Sacred Nicotine

I wrote this early Saturday at work... I hate Saturdays.

What is it that is so appealing about a cigarette for a depressed man?
I guess it is that he sees in the burning, the slow burning of the paper cylinder engulfing the aromatic shredded tobacco, a living picture of himself being burnt slowly by the never-ending trials and miseries of life. If cigarettes were known to Hamlet, I believe he would have been smoking throughout his speech eventually deciding "to sleep" rather than "take arms against a sea of troubles", for he will see better through the burning and the falling ashes of the cigarette that "by opposing them" he will never "end them".

Have we ourselves lit this cigarette? Yes, I believe is the answer. Only cowards believe not. But are not we all cowards for lighting that cigarette? Then I believe that some of us are braver than the others; a coward still, yet relatively more courageous than a coward who decided that it is not worth confronting oneself with the truth about who lit the cigarette... the truth about themselves. Cowards and in that they are dead till a Jesus raises them from the dead. A Jesus they find in the streets of their miserable everyday life; a fight, a joke or a picture of the sun falling in the sea. Shall we then build a church in us and pray for a Jesus who died for everyone else but us? A new Jesus, not crucified but bedridden, dying of cancer.

Is it the stimulant in these holy leaves that makes us extra conscious of our lives' wrinkled face? why is it then addictive? Why then, If it brings to our senses the unbearable excruciating pains of (waiting for) life (to end), do we smoke them still?
Is it confrontational? If it is then I take back what I said about smokers being cowards. Could it be that we are courageous in that new meaning we found for courage?
Courageous then are the antiheroes who flee the confrontation with the actual events of life to confront an enemy in themselves who oppresses and torments them. In that they are heroic antiheroes.

Zuhour Hussain (? - 1964) زهور حسين

خاف درد الله و عذابه
حملوني هموم حبهم
ما چنت أدري الخلايق


من صخر
صاير قلبهم