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White | Grey
à fleur de peau
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 the populist politics
Of the mercantile fictions of the careless clown
Of 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 on someone’s eyes
A swan in fishnet justaucorps swings by, in response
Kiss in the penumbra of the street, the new backroom
Where bodies zip their skins together
Where heartbeats match frequency
Where the sulfurous transgression
Of social distancing denial feels suave


On a nocturnal metro to Bushwick
Thick stockings fold around lazily opened legs
On a night bus leaving Shoreditch
Lovers wrap one another in imaginary embraces
Resisting being showered by Bus 55 surgical lights
On both commutes, 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 little fish in fishnet swings his seductive tricks
In front of his bathroom mirror instead
The poet repeats 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 laxisme and inertia
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 mousquetaires battling food shortage in communist lines
Phantasmagoric video game of biological wars without combattants



Cities morphed into virtual realities of everyone’s lost dreams
The muted architectures of low-ceiling WeWork's slamming-door 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




People shelter in parks
Celebrate birthday on a city bench
Period TV rents bankrupt Shoreditch
Sadistically the summer vanishes
Brutalist shades of grey on grey
claw Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower
Smoke and mirrors on Golborne Road
And Lisboa at that end of the road
Goodbye 55 Limo, 28 in the snow
London
back to back
Cuts to black





On an Easyjet set to Lisboa
The sun lacerates my livid face
ISO switches to 125
in the circle of the window
Smile stretched into a banana
And I laugh and laugh and laugh
– staccato


Lisboa
Rose poudrée
Lys & boa
Débaucherie tropicale
Babillage & Mascara
Lisboa Lisboa
As if Pina Bausch’s
Palermo Palermo
Had awakened ‘l’Alma Perduta’
Del Europa


Lisboa
Polymorphic
Transcending all cities
I love, I miss, I miscarried



Lisboa
Iminente
On the invisible meridian
Where Brazil meets Angola
Meets Mozambique meets…

Lisboa
Kaleidoscopic
Lys & Boa
Trans-funambule
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
My love affair

Et je claque la bulle rose
Malabar d’Enfant Catin

And I laugh and laugh and laugh
– staccato




© Dandy Vagabonds 2022