gamble game of smoke & hope

if a hand can lift a cigarette

and kiss its own slow collision of ash

if breath can bargain with fire

and call it comfort,

then why is the heart put on trial

for choosing a person

it already knows is winter?

we inhale what what hurts as all the time

we sip bitterness from porcelain cups,

we scroll through sleepless nights,

we press 'replay' on songs that

peel us like open fruit.

no one scolds the moth for loving the lamp.

no one lectures the tide for reaching

again and again, for a shore that never moves.

so what crime is it to love a soul

that will never turn back?

if lungs may gamble with smoke,

let hearts gamble with hope.

both know the ending, but they burn anyway.

and sometimes,

the warmth of the flame

is worth the scar of the breath.

- the stag poet