Gerald Stern - Box of Cigars lyrics

I tried one or two but they were stale and broke like sticks or crumbled when I rolled them and lighting a match was useless nor could I put them back in the refrigerator— it was too late for that—even licking them filled my mouth with ground-up outer leaf, product of Lancaster or eastern Virginia, so schooled I am with cigars, it comes in the blood, and I threw handfuls of them into the street from three floors up and, to my horror, sitting on my stoop were four or five street people who ran to catch them as if they were suddenly rich, and I apologize for that, no one should be degraded that way, my hands were crazy, and I ran down to explain but they were smoking already nor did I have anything to give them since we were living on beans ourselves, I sat and smoked too, and once in a while we looked up at the open window, and one of us spit into his empty can. We were visionaries.