They say you can’t smoke in a church but they stop saying it soon enough.

white on white Lisianthus bound in twine and the ash burns into the filter

My bill of particulars can’t puncture the gaze affixed to your face, can’t make you listen.

Struck mute at the thought that you were always listening at my feverish attempts to be seen and heard and how tiresome that feigned ignorance must have been.

We’re seemingly done standing on ceremony, but of course calling quits isn’t quitting. Not really. For all my chips, I still don’t know that yet, do I?

I take pains to fathom glory and approximate a solace as cold as the frost on the stained-glass pane in this false knave

It would be easier to lie and supplant this moment with a breathless I love you, in the echo of which I might then ease out of the sanctuary, into the gray much of afternoon, saved from the cloying handshakes and painstaking hugs and animate aching.

But being kind and congenial in this appalling moment dishonors the grandiose monster begging to be fed. Better to give offense in the full obscenity of this glistening grief.

There will be ham sandwiches and red juice and salted ruffles chips in an adjacent room and an adjacent time, as though anyone could swallow in a time like this.

There will be another round of having to say words as though they may pin and be pinned by their signifieds.

There will be consequences, penal and otherwise, if the smoking in the sacristy continues, or so they say, but they will stop saying it soon enough.

Flick ash, inhale, repeat.

The festering held always in.

The dissipating hiss of a struck match coming ever closer.

The wispy acceptance of not having you hear me say the things that I’ve always had to leave unsaid.