London.Lisbon. My mood in these years of United Kingdom Post-Brexit oscillated between anger and relief. I spontaneously left paragraphs in my native language as if retracing my routes. Increasingly, language itself felt lost in translation between borders and memories. After all, why wouldn’t we blur our wealth of languages, native, adopted, just encountered, to expand the lingua franca?
text & photography Claudine Boeglin
L’écume des jours fume en cachette derrière les nuages
Dans l’interstice négocié des rideaux opaques
La poussière qu’irise l’hiver poudre les pare brises
des voitures immobiles des confinements
Once Grand Britain
England shrank, wounded by populist politics
The mercantile fictions of the careless clown
The bill pleaser with nefarious nihilism
Peeing his pants from self-inflicted lousy scripts
Mirroring humanity in its mimetic conflicts
And at the end, all he wanted
Was to be loved and to make you laugh
And to keep the tips you squeezed
In his bikini laces
In the comforting womb of the night
A gracile boy blows a smoking curl in someone’s eyes
A swan captured in fishnet swings by — in response
Kiss in the penumbra of the street, the social backroom
Where bodies zip their skins together
Where heatwaves match frequencies
Where the sulfurous transgression
Of social distancing denial feels suave
To some, unbearable to others
On a nocturnal metro to Bushwick
Thick stockings fold around lazily opened legs
On a night bus leaving Shoreditch
Lovers wrap in embraces
Resisting Bus 55's surgical lights
Both commutes with the presence of a lens–voyeur
Staring emotionless silky-soft gestures of intimacy
Clubs have closed
The party no longer stretches late into the night
The greasy dive stopped serve junk to munchies
The poet rehearses his lines on an empty Brooklyn stage
Where the Lemon Twigs once played for Valentine's Day
As a child I always had a creepy feeling of missing out
Now it feels lighter shared with millions
L’écume des jours saupoudre son spleen sur la maison flottante
Noon, la chatte de gouttière, se joue des mâles sur son toit toboggan
Navire perdu en mer, la maison résiste aux assauts climatiques et mutants
Après le divorce de l’Angleterre avec l’Europe, elle devient Ile Flottante
Brisée par les usurpateurs de rêve
Délateurs, radins, procéduriers, narcissiques, égoïstes, ‘assholes’
TRAUM perdu d’une Europe ouverte, humaniste, visionnaire
TRAUM–A
La maison referme son cercle de quelques crans
Auf Wiedersehen, Angela
Wrecked
Beirut and its nine portals of conflicting history
Beirut and its coagulated villages of religious minorities
Beirut and its psychotic map-free maize brewing human haze
Beirut entangled in a half-century bloodshed with coping mechanisms
Beirut and its idling internet, roaring generators, and cold showers
Beirut unique in beat, in lingua, in style, in humour
Beirut in appearance fearless of chaos…
Blew up
The city imploded in a chemical firework
Man-made by the toxicity of its politics
A revolution in standby
A livid economy
A people piling up more trauma
Haunted by the sarcasms of corrupt cronies
Bathing in the troubled waters
Of a momentary impunity
But every child who came of age in history books knows
Evil ends up in inferno
Lockdown I Lockdown II Lockdown III
London Shoreditch vs. Gotham Netflix vs. Matrix Blockchains
Bleak landscapes of ghostly silhouettes hunched over nano-screens
Masked musketeers battling food shortage in communist lines
Phantasmagoric video game of biological wars without battleground
Cities morphed into virtual realities drowning everyone’s lost dreams
Muted the architecture of low-ceiling WeWork and its mirages
Had emptied the barrel of their past upbeat pastiches
Of imposed narratives of minimal thinking
Smile More, Buy More, For Less
Hope, Dope, Nope
Joker
Then people sheltered in parks
Celebrated birthday on a city bench
Period TV rented bankrupt Shoreditch
Sadistically the summer vanished
Brutalist shades of grey on grey
Claw Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower
Smoke and mirrors on Golborne Road
Goodbye the 55 Limo
London
back to back
Cuts to black
The sun lacerates my livid face
I’m an EasyJetsetter to Lisbon
ISO switched to 125
Smile stretched into a banana
In the circle of the window
And I laugh and laugh and laugh
– staccato
Lisboa
Rose poudrée
Lys & boa
Débaucherie tropicale
Babillage & mascara
Lisboa Lisboa
Echoes Pina Bausch’s
Palermo Palermo
Lisboa
Polymorphic
Transcending all cities
I loved
I missed
I miscarried
Lisboa
Iminente
On the invisible meridian
Where Brazil meets Angola
Meets Mozambique meets
...
Lisboa
Kaleidoscopic
Lys & Boa
Funambule Trans
Cross-dressing
Latin Afrofuturismo
Against Vovó’s cômoda
Lisboa
Camaleão
Wearing the Black Hat
To change the tracks
To keep the night knight
Or alike Hatim
Messing up an Afro
With black-painted long nails
Or posing as if the Poet
Isaac Jalo D’Amadora
Who dribbles with words
On a máquina antiga
Lisboa
Black Hat
Black Widow
Eats the lovers
I cannot bother sustain
Lisboa Amor
Et je claque la bulle rose
Malabar d’Enfant Catin
And I laugh and laugh and laugh
– staccato
