Ashen Smoke Rings

vividly seen through his unseeing eyes, thoughts float, drift slow in lazy, hazy air much like deathly ashen, oval smoke rings leaving his aridly acrid, insomniac mouth, there he is, the drunken, dying chain-smoker; and they keep drifting back in silence to the placid pool of his maimed memory: tired tales of untaken rare opportunities, of had it not been, of endless if and only if, of unending what could or should have been.