Designated Smoking Area

They stood, jackets open to the gust,  

halfway between algebra and adulthood,  

fingers curled, loose on those lit sticks,  

kids exhaling rebellion into the Midwest air.  

The gravel beneath sneakers held stories  

of Marlboros passed in quiet defiance,  

a language of nicotine and borrowed time,  

shared in puffs under a black-and-white sky.  

Teachers walked by like prison guards,  

eyes half-shut, smoke in their own throats,  

and the rules were whispers, only whispers,  

a gray daydream held between their teeth.  

Now, the memory is absurd nostalgia,  

a flicker of ash faint in the wind.  

Laws built walls where smoke once lingered,  

eras buried beneath courtroom declarations.  

No embers now burn in high school corners;  

teenage lungs breathe only filtered rebellion.  

Yet some mornings, under fluorescent glow,  

you swear the air still tastes faintly of then.