Interlude: My eternal frustration with smoking....

Give me a break!

A: Well, good day to you! And have you had your daily whiff of cigarette smoke yet? No? Care for some by any chance?
B: No, thank you very much!
It would be nice if people asked you, if you didn't mind the smoke, wouldn't it?

Although I am guilty of my fare share of social, environmental and health "sins" myself despite my efforts to eradicate them (but I am definitely NOT a smoker), and I know there are plenty of other problems in the world, I just couldn't resist putting pen to paper, or rather "finger to keyboard" on this topic... It is work in progress - additions, changes, improvements are welcome! Also, I am by no means a poet, by the way, so please forgive any poetic and punctuation faux-pas!

Finally, and most importantly, to my dear smoking friends and acquaintances - I do not wish to offend (though I no doubt will), just to make a point...

"I smoke, therefore I stink"

Oh dear smokers, 

you make me ill, 

when you light up that stick-shaped pill,

full of junk - worse than a skunk.

What makes you think I like that stink?!

I do not wish to gulp that "ink"

that makes our lungs turn black.

'twill make you want to hack

when many years from here

we may both yet shed a tear.

It really frightens me;

I try to get that you can't see

disease a-plenty comes from this

and more besides: the corporate bliss,

the streams of profits coming in,

thrust at pol'ticians so that they win

another smoker yet to start

while slicing up their profit tart.

I doff my hat to those who quit, 

and those who want to stop legit

remember that you hold the power -

you are no victim, and vict'ry's ours!

And to finish off and refocus on my actual focus of this blog, which is our relationship to nature, a quote from "Hungry City" (p.244 in my edition), just read today: "Soaring levels of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and Type-B malnutrition - surely the most ironic of all urban diseases - meant that eating had overtaken smoking as America's most injurious activity" (and this was in 1993)!

In case you were wondering, according to Steel's notes in the back of the book, Type B malnutrition =  "describes the effect of eating too many processed foods, leaving people simultaneously obese and undernourished, with a high risk of developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes".