{ 30 Days of Spooks: Day 2. }

I am going to fall behind on this, I know I am.

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Day two: When did you start watching?

My first episode of Spooks was-- okay I just realised that it's the same answer I gave yesterday. 1x03! I remember seeing the ads for the show and really wanting to see it, and then my friend at school mentioned the face/fryer incident and reminded me when the show was on, and I watched every episode since. I was going to say I watched every episode as it aired, but that's not right because I started uni during season 4, and it took me almost the year to catch up on that. But, yes, 1x03. And the episode after that is the Peter Salter one, and I saw that one whilst at my gran's. It must have been half term or something.

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( all 30 days. )

{ Dorianne Laux: Smoke. }

Smoke
by Dorianne Laux

Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat’s eye
in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke,
the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries
of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke
slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked
into the night you don’t dare enter, its eyes drunk
and swimming with stars. Somewhere a dumpster
is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine.
All down the block something inside you opens
and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,
trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.
You don’t flip on the TV or the radio, what might
muffle the sound of car engines backfiring,
and in the silence between, streetlights twitching
from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp
of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter
as you inhale. There’s no music for this scarf
of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers
crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song
light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough,
then thins and disappears. Death’s shovel scrapes
the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks,
slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs
its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.
You can hear him weaving his way down the street,
sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth
before swallowing: breath of the cat kicked
to the curb, a woman’s sharp gasp, lung-filled wail
of the shaken child. You can’t put it out, can’t stamp out
the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through
your smallest passages. So you listen and listen
and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace
of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros
and rings, the blue chains linking around your head.
Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke
and blow it up toward a ceiling you can’t see
where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,
like the ghost the night will become.