Something is taking shape, a Leviathan fattened on damp
and disregard: the bureaucratic Unconscious, with its pagers,
mobile phones and trouserpresses, taking all our deepest
desires and fears, our primal hatreds and our hardest drives,
and making them fill in forms. A new language which has no name
spreads along the billboards and the shopsigns – Euro Dago,
Le Y€S Bar, Het Leader Bowling – beside which the sign marked
Liquidation totale seems full of Old Testament promise. Caught
on the down-bound escalator the one time in my life I stopped here:
the funereal blush of marzipan fruit in the chocolatier’s window,
laid out in their crinkled doilies like Lenin in his mausoleum,
and the ghost of their taste in my mouth: sugar dipped in formaldehyde.