Flight 2.0
26 February 2009 15:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skonen_bladesGrab the velocity.
The throttle is right there, singing to you. It’s a metaphor, sure, but it’s a big one. Wrestle the trajectory towards heaven. Make the arrow jig straight lines into life’s direction. Make the bull’s eyes fearful. Flight is an escape as well as a direction. What goes up must come down. Every slow-motion leap a plane makes is proof that the earth is playing catch with hearts in man-made cans.
Emotionless, top-heavy, and proud, I careen like a gymnast in the wrong body at a family reunion for cannibals. My leap of faith wears sequins and a baseball cap, carries a gun, and has eyes squeezed shut towards the future. There is a map of travel routes for passengers tattooed on the backs of all our guardian angels. For every fulfilled hope, the curtain lifts and there it is; a mountain in the way.
The black box nestled in my head will play back the last moments of my life to the crash inspectors. I’m a stock market in a bakery, collapsing like a soufflé only to rise like bread moments later. This is the breath of life that airplanes skate across. A child’s exhalation of icy wind, thin near the border of space.
First class will die seconds before the cheap seats in a head-on collision. That’s comforting to some. There’s a burglar on the plane. Blood is my propellant and it’s flammable when you’re around. Fuel for shuttles needs to be kept at absolute zero. You are an ignition switch.
A friend of mine is afraid of skydiving. Not because she’s scared of falling but because she’s scared she’ll pull her arms in, point her toes, angle towards the earth and laugh all the way down, heart exploding on impact without ever coming close to pulling the ripcord to open the parachute. I know exactly what she means.
If heaven is up and hell is down, then we are the left and right, the 2d world that makes paper-airplane origami out of all of us. We are bear-skull engines on fire for the last ticket to the fist fight. We are dice in mid-throw. Turbulence is upon us.
I always need to sit beside the emergency exit in planes because of my long legs. In case of a water landing, I will use my seat cushion as a flotation device and think of you.
tags
The throttle is right there, singing to you. It’s a metaphor, sure, but it’s a big one. Wrestle the trajectory towards heaven. Make the arrow jig straight lines into life’s direction. Make the bull’s eyes fearful. Flight is an escape as well as a direction. What goes up must come down. Every slow-motion leap a plane makes is proof that the earth is playing catch with hearts in man-made cans.
Emotionless, top-heavy, and proud, I careen like a gymnast in the wrong body at a family reunion for cannibals. My leap of faith wears sequins and a baseball cap, carries a gun, and has eyes squeezed shut towards the future. There is a map of travel routes for passengers tattooed on the backs of all our guardian angels. For every fulfilled hope, the curtain lifts and there it is; a mountain in the way.
The black box nestled in my head will play back the last moments of my life to the crash inspectors. I’m a stock market in a bakery, collapsing like a soufflé only to rise like bread moments later. This is the breath of life that airplanes skate across. A child’s exhalation of icy wind, thin near the border of space.
First class will die seconds before the cheap seats in a head-on collision. That’s comforting to some. There’s a burglar on the plane. Blood is my propellant and it’s flammable when you’re around. Fuel for shuttles needs to be kept at absolute zero. You are an ignition switch.
A friend of mine is afraid of skydiving. Not because she’s scared of falling but because she’s scared she’ll pull her arms in, point her toes, angle towards the earth and laugh all the way down, heart exploding on impact without ever coming close to pulling the ripcord to open the parachute. I know exactly what she means.
If heaven is up and hell is down, then we are the left and right, the 2d world that makes paper-airplane origami out of all of us. We are bear-skull engines on fire for the last ticket to the fist fight. We are dice in mid-throw. Turbulence is upon us.
I always need to sit beside the emergency exit in planes because of my long legs. In case of a water landing, I will use my seat cushion as a flotation device and think of you.
tags