronze of African hues. Their blood, unjustly shed to the soil, was red.”

“Dried tobacco is yellow-brown, if it is bright, and good cigarettes should be checked for brightness. That yellow and white of the paper should contrast.”

“But the swirls of cigarette smoke – more substantive than steam, with its blue-gray density, curling and twisting upward, like Queen Anne's Lace airborne. There is nothing like the gorgeous swirl of cigarette smoke, nothing in the world.

“I smoke partially because it is so beautiful. Yes, I know that the yellow tint on the walls from nicotine steam condensing on my walls heralds the black gathering of tar in my lungs, and the red tumors and the nasty rainbow of fluid of colors I shall drown in after cancer does its work. Yet I am addicted to beauty as I am to nicotine, and I simply cannot give it up.”

That was the key. I'm going to get him some pictures of the end stages he imagines. And some nicotine patches. I'll save him yet. Nothing is uglier than death, when it is at last REAL.