Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

stoneage

vernissage in zero’s old town. paintings of monstrous ugliness. can you paint with dead eyes? wooden faces behind a soundsystem. zero’s imitation of jazz. infernal noise. i am a stranger here. the artists gloat over the incomprehension of the visitors. artists? i join hans for a moment, drink my free beer. hans talks about lavater and rebstein. i don’t understand at all. but there is suddenly the vision of a cubist painting again, so near that i quietly yelp. don’t come too close, hans, you are frightening me, you devour me. hans neither sees nor senses anything. he does not see the fear in my shaking hands, they are like little birds, fluttering, frightened birds. i observe and pity them. noise. the pubowner has grown fat over the last months. the eternally homeless are good business. he looks greedy and lecherous in his weak, spongy way. he is only thirty. the walls bend inward. they will fall, collapse over me. hans, you are still too close. go away, please, you are breaking down the wall i had built so strenuously. i don’t want to have to feel this fear any more. the faces contort to grimaces, torment with unnaturally ordered limbs as if there were no more natural order to the bodies. hans’s voice, monotonous, dangerously soporific. it is always the same, a bomb will drop. soon, please, soon. “the world lost me,” so it is, betweenworld, nothing fits. the noise cuts my skin in strips. silently they come off until the flesh pulses naked and unprotected beneath jeans and pullover. flesh wells over the edge of the chair, it smells of feces and urine. bloodsea spills about the feet. the walls do not fall.

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