My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.

The image of days “crackling” and vanishing “in smoke” compresses a sense of time squandered or consumed—life experienced as something that flares briefly, makes noise, and leaves little residue. The phrasing suggests not only transience but a kind of self-consuming intensity: days burn away rather than unfold. In Thompson’s poetic idiom, such imagery often accompanies spiritual desolation or regret, where the speaker feels the past has been spent without lasting fruit. The line’s power lies in its sensory immediacy (sound and sight) and its moral-emotional undertone: time is not merely passing; it is being irretrievably used up.