Hi

A small vice poem that links taste, ruin, and appetite, then lands on the body's instant surrender to nicotine.

'Hi' is a wry little reckoning with appetite: the speaker admits 'cockie is a part of it' and that 'Not so long I smelled like Hell', then warns 'Watch out when there is a taste - / The better it is / The more the hangman likes it'. It closes on the body's instant capitulation, 'When the nicotine hits', so that pleasure and the gallows share the same logic.

The casual title 'Hi' sets a deceptively friendly tone for a poem about being slowly executed by one's own pleasures, as if the habit itself were saying hello. The opening 'I would have never thought to think' echoes the same astonished construction that opens 'Hi's' neighbor 'Her', marking a speaker forever surprised by his own life. The proverb at the center - the better the taste, the more the hangman likes it - turns enjoyment into incrimination: the things most worth craving are exactly the ones that tighten the noose. The slippery final movement, 'Now it is not the shadow / you watch / When the nicotine hits', suggests that once the chemical lands the danger is no longer some looming shadow ahead of you but the very thing in your hand; the threat has stopped being symbolic and become the substance itself. Preserved spellings like 'cockie' are kept as written, part of the offhand, confessional grain of the voice.