Richard Makin, Work in Process

The old optimism's back, for the time being. And resoluteness: how the problem of an authentic is attested. Some of these things have disappeared over time, an owed entrapment touching water. The one who comes this time is a herder of swine, underpigs with ornamental beatings, three hundred of them with heads down going damn hell for the horizon. They pop up and eat you when you're least expecting it. The works sit still tide by tide: song and gravity. Wonderful music to die to this, upon which he has prescribed the line of a cut. I'm amazed by the rate at which he can remember: glacial deposits, mantle-rock, a kind of valve made of stones, a blanket, the blast of distant trumpets—or maybe from the very next room. Beyond the frozen panes an efflorescence of sodium salts settles on the topsoil. Even though it was only for one night it was still strange unconsolidated material to deal with. When he died they found in his head an enormous brain rumour, almost unbearable to look at, yet magnificent too. Now no symbols remain in his workaday world; whole trances have gone missing. Please to leave, sir—what a die to day to die for. Now he's going to get some stick, compassed about by a letter-filled sky, slam-dunk in the middle of a right fell day. He has clenched his fists all the livelong life that has lived him up. He just wants to push off into the far distant future—an invisible barrier whose iron-grey pulse is elevated by twisters, eighty kilometres up into the star roster. A stratagem forms: make up a complete universe, including a horrible animal. The evidence comes prowling out to meet us, his families and his injuries and his endless enquiries.

There's one close, I can smell it. Fumble forth by memory—that's how they get you. They're under the ground. Or maybe he's going to wait us to death. But I do know things about myself, basking on these warm residual boulders, all of them pushing at once—pushed out and horded into the relentless mall. We assess and we study. We quiver and we brutalize. It's been waiting all this time. How does it know we're here. There's a wake of light at peripheral. Let's go up on the roof. They have no ear for things. This thought overcomes her resistance, and she says: I do not know things about myself either—I do not yes, an old old yes and those handsome moors. Nothing left but used names, porterage, a burian with bright blue flowers strewn and leaves used as flavouring, father of sweat. You just can't disguise the number of shots on target. Everything closes down Monday, but it's okay, the technology allows me to play five different roles at once. He says, I'm a raw nerve, walking. I'll be all right once I'm back on my knees again. He's famously taciturn, the inexplicable unescapable. I've been getting some really strange readings recently; the whole matter is still obscured. Alphabet dolmen scatter throughout this immanent domain. The pointlessness today is no more pointless than usual, a cause for mute celebration, I suppose, desultory calibrations. That's one damn job I'd never do, working around electricity. Maybe it's time we hired a new generator.

The lone frontrunners bent double like hogs.

He dies of a delightful species of dehydration. They come up through the floor. He feels driven to do something and equally restrained not to and is yanked in directions. That's how it is. He is become two, not the one. Why does he stay here? Why does he go there? To be there for the earthquake. Maybe the ground. Yes, the ground from under him.
I only need one head. Sort it out between you.
He bows, aristocrat very, and he says: things are builded of things today, to mark a change. But what if we can't finish the roof. At the molecular level things are really heating up, the great peal from Yes to No. Land and kin, and notably, a calamitous bankraid. There are no more what ifs left to juggle with. I feel quite guiltless: the basis of their wealth was running off with other people's cows. It's a good job we're still inhaling.
It's a good job you're actually here because you're unimaginable, she says, and bring me the interstitial Yes, and his head while you're about it—the musterman's.
Those are feet, aren't they, swaying from side to side through the veil of curtailing light.

The sound of a descending aircraft through the mural vent attests to life beyond the compound (by mural I simply mean pertaining to walls). I share your fascination with marginalia—annotations to a book never written, redundant technologies half-hid by high winds—having once decomposed my very own track of rebellions: fractured gaps, tongue splinters. It's a project I'd like to resurrect somewhen. Regretfully, I missed the thing of the ears.

That sequence was so fine it wouldn't put me down, and now I'm stuck at uncertain memorials. It mangles the emotional register, like the track of a bite. He spent the first half of his life seeking out a nice comfortable wasteland of his own: oceans, deserts, that sort of thing. Arrested by a bolt of sunlight startles me, the incontestable bright. He has a weakness for such ill-starred digressions. We've been threatening a performance like this for weeks—Spring combat. Some of these remarks will disappear over time. That might just be an effect of leaf-fall, all counterintuitive, but the old optimism's coming back, for the time being. I am of course responsible for all the conclusions drawn here, in so far as his mourning is not expressly cited. You are horrified at our intending. And the fact that he differentiates at all isn't helping matters much. Not a chance must be wasted today!

Who lives here? One diminutive talker participant in a delightfully conversational period. I'd rather remainder at home alone. Time passes so quickly when you're pacing out—memory stockwork, hunters in the now. Not a chance must be wasted today. It's necessarily psi-phy in flavour, he says. There's no dogmatic commitment to the metaphor, and here's the proof of this: he takes outside everything they have done that day and he builds a big bonpyre and he fires it before their eyes and all goes up in smoke.

We'll have the hound checked by our technicians tomorrow. This isn't the first time it's threatened me. Last month it happened twice. Who checks the men here where all lack a body at the base of the sky? His hands are on fire. I'll never forget that image. Pick one, say, a lark ascending, lost in its aerial rings a precious metaphor. One reading is 295C, nothing more nor nothing less. What are we to make of that. Speech infliction governs the vocal lines—the mighty handful with an only word—ballast for an orchestra of ordinary size, a beautifully decorated toy, a nightingale.

Nighting-gaggle, stymied by the fateful decisions of a previous day. She's a woman of glyphs. Her theme provides recurrent inspiration, rushing on toward a future that's nonetheless already lost.

Happening is happening again and is proving indefatigable. He is elect for a single day. His hymen breaks. He's offered up to the circling light, assumes various shapes, sometimes of enormous size and portentous hideousness.

Is this politic. Good question. If only he knew he could stop. Use whatever comes to hand, proceed by way of curses and superstitions. Take care that the pins pass right through his wick. Now set him up and light him. He burns down first to one pin then to another. Every node has to corresponds to some childish ditty. Each seems to stand for a separate lover. When it gets to the right man the door will open and he will appear, bladebone in clenched fist. Some spelling that, like a stray once voiced longway back wrong passageway:
Conjuration, as done this false—necromancer—in a bare-shuttered room, under the shoulder-bane of a ram, salt hand burning at the spell.
Soured cream in the churn. They sometimes cast a handful of salt into the fire. A space slips down through the shoulder's tense muscle, sealants bursting in the silence. Garden of planets:
Whether he be asleep or awake,
I'd have him come to me and speak.

I've never been sure myself who he is, always at all times of this earth. Strewn across the pavement are shattered eggshells and a little bit of purple stuff, all very pleasant.

His father always had a rather blasé attitude towards electrocution, having enjoyed a lifelong acquaintance with the substance, if it may be so called. They still have silent parts to play: corpse-bearers, muse, musicians, slaves, frogs, a chorus of ones. When she handed me this tragedy she was in a mad, bad way, stuck in the centre of the spreadwide art of epigrams: Out of unreason comes everything exits. We keep to the rules, resolved as we are to die in the remnants of a much larger repertoire. No one can hurt us now—we're no longer inside ourselves.

White mark on the animal's face. Proclaim a simple hierarchy of courage.

She's been arraigned for obscenity. There are some figures, but it's unclear what they mean. I now feel that to bring love between them is to touch their history with something not quite so good as itself. We've made it through another day. Can we put it all back together now. Hurry, if I were to be late just once, you're dead. Inside, she covets her fear.
It comes from old money and older power, and it'll go back to old money and older power. I wouldn't do that either, right now, the great leap from Yes to No that just will not go away. Suck back in fuselage. Suck back in swamp, squash-headed alive deep in the unforgiving merse. She doesn't say anything but takes one of his hands. She can see without looking at its roots that he's a doomster. He never moves his eyes off her yes.
Do not allow it to distract your life. I cannot do that. It was without memory, that much was clear. The world was spinning so fast that night: limner manipulation—synaesthesia—corrugating sheets of rose and blue, like rising heat vapour on a runway out east—bolts of violet, everything set aside to treasure. I advise you to come over to our side, whenever you've saved up the required sum. I keep adding a daily sheet until I can send the whole steaming packet off; when July beats down with blows, my hope is to smuggle you in. We'd all be a lot better off if people spent more time watching, be like they, everything wondrous: skeins of blackflapping geese, vapour trails and engine roar, a brace of heron, crow in wake—all at a welcome standstill.
An experiment: outsounding angelus, long-spanned. Slender hollow tubes form the framework of his wing. She opens the door and a huge red feather is wafted in by a gust of wind. A film forms over her eye, a conveyance of sorts. There must be a venter abroad, shod in shoes of rawhide. We later find her remains at the basal part where the egg cells develop, felt stuffed into her chest, the thorax support. The right extremity of her liver is thick and rounded.

The student should make himself acquainted with the indifferent circumstances, and flee. The inside leaf of a hog is melted into lard—the fat around the pig's kidney—beast turning on spit in worldscoping arcs—Xmas Day—offset by hunters in the snow, beyond the shutters into memory's thaw: cakes of flare, unrent gristle struck over freely with current, pork flare, ruinous shacks, the scent of chemical plant, factory stacks, diesel fumes. Enough. He's fortified now with denticulate battlements—the stone that eats itself. And the sonic aspect? Grey antinomy, the muscular coat, a double layer of fibres pitched exact. You are it. I'm leaving; I've been leaving all the time I've sequestered myself at this voluptuous retreat.

A consultancy of manes: How many of your goals have been very good goals? No answer. An echo he speaks again. No answer for a second time. Repeat. Repeat immediately. The chasm breaks. Echo. Still no answer. His reputation has been built on to the spirit of the place, into which a shape enters: This place will be my very own place in an idle plot of substitutes. His inner ear itches, the signal for immaculate contraptions, the machinery suspended above the stage, an unexpected power or event ruining a seemingly hopeless situation. What if I should die during the last movement, all my dust blown off the book-head? Flowers have different names over there. Hold the hall in the lung! Great trumpet-loads of breath . . . He's busy finalizing the patrimonial state his predecessors have prepared. He's known about these parts as Grozny, or the Terrible, the Vengeance. It's empty.
There's a sudden crash of drums.
And he says it must be.

I never saw it happen, how they soften and hover at the cusp of two silences.

Loud music as O dances frenziedly in the banqueting room. On his death the empire passes to his surviving son. He's an opsimath, one who learns late in the levelling of a lonesome life, a sort of tolerated smuggler of words. The rest of his time he passed. Pupae of moths balance on his shorn scalp, with fallen columns across the inside head—within beneath a drystone wall the sea murmuring Shelley. A last stand in the desert, that colossal wreckage—salvage of fresh flowers, forget-do-nots, forget-do-you-nots, and along alas along the cry of the loon vendor: Come quick, here they are.

Some of these I habitually remove. I have wrought two very decided failures of late, the impulse to the satellite, and the other I forget. He was at first considered very feasible, even by men of science: something about his having had words with a she-mummy. Since this theme pervades, I never knew anyone so keenly alive and attuned to a joke as her: she had eight of them chained together, dipped in pitch and suspended from the centre of a dome—from its eye, so to speak. You can guess the rest. Lung at rest on firm pillars, a timeless earth-house held beside, until I stop and say, This is pouring out of me.

No one's going into the kitchen until I know what's happening. Hell, he says, as long as I have to go across somehow. Sure. Why not take control? Push jovial out among the world. Who's playing up there, asks he. Nobody. They're all gone. A whole bladder full an open vein, pressure for the rush and the roar, a big old steam train shunting from here to here, and back again. There's a matchstick figure chained to the line. He can't break. He can't go on. Sparks descend, in formation. He drifts. It's right here. We've never left. And he says, addressing the hesitant young officer: Dog—were you hoping to live forever?
A great opportunity arises for them to make use of a death: the fury of extreme factions, a band of soldiers in castoff raiment leading away their hostages.
One night when we were all fast asleep we heard a knock at the door. We wake up and in walk an angel and his brother, both in disguise.
It's time for the great balloon hoax.

All this time the sleepwalker remains exactly as I last described him.
You've got to start making real decisions about all this.

It's true. He rewrites his own commentaries. Who'll navigate now? My nose has had to be rescinded. Aspersions are cast on my rank. That distant enthusiast is waving his arms about. He must be describing, decyphering. He's offered a bed for the night, but declines and leaves the hospital alone. You've known this all along—I told you, remember afar all I remember all.

Somehow I cried all the way through. Branches dowse and sway, while giant wings pound the air (I foresee awkwardness with this thing of the wings). Their translation marks are visible like the track of a bite, the penultimate stage of a discontinued life. I dedicate. We hijack. We nonchalantly chaperone a ship. Today I'm signified as O, hymen ruptured and folded inward—beating angelus, muscle at the index. But yet, yet but again, unearthed—disinterred.
The police drive about the streets looking for him. They find him and they take him back. He doesn't care. It's all one to him. He's left with a small scar, and a madly contagious, febrile disease. Anticlockwise eruptions cover his skin, simply unshakable, simply ineradicable. He is of or like the liver. Yes liverish—

Send photos. Stop. Their translation marks the stages of a misused life. By dint of learning my lines by heart I suffer a mighty blow, the mark of a shrike, edge against edge. I dedicate. I dictate myself to myself. We nonchalantly chaperone a ship and the crew would rather we had not. Go back to the sea, the sea they say from whence you rose. Me, I'd rather stay here with the things.