Relapse rarely gets a love song, yet "First Smoke" opens with something close to one: "Little smoky thumb, how / I've missed sucking on you!" The affection is real, and so is the embarrassment inside it. A cigarette addressed as a "thumb" belongs to a baby, and the speaker is a grown man comforting himself like an infant. The poem is about smoking again after seven years away. Its central idea is that the body can renew itself completely and still keep a memory that no amount of renewal removes.
The poem's most striking image comes early. The speaker's head "floats on its stem / like a flower that's just been pollinated." It captures the nicotine light-headedness exactly, with the head bobbing on the neck like a bloom. It is also a strange, slightly sinister comparison. Pollination means something has been delivered into you, and the flower is passive, changed by what arrives. The pleasure is tender and a little invasive at once.
The middle of the poem turns to the body. The speaker notes that "every cell in my body has been / replaced at least once," a popular idea about the body's seven-year renewal that the poem uses without insisting on it. Against it he sets the stubborn fact that "my fingers still remember / exactly what to do." Here the language slows into ritual: "the huggermuggery of matchbook / & rolling paper, ashtray & ash." The nonsense-sounding word "huggermuggery" suggests both secrecy and clutter, and with "hug" tucked inside it, a fussy kind of comfort. The paired nouns joined by ampersands read like a hand moving from one object to the next. The speaker also rolls his own, so the habit is a craft as well as a craving, and that may be why the fingers keep it.
Then comes the poem's one real moment of fear. He calls his body "new/old," and the slash holds both words in one breath. He wonders whether it has "inherited secret flaws." The verb is telling. He has inherited the flaws from himself, as if his earlier self were a relative who left behind a will. The question mark is the only point where the poem's easy, joking tone gives way.
After it, the tone cools. "With growing detachment / I watch the thing go gray / as I draw the glowing life out of it." The sentence seems to enjoy its own irony. The cigarette's glow is called "life," yet it is the smoker who is being slowly consumed. The detachment also suggests that the first rush has already worn off, and the pleasure is fading as the ash lengthens.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its short, conversational lines, full of enjambments like "but / my fingers" and "wondering what / the hell to do next," imitate someone thinking aloud. It has only five sentences, and the last is the longest. It begins in the present, with the speaker watching the smoke, then moves back to "the road in Japan / where I'd stood 21 years ago." The long sentence works like an inhale, drawing the reader backward through time. The arithmetic suggests he smoked for roughly fourteen years before quitting, though the poem never says so.
The ending is the best touch. The young man with his "very first one" between his lips is "wondering what / the hell to do next." The question is comic, since a first-time smoker has no idea how to hold a cigarette. Set against the opening, where the fingers know "exactly what to do," it becomes a real contrast: then he was ignorant and now he is practiced. The final word, "next," also looks forward. The older speaker, cigarette burning, might well be asking what to do now.
The poem matters because it refuses to lecture. It gives the pleasure its due, admits the shame, and leaves the verdict to the reader. Its title says "First Smoke," but it describes a loop: the first cigarette of a second smoking life, and a memory of the first one ever. It suggests that habits can survive in the hands long after the cells that formed them have gone.