What is an extended metaphor for smoking a cigarette?
As he lit his cigarette, he thought Ah, another nail in my coffin. He watched the smoke rise from the ashes as he would a soul leaving, drifting, weaving amongst the branches of the hickory tree outside his door. He sighed as he inhaled the wraith like smoke into his crumbling black lungs. He choked a laugh as he thought, coal miners weren’t the only ones with nailed shut lungs and blackness around their hearts. The ashes fell like the cells of his body, crumbling, black, grey, dead. He choked again as he stubbed out the glowing embers of his needed, desired, cancer sticks. He turned and dropped the butt onto the pile of coffin nails by his door and went back to his room in Hospice.
