We are a generation of
burning afternoons in fireplaces
for warmth and aestic--
the children who strangle the dusk
-- wash the maroon ash from
leg hairs-- use cumin for
war paint.
We draw sunset
after sun set after sunset
on our thighs
We were really trying to
decide if anyone still painted
the stars or if
that was impractical too.
Tucking them behind our ears 
in tattoos to remind ours that at
least sometimes we can own ours skin--
I come from a generation
who is already spoken for
from the choking sigh of
a cigarette gripped in the teeth
of a grinning girls on curbs and
smug boys waiting for a school
bus called "Greyhound".
For my generation smoking
is a form of suicide-- a form 
of forgetting-- and we're all
smoking though we don't all buy cigarettes--
some of us smoke our veins 
in the serpentine tentacles of 
our own flesh-- we smoke ourselves
in chalked-scabby incense cones--
pour ourselves into vapor vases
looking some place to solidify 
and become am ice cube 
or a state
or a sunset
or at least a pile of
ash someone can use
as cumin.