Tuesday 27 August 2013

Berlin und so weiter


This city represents something undefined
Maybe just out of reach
A moment feeling like i'm standing on the edge of the world
On the little bridge over the tracks by Warschauerstrasse U Bahn station,
A spectator to a broken bottle apocalypse 
Kicking in round three in the morning most weekends. 
Struggling to understand why mascara is de rigeur for the young women and ladies of this nation 
Perhaps i should do some interviews.
Musing at Katarina from my hostel room who says only Bavarians know real beer
Today I have woken still weary 
Gratefully not drunken
Last night was tempted to follow the beautiful young European things 
As they headed for the clubs round 2 or 3 in the morning
Bed seemed more attractive in a different way...
This morning wandered over the Oberbaumbrucke
Across the Spree to arrive at Chert gallery on Skalitzer Strasse near Schlessisches Tor
Standing before images of large scale shooting gallery target practice portraits from the United States hanging in lines from the gallery ceiling.
This is raw and confronting at this time of morning
Brutal connotations

Now I miss Berlin
Back on the other side of the world
Reminiscing
The smell of piss in the corners
Near misses time and time again
As bicycles fly by
Carelessly stepping over the nominated pavement lanes to semi catastrophe

Street scavengers pour the dregs of empty beer bottles out by our feet
As we queue for nightclub entrances
Cunningly concealed behind veneers of graffiti smeared concrete walls
And nondescript doors

A few monstrous derelict powerstations 
Industrial audio bunkers
Solid towers of speakers nestled deep within
Laced with red, blue and multichromatic beams of light
Little legions of young techno heads and handfuls of old electro stalwarts
Writhing and bounding to solid thumping beats
Hovering through frequency modulation
Pitch and tempo shifts
Fading into a smoky haze

Different corners of this town host surreal monuments in parks
Odd aesthetic anomalies
Legacies of the east and west divide
Fragments of broken history

Yellow shunting U Bahn trains with odd wallpaper style window decorations
A lively assortment of mobile musical buskers and panhandlers onboard
Bullet trains, regional connections, S Bahns, Intercity lines
Crisscrossing the multi layers of the silvery hi tech Berlin Hauptbahnhof
Polite well behaved canine passengers sit beside their masters on the high speed ICE trains

Central Berlin
Flat
Highrise steel and glass veneers
Copious ongoing constructions in the works
Or seemingly in limbo
A landscape dotted with crane towers
And walls of scaffolding
Draped in plastic sheets