Dancing on Ashes (North)


Just imagine a cold morning, a very cold one
After a wild party in the woods, a wild wild one
The cabin reeks of cold tobacco, sweat, spilled beer and kerosene
Skullface - who is not Skullface yet, but will be very soon -
Wakes up from pain, then cold, then more pain
The kerosene heater is far from enough, the wood fire is dead
She has to pick a few logs outside to start a new one
Or these drunken morons will freeze to death
Adrift in the vapors of their alcoholic sleep
Her face is burning like hell
She also feels frozen and nauseated, but this is more familiar
Wrapped in a rough blanket over the clothes she slept in
(For at least five days now)
She loosely puts on her army boots and drags her feet to the door
She stands shivering a couple of minutes in the doorway
Staring at what seems to her an almost petrified forest
Until she notices the liveliness of morning birds’ singing
Moving has reactivated her blood circulation
And revives the pain, and blood starts to drip on her face
She enjoys every bit of it
Because she wanted it so badly
And now she is the queen of her tribe
She reached the acme of her street credibility
And she’s lost forever to the Christian capitalist bourgeois society
She can’t smile because of the crusts on her lips
She puts three logs in the rusted cast iron stove
And adds a glass of kerosene to start a quick fire
They won’t call her Snow White anymore
Like these suckers used to
And they won’t call her the Austrian Virgin anymore
(She used to pretend to be a virgin
It aroused the guys
Who talked of sacrificing her to Satan, or Odin, or Hitler
But of course she hadn’t been a virgin for a while already
Wasn’t she raised in the Commune
Under the rule of free love?)
She softly touches her swollen face with icy fingertips
It relieves the pain for a short while
She has a pocket mirror somewhere in her rucksack
But she wants to feel it from the inside before seeing it
And she knows that for a few days
Her face will be bruised and bleeding
Right now she probably looks as scary as the Krampus
The devil that hunts children on the 5th of December
Every year she expected and feared its celebration
When she visited her grand parents in the Berchtesgadener Alps
She also brought some healing cream and her favorite painkillers
But yesterday’s cheap and strong Estonian vodka
Still keeps her numb enough for the moment
A growl comes from one of the human shapes
Cocooned in sleeping bags on the cabin’s floor
It’s big Varulv, who spent half of the night
Drunkenly screaming to the trees
His hatred of humans and society and above all Christians
Varulv who sang of destruction and blood and fire
Imploring unresponsive Nordic Gods to assist him
In his desperate fight against Christian capitalist nihilism
That allows the weak to rule the powerful
In Norwegian police files
Varulv is recorded as the leader of this Black Metal gang
That gather today in the woods north of Lillehammer
Half celebrating loose spring rites
And actually half running from the police
After the last wooden church arson reactivated
The media’s hysteria against the rising Black Metal Satanism
And the gang’s latent and constitutive paranoia
She plays with the thought of Varulv’s reaction
When he sees her ravaged face
Despite his outrageously staged misanthropy
He’s a sensitive and ambiguous boy
Though struggling with his appetite for personal power
He will love her and hate her for what she did
She will be the living icon of this gang of wrecked kids
She who sacrificed her juvenile beauty to the Darkness
When most of them are mere turbulent teenagers
On vacation from dull parents, schools and futures
But where she’s from, standards are different
Otto will hate her, she can tell for sure
For the same reasons that Varulv will
Because she overpowered them
The old Viennese actionist
And the young Black Metal thug
She is both a living piece of art walking the earth
And a bloody spit at the face of society
And she did it alone, she’s only sixteen and already far ahead
Well she did it almost alone
The Russian guy who tattooed her claims to have learnt his art
In a Uralian gulag
Not a political prisoner though, but what they called a hooligan
A street kid re-educated in camps
Who learned to love the Soviet Union like the mother he never had
And still does, though it has collapsed a couple of years ago
He had plenty of tattoo practice on his fellow zeks
Including shocking face tattoos
Once relocated in the west (it’s not clear how this happened)
He realized that there, tattooing pays much better than thievery
The metalhead kids in Oslo love his genuine Mafiya tattoos
They line up in front of his tiny shop to get inked
And they invite him to their crazy parties
Sometimes they do quite scare him
These little spoiled brats have no principles and no limits
The girls are particularly scary
In Motherland they never had to display this level of machismo
The German one he’s tattooed last night
Seemed to have plotted for months
For this conjunction to happen
The group of kids gathering in the forest away from Oslo
Him invited to supposedly the wildest party ever
The presence of an unusual amount of fierce alcohol
Everybody collapsing a little bit to soon
Himself drunk enough to be convinced to do a face tattoo
On an under-aged runaway
(He would never have done this in his renowned tattoo parlor
In fear of loosing his license – wild days are behind!)
But still he was able to hold firmly the needle and draw the lines
Of a stylized skull
On this pretty face.