Two guys and a girl just sat there
smoking, sniffing, glancing…
Hey man, you wanna go see Janey?
You had to hear everything everyone said
in this place. Ceiling fan shadows
chopped at brass chandeliers
with lumberjack devotion, and smoke
congregated near the ceiling where
the air didn’t move. Where is
the smoking section? Everywhere, it seemed.
And waitresses assessed their tips
in the back. “Not bad,” said the girl;
both guys said, “Yup,” and they
blew out blossoms of thick smoke.
On Monroe, a boy walked by the window
with Green Day on his shirt and pink
highlights in his hair. “What a freak,”
one guy said, while the other remembered
the last concert he had gone to
where the air smelled so sweet
that he got a buzz before he even lit up, though
he lit up anyway, because — Hell!
What else was he gonna do?
The girl turned and looked, but really
she didn’t care, so she just puffed
and sat there, smoking.