A final drag off the cancer stick

Nicotine permeates everything he wears. Hot ash burns a hole in his lungs. One last drag off his filthy fag and he's a mummification in progress. His hair is already falling out in gray matted clumps yet he heeds not the warnings plastered on the carton of his toxic cancer sticks. Not long back, twenty tar-stained teeth hung loosely from his rusted jaw, but that was then. This unfortunately was the day his jowls would complete their rotting from the inside out. His blackened breathing apparatus strains under 3 millimeters of plaque-lined pulmonary tissue. He nurses his addiction without realizing that he is 10 hours short of a led-lined coffin. Nonetheless, his blood-shot eyes register a strange finality of living as he sighs his last breath. 

Ages ago, he was radiant. His piercing blue eyes shined with mystery and reflected profound thinking. Woman's heads would turn in his direction as if pulled by some unknown force of attraction. Magnetism could not have been stronger. However, he took a wrong turn when the tobacco industry set their talons deep into his healthy heart. He became a crippled man: a short straw lit up by an unforgiving butane torch. With his first puff, he began a dangerous hobby that would see him to his grave. Every day he took five step's, when others merely took one, towards death's dark doors. He was intelligent. But not enough to realize that smoking would prematurely kill him and destroy his life. 

RIP 1956 - 2010
Mathew Ackerson
Big Tobacco Sales Associate