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Clean lines, white walls,

green tables for ping-pong,

machine precision,

love of less and faultless geometry –

the interior

recalls the Lenin’s Worker’s Club

of Alexandr Rodchenko,

designed a century ago for Paris Exposition,

now featured in the European Union buildings

and bodies:

an assemblage of modular and standard

components

devoid of handcraft and devoid of soul.

The plague of sameness

promises the better conversion rates

but it’s not keeping my sanity.

I’m taking the quirky, the unmodern way

I’m choosing the absence of patterns,

I am choosing the irrational:

I am rooting for carpets and curtains

For frescoes and painted domes,

I waste free hours

Inspecting Brussels’ Hotel Metropole:

I taste the Corinthian columns,

warm furnishings,

Grand piano and paintings, paintings…

the leftover of Horta,

the Belle Epoque’s ghost

in the centre of the Belgian capital.

The concierge is reading aloud

the newspaper:

“The plastic surgeon was murdered yesterday

by the female patient

who was unsatisfied with her new nose”.

I am back to the thoughts

on growing sameness:

The times when human behavior

leads to the inevitable extinction

of people,

The times when human behavior:

what we eat, when we speak, how we live –

is led by the political and commercial

silhouettes

sitting in the white walls,

thinking in clean lines,

using green tables for ping-pong during lunches,

inside the interiors

that recall the Lenin’s Worker’s Club

of Alexandr Rodchenko,

designed a century ago for Paris Exposition,

now featured in the European Union buildings

and bodies.