1886, by Jasmin Deans

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands), 1886.

1886

Smoking death through a cigarette, he passed the time-
his eyes: glazed over with the look of the dead; his cheeks:

the hollow worm meat long vanished from the sordid frame
of his chiseled face. He was once so great, but I cannot

remember what he did and now nobody would answer to his
name, also forgotten, apart from existing, inked, on the slowly

burning carcass in between his bony, blackened lips. He had
written it there before, when capable, and now it burnt like his

life before his glassy eyes, twisting and screeching, in agony 
at the horrors that were seen and the nothing he was to be.

He was not yet put to rest, the dagger remained tattooed in 
his shrivelled veins; the day had not yet terminated but hung

like loose threads before his head and fluttered in the wind, 
tormenting him in the everlasting light and the evanescence 

of before’s and again’s which now forgot to haunt him in his dazed 
state in which he remained, until the rain came down and covered 

his bones in mud and darkness, stamping out his smoky 
friend forever. He was left tearless in his grave of faeces and mud

to spend eternity being the food for plants.

Jasmin Deans

Jasmin Deans has been writing for three years now. She is eighteen. She has recently moved to Dubai but will be attending university in the UK next year to complete an undergraduate degree in English Literature. She has previously been published in Rat's Ass Review.