Puffs of Smoke

144 Tanglin road always looks tired. Empty, unless one Looks. Like pendant bats to limestone, Crumpled Birdcages and pear-shaped wicker baskets clutched Their bamboo perches overhead. lanterns alike- some Papery, mint-green, and mottled cocoons, others Coppery bodies, with wrought iron veins, held in their Patterns by painted glass sinews- clinked like gypsy Teeth against one another, swaying in the fan-swept Air. A dragon, slithering from her hoary, herbaceous Hollow, ebbed with the draught, unfurling, curling, Twirling, pearling as whitely as Waning moons. Her Quintessence was entirely that of smoke, from sickle-Shaped scales to smoldering marrow, which, as she Entwined herself between the suspended glims, Silver-soiled the sun and coloured lights. A hackle spun like yarn and trembled like a kite from her gills, withering into misty nothingness at the tip, As did her tail, and body, and starry, sightless eyes.
She belonged to the Junk Broker- as did eighty black Pearl checkers, gold-nibbed bone pens, a ficus bonsai, Jade Chinese lion busts, and several silken saris, just To name a handful.
Everything served a purpose. Everything possessed a price. Everything but the pipe.
Expect on slow, balmy days that the she-dragon will Wander the antiques and tapers alike, diffusing that Charred, fruity musk about the shop. Expect her, Drawn from a lacquered, mahogany chamber with Each rank respiration, to escape the bowl girdled with Her carved likeness. I said she belonged to him. Though, when folding faithfully to cravings- his trade Of humid, grueling reality: petty bartering over Erstwhile objects, for some benign, herbal euphoria- The Junk Broker belongs to the pipe, the smoke Winging him from 144, Tanglin road.