The Suffocating Ride to 48th Street

Vapes, smokes, puffing, filling lungs with want.

blunt rolled on open seat, engine chugging, towards 48th street.

Eight minutes of hell in a moving smoking den.

I suffer from someone else’s bad habit.

The sign reads, “NO SMOKING.”

The PA plays, “There is no smoking on SEPTA.”

Still, you puff away.

It’s your habit, not mine, but my nose pays the fare.

I have no quarrel with your habit.

Only the place you choose to do it.

Buses, subways, platforms,

clouds everywhere.

Exercising your right shouldn’t steal my choice.

Signs everywhere pleading for courtesy.

Yet courtesy has drifted off in a haze of blue.

My daily commute turns into a gauntlet.

I shouldn't have to suffer for someone else’s bad habit

just to make a living.

_________________________

Honestly, I wrote this poem because I was fed up, plain and simple. Every day, I’m stuck in a rolling smoke box with random strangers who treat the “No Smoking” signs like they’re decoration.

I’m just trying to get to work without inhaling a cloud the size of Jupiter, but nope, someone’s always, always! sparking up.

Sometimes several people in the same train car just blazing away without a care in the world. It’s a little vent session wrapped in verse, my protest against the lack of courtesy that seems to follow some people around my city.