In the outside corridor of the Galeria, there is a flurry of life. The workers and consumers and loungers and students from the nearby college stand under here. As I walk along it there is a symphony of cigarettes, as they are raised in the air like the violin bows. Smoke is ubiquitous here, Much cheaper than such unwholesome pursuits as swimming. Clubs drown in smoke and menus have a whole page dedicated to tobacco products . They are smoking their hearts out.Smoke your Hearts Out
Here you'll find a closer sort of cafe
There are bar stools and fags across the way
Here amongst mahogany we proffer hearts
And sanguine delicacies such as strawberry tarts.
Hearts constructed of plastic or ebony
Decorated like mobile phones from last century
In the Bar of Vaporised Hearts, it was smoky and dark like any other bar but here the punters dipped long tubes into their own heart or the heart of others.
I sat in the bar, smoking my own heart. I pulled the pipe our slowly , drawing the melancholy out and then took it into my mouth and let the remainder drift listlessly into the air. It was a limpid smoke, with only the slightest hint of blue. A man to the left, with the most exrcruciatingly beautiful shadows on his cheekbones was blowing coal black smoke and it made me shiver. I looked at him. It wasn't the shadows that were beautiful but the bones that formed them. He caught me looking at him but continued to smoke and read a journal. From here, I couldn't see what it was. About rocket advances, I assumed, as that's what most men on London tend to read if they read anything.
It wasn't. I looked closer. It was a Dickens. I'd heard about that myself, and people say London wasn't so very different then. I showed him my own book of Robert Browning, a fancifuller sort of Victorian nostalgia. 'Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,
May gaze thro' these faint smokes curling whitely ..' I read huskily, distractedly, as if to myself. He looked up through his black smoke.
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