The swan sits between the pastor and tar

With her milky feathers coated in pitch

She sits in nest; she lives as a cigar

Homeless and dirty, she sleeps in her ditch

My hospitality smokes her broken

Fowl snuffed out by the television screen

Mud is the lung cancer, yet still smoking

I’m humming at the oil chokehold machine

Paper burning the salt sores in her beak

You had to be there to see the dead bird

Soot and coal smudged against my widow’s peak 

Concentration camp in my ribcage stirred

Then I reached the last nicotine bottle

Drowning in the works of Aristotle