Revisionist Poetry – Life of a Smoke, v.4

I am smoke.

Born at the ember’s edge — pyrolysis of leaf and fibre —
a thin life of rising carbon and heat.
I press against warm darkness, a pocket of soot and vapour,
a particulate world cradled in solid matter.

Light finds me. Lips close like twin petals; a clap, a seal.
A spark cracks — combustion — a white-hot flash that touches my spine.
Air is dragged through me: a violent diaphragm, a gust down the trachea.
I am pulled, threaded into a warm highway of bronchi.

I ride the breath. Turbulence throws me against mucous membranes;
I slide past cilia, skirt cartilage, and sink into the bronchioles.
Then — alveoli: delicate sacs where exchange happens—
I spread thin as film over living tissue, press carbon to blood.

Energy flares; my edges char and glow. I am ember and vapour at once,
chemistry and motion. Painless fire becomes work: heat, oxidation, ash.
With each inhalation I am compressed, stretched, reformed —
the vacuum of exhalation tears at my body, pulls me small.

My mass grows lighter; particulate numbers swell and fall.
Some of me lodges — a remnant of soot, a speck of ash —
others rise, a smoky thread that slips back into the open air.
I thin to memory: volatile organics, traces of tar, a carbon ghost.

Everything dims. I am no longer a single warm body but a cloud,
diffusing across alveolar surfaces, across bloodstream, across room.
Existence blurs into chemical exchanges and expelled breath;
I want the tight dark of ember and leaf — concentrated being — not this drift.

I am smoke: ember-born, alveoli-touched, ash-making and wind-rent.
Senses gone, substance scattered, I wish for the quiet cradle —
that slow, sealed dark where existence was held, not dissolved.