Passing through, you feel as if you’re emerging from some kaleidoscopic tunnel, soon destined for total darkness. The walls seem patterned after a Moroccan palace plunged in the colors of early morning: starched yellow, lime, marine, pink tempered by a haze of hashish—but no one would skip through the halls of such a palace, past each illuminated marble column—it must be crossed languorously, with decadence, sauntered through like a sheik trailed by the folds of his robe, boy servants with pencil-thin mustaches & concubines intoning his name. Between each pair of columns rests a meek diamond sun that the sheik has aspired to possess in his more megalomaniacal dreams, crouched in his satin divan while parrots preen one another above his slumped shoulders. The sun: as attainable as a jewel pandered by a Berber, or a girl pandered by her father. He’s never beheld a jewel or a girl he couldn’t own, a vista he couldn’t claim in either gold or blood. Passing in haste, the eyes shudder between two empires cast beyond the temple gates—one empire of the dawn, the other of the dusk. One bearing a seductive liquid sun, the other, a blue moon blending into the sky that envelops it (a panoply of colors on the verge of collapse, becoming a shit-hued swill, a putrid cauldron, bubbling & black like the rainbow once seen in the badlands of New Mexico after a rainstorm ebbed in the distance across a valley named after some murdered god, populated only by sagebrush. The bow propped over the valley, bridging the wasted pass. You wondered how long it would last before succumbing to an infinite stretch of gray thunderclouds, the murdered god sending his condolences from beyond the heavens). The sheik sighs, calls for all the drag queens of Schöneberg, high-jawed & lanky boys whoring themselves as Teutonic princesses, feeding off the gazes of straight-backed & white-collared men who are undeniably entranced by these bodies prancing in high-heels & tight jeans, dainty leather purses slung from their wrists, bleached blond hair, split-end & ratty, bouncing off their shoulder-pads. Some wear shimmering black wigs & diamond rings & are escorted up the stairs by stout men in sunglasses who hold their greasy hands as brides soon-to-be betrothed. If you look in the faces of these unassuming men who glare at the queens from the train window, you can see the initial stirrings of a violent desire. The eyes belie nothing; it’s the nearly imperceptible quivering of their lips. Passing through a narrowing, brief terminal that poses as a boundless empire with deathly serious men speeding home, wearily confronting their own fractal desires, bearing distorted & reflective surfaces & a history that has been tacitly suppressed.