Most poems about smoking either preach or swagger. Balachandran V's "Gone up in Smoke" does neither for eleven of its twelve lines. It simply describes a cigarette being smoked, so closely and with so much relish that the reader is drawn into the pleasure. Only in the last line does the poem turn, and what it turns on is a single, unexpected word: "you."
The poem is built as a sequence. First the packet opens, then the smell reaches the nose, then the smoke goes in and the rings drift out. Each step is registered through the senses, beginning with sound: "Crackling cellophane" is a small noise, but the repeated hard *c* makes it crisp, almost audible. Smell follows ("Aroma of tobacco"), then touch and bodily sensation. The "Fingers a- trembling, brain a- tickling" line is the most revealing. The old-fashioned "a-" prefix slows the line and gives it a lilting, half-comic sound, but the content is less innocent. Trembling fingers suggest craving, and a tickling brain suggests pleasure being anticipated before it arrives. The poem never says "addiction," yet the body already seems to know the routine.
The rhythm helps enact the experience. The opening lines are short and hesitant, with the dashes after "opens" and "lips" working like held breaths. Then comes "Tingle!", the one exclamation in the poem, and the lines lengthen: "Seeps in settling, satiating one's blood." The hissing *s* sounds (seeps, settling, satiating) are the sound of smoke slowly spreading through a body, and "satiating" suggests a satisfaction that feels complete. After that the lines thin out again. "Wafting away into nothingness" drifts off with a long, airy vowel sound, and the final lines shrink toward silence. The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, which suits the subject. Nothing is fixed or locked in place, and the form dissolves much as the smoke does.
The imagery is pleasant on the surface. "Rings dancing in the air" is the most attractive picture in the poem, turning waste into performance. But the verbs gradually undercut it. The smoke "curls," "seeps," "wafts," and finally disappears, and the word "nothingness" is surprisingly heavy for a poem about so small an act. The speaker also uses the impersonal "one's" ("one's lips," "one's blood"), which makes the experience feel general, something anyone might undergo. That distance makes the ending land harder.
"Only a fragrance remains— / Then that too, like you, is gone forever." Here the poem swerves from "one" to "you," from description to address. Who "you" is stays open. Judging by the text alone, it could be a person who has died, a lost relationship, or the smoker, or reader, who is being told that this is how a life goes too. All three readings share the same logic: pleasure that seems substantial leaves behind only a trace, and then not even that. The phrase "gone forever" removes any comfort from the earlier softness of "fragrance."
The title does similar work. "Gone up in smoke" is an everyday idiom for plans, money or hopes that come to nothing, and here it is also literally true. The poem lets both meanings sit together, so the cigarette becomes a small model of everything that burns away. What the idiom puts into the poem is a sense of waste, though the poem is careful not to say so outright.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It never lectures about health or says "stop." It lets the reader enjoy the ritual, almost take part in it, and then shows how quickly it ends. By making the reader complicit in the pleasure first, it makes the loss in the final line feel personal rather than imposed. In just twelve short lines it shows how a small, habitual act can carry a much larger thought about impermanence.