Crash Worship: Runaway


"Crash worship is a killer band!"
"Slammin'!"
Dissolve: Run this on a fast loop: The directions you got for the plunge were all wrong, reduced to highway rubble; a silhouette with a full-leg brace leans against the next smooth victim of velocity - this is the car that Jack built;
Run over at high-speed - there's exhilarating major trauma;
Viewing filmed sequences of authentic torture opened their minds for a unique experiment in thought- implantation: Watch the bodies of the tormented writhe and think of Iced Cappucino... and the family; your professional position gives you three options which may be exercised in sequence: empathy, come-by-wire and next-channel-protect;
Self-inflicted pain is a form of signature with a script imported from the shadows of cloverleaves and the bars on cribs; alleviate your indecision with this simple trick: visualize alternative lifestyles - A Zen tattoo, an overstuffed couch made to look shabby, a 5-year-old Range Rover and... scarification, uh... next year;
I'm grinding forward through the gears, mired in the speed trap, the cliffs before me, guard-rails and sheafs of innocuous workload; I'm a meteor, won't sleep my natural rhythm, caught streaking on the Lingo-Bahn, typhoon oblige, can't seize the day, no longer wandering;
"John's recklessness just kills me!"
High-speed chase- zooming in and out of traffic on slick streets, they abandon the notion of a central authority and strike out toward the vanishing point where the rubber meets the flesh become twisted metal's found object;
Approaching headlights twinkle a message in transparent fascination - Surrender and prepare to be boarded;
The angle of the placement of her legs is a kind of crash;
Grease drips from a leaking crankcase, gasoline an expendable blood whose fumes are the cologne of shredded clothing; vinyl melts in tears poisonous to the membranes sheared away from organelles by razor-sharp plate glass;
This as a way of playing: pierce each other's nipples with shrapnel taken from the sites of imploding safety cages, then salt the wounds with kisses;
"I wanna see Demolition Man!"
"Slammin'!"
In the farthest corner of the human brain lies a switch with seven positions: salivation, continuance, gnashing-and-claws, forward thrust, mechani-clock, tremulous waters and wolf-gang-awed-by-hot-stars'-plunge;
Oil-slick dreams a negative rainbow cast raggedly against the asphalt grip night's sparking weld illumines;
Hiss-bang, nitro-dawn cracks groaning into being, flamethrower found with a day in its arms;

John Noto is a poet and essayist living in San Francisco. His writing recently appeared in the CTHEORY book, Digital Delirium, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. He is editor-in-chief of a new literary magazine, Orpheus Grid.