They asked me why I ran away so often, I told them no idea. I was lying, of course, but the reasons why were pretty obvious to all but the most disinterested spectator. My function was limited: I was a noun in a room without a narrative to follow (or be followed by.) I was along for the ride, and the ride was pulling my body in a trillion directions at once.

 

Wonder and sawdust. That’s the stuff most memories’re made of. Voice came through the intercom, I have an important announcement to make. Something about baby snow lions in the zoo. The part of me I knew least about went mountain-climbing. Voices surrounding promise imminence, though we’re not buying this week. Salty and demoted, I could only chance to moan.

 

The one of me that is a cripple entertained the rest of us with his dubious song-and-dance routine. There were countries I was never even a part of in that song! Ghost chorus accompanied us on the refrain:

 

shhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeeeee!

sss-ahhhhhhhh!

 

wo-yaaaaaaaaaaahh!

ig-dbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 

Everyone sat on the thermometers that had sprouted from the floor throughout the aforementioned. Brains and their sisters sighed in a rugged unison that belied the sensus communis we might’ve once dreamed to attain. I’m usually not the type of moose to go prancing across the ceiling, BUT…

 

Are you gay enough to fall in love with what you used to be? I taped a sign to my abdomen inviting the masses to abandon me. Devoid of all emotional content, we start to resemble prunes. The rustling sound in the garden was the copernican revolution.

 

During that period when I was an object, I found I could be inhabited quite readily. Then I became pure substance — what a drag. Substance almost always entails incorporation. It’s like there were magnets on the ceiling, I couldn’t walk anywhere. Nothing less to do than seek solace in the ill-definable.

 

“World” equals shiny metal object. And I wasn’t feeling so great myselves. Singular function had been reduced to produce, vegetative scramble for egg edge pure in molty permanence. I donned my protest outfit and stood outside the House of Common Law, screaming admittance. Much to my chagrin, they allowed us inside. The entrance hall was shaped like a tunnel, so we automatically morphed into sperm in order to serve this metaphor. Judges and gods put on goggles to protect themselves from our mutant wrath.

 

Next year you’ll feel the same, I assured one of the oldsters, whose wig had been irreparably damaged in the peril. He never felt more certain, though, than when he watched the back of my hand melt into his face.

 

Outside, there were houses, houses everywhere. The mass media was said to live in most of them. The question was, could we move past them without being pierced by their electronic arrows? That’s a question we still find ourselves asking, made wily by the stasis.

 

And so that seems to leave us exactly where we started off, haunting beneath the skyless enclave. The seasons were everything that year. And I, well, I of course happened to change again. In the absence of global conflict, I began to feel as though I were falling in love with the soundness of the moment. It was an awful feeling, and so I threw all my trash away and knelt down in front of the transport center, reclaiming the hole through the method.

Commissioned by Wilkinson Gallery for the upcoming exhibition by Pennacchio Argentato, opening April 26th in London.