Haptic, Elastic Arts, Chicago, 8/22/08

As though lying on our backs, we submit to an urge to turn over. The journey to the halfway point: groggy fluttering. Gritted teeth. Mounting tension. Our muscles sing; they sing on a throbbing platform of motor attempts.

Success: balancing now, we hold ourselves on our side, every inch and angle burning, cerebral cortex straining, holding the body's variable x note.

We death-flirt at the threshold past which gravity would embrace our burning noise. Hips to the floor, side-leg smashed flat, we turn our eyes toward this imminent descent. Yet suddenly our desire to flip/to fall is overcome by a terror of propulsion-rushing change. Our ears fill with saw blades, our nostrils with phosphorus. Our tongue swells, we are astronauts flabbergasted by self-induced, unruly fate-- too late, we pray-fall into the deadly cradle of rollercoaster departure, singed hair flies away as we involuntarily embark. Falling into the noise our pancake body is scheduled to produce on impact, we drop toward the ground and

sliver, mid-air, into pieces, small bits of our matter following the example of those fleeing-fried follicles. Pieces grate off our being, we are a solid metal train slowly elapsing, our anticipated fate of slam-dunk, hard-screech impact noise is displaced by a rain of incensed slow-motion hardware sparks, shimmering into no-way danger zones, testing the limits of temporality as they crescendo into stuttered transcendence-in-becoming.

A brake gets pulled, strained, not enough to stop us but only to squeal sustained shattering, a process of fragmentation that moves simultaneously with the pieced-off, fly-away, singed-hair-following substance of our metal flesh, and against it, both enabling our flight-descent and refuting it. Wavy, transformative path, we regenerate our shattered motor-innards like a lizard grows a second tail, fucking over space and time, making violent waves in these pools of ether, shifting machinic organs to withstand gravity's night-shivered, corset-gloved touch.

Holes gape open now within us, outside airplane noise penetrating our 90-proof walls. We yawn, hard air consuming our screams, night-violence-spotted creature that we've become, we begin to merge with the air that drown-surrounds us. The atmosphere spots us; we spot back; diving abyssal interpolation of creative pain.

Our sound-flame drowned by air-like bass, we cut our own liquor, diet our figure, flood our own flow with atmosphere. We dilate our pupils, stretch past our nylons, flicker our light source: dialectic self-interference patterns render us violent-violated-ephemeral.

One last clutch of self claws through us, echoing out and down as we become atmosphere. We "arrive," to find that we now reside only in this empty force of air as it kisses the anticipated impact-surface, restlessly searching our matter for bodies to crash, finding only a certain melancholic solace in the evocation that absence performs.