BODILY FUNCTIONS AND THE ROOTS OF INTERNATIONAL DREAMWAVE
Misled by a great ability to introspect, I was just thinking is all. Might kill myself eventually: not yet: in 2044. The neon of the chicken takeaway on Prinzen Street is some of the bluest I’ve seen. How the electric glints off black leather and puddles, off of tarmac like gas aflame, as I squinted down the pavement to a curved block of flats bearing dozens of satellite dishes, the bays of balconies repeated below the sky. Draped in dark another towerblock looked like the Nostromo spaceship but not manmade more insect it felt. While reaching into my jacket for tobacco, a pouch of AMERICAN SPIRIT, I stepped thru the shadowline behind these caged wastebins. A rat jogged across the floor and its tail slurped under a fence. Yes: slurped was the noise as I pushed my right hand into the pocket holding a few euro notes and the crab pulled out a twenty. There was this steel door that I didn’t knock cos they say don’t knock when you knock. I coughed. A hand tapped a window. The door opened, a little screech, a tall outline of a man, a voice beckoned to come deeper into the gaping black stairwell and I did and in a stilted croak said: Zwanzig bitte.
Ganja enables to hear feedback sonically. So I mooched homeward with a ziploc inside my jacket smelling of Lebanon. Lemons I mean. The citrus.
Between the U1’s steel-riveted legs along the slabs to Hallesches I strolled. Some tent was erected near the canal, one of those domes. And I thought about this and paused on the Athenian platz where vaporwavey statues loom at night above the water. The oily smell from that kebab shop I remember: July 2017, sweltering: a busride from here to Kotti with many seats taken by hardened Berliners, hot and frazzled, everyone silent when Kendall said: You can now tell people you’ve lived in Berlin. You can now say: I’ve lived in Berlin I have. Like Vladimir Sirin and Kevin Shields, both moved to this city and made art. I wonder if The Gift song is inspired by The Gift novel. Noise is the street. Noise now in March 1922. Specks of rain fell when a kid between Mehring and the abandoned railway path on Yorckstrasse, he said hey have I got a cigarette and when I said yes and halted he had more questions, wanted my name, my nationality, age, time since being here. Said he’s from Syria but speaks fluent Teutonic. Why, he asked, if you lived here five years do you not know the mother-tongue? Because I’m an intellectual maggot, would’ve been an apt reply and he insisted he roll his own cig so I gave him a strand of tobacco in a skin, dropped into his palm a GIZEH slim filter.