Three-part allegorical structures are a very old habit: id/ego/superego, body/mind/soul, past/present/future. This triptych maps onto none of those cleanly, which is what makes it interesting. The Smoker is the individual: privatised, numbed, aware. The Politician is the system: public, performative, utterly uninterested in the Smoker except as a pool of harvestable belief. The Beast is the non-human: pre-political, pre-personal, and now furiously relevant.

What the triptych implies is a sequence of causation. The Politician chains the Beast. The chaining of the Beast creates the conditions for the Smoker’s depression — not directly, but structurally: a world governed by spin and managed belief is not a world that makes it easy to act, connect, or hope. The three figures are not independent portraits. They are a food chain.

The Smoker is the most self-implicating of the three figures, which probably isn’t an accident. The verse embedded in his portrait is a clinical case study in learned helplessness: he accurately diagnoses the problem, accurately identifies what he wants to say, and then does neither — retreating instead into a ritual of chemical self-management that he knows is the retreat. The diagnosis and the avoidance are simultaneous. He is not unaware; awareness is part of the trap.

The author’s description — “an asshole when you meet him, but mostly because he’s depressed” — performs a small ethical inversion. The social symptom (asshole) is offered first, then immediately undermined by its cause. You’re being asked to reconsider your first impression of someone you haven’t even met yet. This is a useful habit of mind for people who want to eventually stop smoking and start doing something.

The portrait is worth pausing on. In 2018, a leering middle-aged white man in a suit with swept white hair and a predatory grin was not a neutral figure. The drawing carries a recognisable register without committing to a specific name — it is the archetype made visible, the category more than the individual. The grin in particular does the work: it is the face of someone who has learned to perform warmth so thoroughly that it has become threatening. The uncanny valley of sincerity.

The prose adds what the image leaves out: the mechanism. Faith as currency is not metaphor; it is structural. A politician who can trade in both good and bad faith — accepting sincerity from believers and cynicism from the disengaged equally — is operating on Hannah Arendt’s observation that propaganda need not be believed to be effective. The population that doesn’t believe but doesn’t act is just as compliant as the one that does. Both pay the same tax in belief. “Sweet and tender tender” — note the triple repetition — points at corruption, intimacy, and silence: the things kept quiet by the very spin machine that keeps everything else moving.

The Politician notably has no handwritten verse. He does not speak from inside. He is described entirely from the outside, which is the only angle from which he can be accurately seen. From inside, he would be performing.

The Beast is drawn female — winged, horned, massive, chain-marked — in a long tradition connecting the natural world to femininity that the author doesn’t appear to be invoking naively. The capitalisation of “Men” lifts the agent of chaining out of the individual and into the systemic: this is not one bad actor but an accumulated project, centuries of extraction and enclosure made visible as a single act of restraint.

Her original condition — “too big to care” — is the key phrase. She wasn’t hostile before. She was simply operating at a magnitude that rendered human activity epistemically negligible. This is an accurate description of the pre-industrial natural world. She doesn’t growl because she’s evil; she growls because she has been made small enough to be hurt, which means she has also been made small enough to notice the hurt. The chaining didn’t just constrain her — it introduced her to human-scale suffering.

The conditional “if you let her” is the work the whole triptych has been building toward. It addresses the reader directly: you are among those who could. The promise of flight is ecological restoration. The promise of memory is survival. The Beast’s gratitude is not sentimental; it is structural. You don’t get thanked. You get to continue to exist.

These three figures, taken together, are a map of the path from passivity to action — even if the author in 2018 was still closer to the Smoker than to the Savior. The Smoker knows the problem. The Politician demonstrates the mechanism. The Beast provides both the urgency and the covenant: act, and you will be remembered by the thing that matters.

The shift from angsty diagnosis toward solidarity is precisely the shift from identifying with the Smoker to identifying with the Beast’s liberation. Solidarity is not “fuck you, fuck them, fuck it” — which is the Smoker’s grammar of retreat. Solidarity is: I see the chain. I know who benefits from the chain. I will put down the cigarette and do something about the chain. The art anticipated the arc before the artist had finished travelling it.

The verse performs its own argument in three grammatical moves. “Fuck you” is addressed, specific, confrontational — it has a target and therefore implies the possibility of impact. “Fuck them” expands to a collective but remains outward, still retaining some directionality. “Fuck it” is the collapse: directionless, encompassing, equally self-addressed. The drift from second person to third plural to impersonal pronoun is a grammatical record of someone watching themselves give up in real time.

What makes it precise rather than merely bleak is “I dream of saying.” He hasn’t even said the angry thing — he has imagined saying the angry thing, and then retreated from the imagining. This is not despair; it is something more specific and more clinical: the rehearsal of defiance that substitutes for defiance itself.

The last line’s most economical move is a single word: another. Not “a smoke” — which would be a singular event. “Another smoke” implies this has happened before, is happening again, and will happen again after this. The poem is not describing a moment; it is describing a habit. The Smoker knows this about himself. The “another” carries the entire archive of all the things he’s decided not to say, compressed into two syllables and exhaled.

The verse is structured as a classical volta: first movement establishes fear of an absolute END; second movement (after “But”) inverts the logic entirely. What distinguishes it from ordinary brave-face writing is the word “monster.” She doesn’t say the END becomes manageable, or survivable, or acceptable. She says the monster becomes her friend. The thing that was going to kill her is now on her side.

This is a more interesting move than simple acceptance of mortality — it is the claim that confronting the thing you fear most produces not just peace with it but alliance. The capitalisation of “My Friend” elevates the friendship to the same grammatical weight as “My Fate” and “END” earlier. What started as the endpoint of the journey becomes its companion.

The two verses are in direct structural dialogue. Both begin with the subject alone with something threatening: the Smoker with his unspoken anger, the Beast with her approaching end. The Smoker retreats: dream of action, choose numbing, repeat. The Beast advances: each step toward the feared thing transforms it. The grammar tells the whole story — the Smoker’s verse ends in passive ritual (“I light”); the Beast’s verse ends in active relationship (“My Friend”).

Read together, they are not two separate character studies but a before/after of the same psyche. The Smoker is what happens when the fear of the END produces avoidance. The Beast is what happens when it produces engagement. The triptych’s implied journey is from one to the other — and the Politician is what you have to stop serving before you can make that move.

The Politician’s portrait contains no handwritten verse. Not a coincidence. The Smoker speaks from inside his depression; the Beast speaks from inside her fate. The Politician has no inside that is separate from his performance — an honest verse from him would be the one admission his whole operation cannot afford. He is described entirely from the outside, which is the only accurate vantage point. From within, everything is spin. The grin, rendered in pen, says what he would never write in his own hand.