Richard Makin, Work in Process

One day in an all-night café and I can't recollect where I've been, but there's remembrance hidden in my variance. The floor's always a good place to start looking. I turn myself about and there's someone standing by the window, where the light is.

In the middle of this gentle swell he builds a catastrophe. He meditates upon a single sheet, first lower down and then higher up the river. One day, in an all-night café, and I suppose he means something more or less like company.

Less variety of faintness now.

Nothing like it could have happened, a really day, whereby he feels paralysed at the beginning but then gradually begins to move. I owe him the small debt of dissolution, no time for superstition. I thought I was alone in the warehouse when it happened. The same motifs rerun, weird and quaint, a film of dialogue, or rather, paired monologues. A hole rots in their rushes. Undiscovered circumspectively, assertion is a free-floating sort of anxiety; hence, night the first, legends in a small box of designs: the surface of a mizzen shell, the projecting jaws and noose of an animal, a strap or cage for the mouth. A nice pair of spurs.
The extreme end of a gun to gall, to wound or fire the silences.
To rain in small drops a fine rain.
To decamp to confuse, his hell out soul into anew.

This error of yours will gugg you to the quick.
I whittle away until it reaches a point of collapse. His front too is now smooth.

The development of meaning here is puzzling, we're distracted by the carousing of seamen on an icebound ship. Space, undivided by existence—content for want of better—is compelled to teeter and fall from its collapsing axis. A carriage is pulled by horses at speed, entirely caparisoned in jet velvet. No details can be perceived on its unseamed surface. Abroad in its own time, its blacks implode a nothingness. Into the distance, he says, into the direction of a favoured object. I say that to be quiet and not distracted by literature are the same thing. And outside, it's mizzling outside. Fine rain from a cloudless sky. Serein.

A loose cavity in birds and reptiles. His ducts terminate and burst. He's an emotional and melancholy type of song sung hauling at the capstone. His given name is an old name for honeysuckle. Unusually satirical today, he plies the unwilling veil across, now prostrate in humility. You know what folk say they done to him, limbs bound to shire horses, torn apart between the grand plan and the minutiae. Whereas I, I stood myself still that day, no turning to turn in time, and everything came back into itself to collapse at the instant.

The ground was silent.

Opposite crouches a woman with assorted nervous tics. Understandably, I'm reluctant to participate. Readings are scant, scanning—parts are missing. Will she heed. I think just how my shape shall rise. There shouldn't be any reflections over there.
And then, of course, I remember what I wanted to do—I'm trying to push these rational forms into what he originally wanted. I know only too well to be hoped for. Why does he have a head that looks like that. Nothing else has a head that looks like that. Where's the boat gone? The subject-matter is irrelevant, epigrammatic ruins, partially obscured by a line of horizontal cloud. My reader's fed about now, about to drop, all part of a posthumous reputation, expressed in rather flat parataxis. Can't rush this, we're in need of a thing that joins, the two organs having been loosely arranged side by side.

Bright spots of night misfire on the iris lens. I'd have called it a day after page one. And my copyist agrees: Little book—enough. Full stop.
WRONG
You're out of touch.
RIGHT
Times have changed, like a shed battery.

She was brimful before she was ever born.

It feels less of an ache now, more like pressure, of type neural. Being wholly preoccupied with all of the negative exterior aspects, they care very little whether they are called That or Something Else.
Or of aerial lightness.

He never leaves his room with the sound out:
You see, if I'd left that cloister, I would never have found the other.

Room with ikon corner a large jar of onions. A provoking man opens the game; large daggers of ice are piled up beside the field of play. He hires a signalman to shout out the letters. Competitors use the shin bones of horses arranged in a uniform script upon the ground, primitive glyphs.

She draws the light from the window and the light from the window draws her back. Her writing allows me; I can, because she has. Masses of plumage, heavy-beating chrome wings, a preferable bodily contract . . . I dictate it all at once, in a roar, as if in a workaday trance of my own making. A blue smear of watery ink spreads from the dead centre of the page—perhaps the devil caught, so to speak, off balance, behaves a little carelessly.

Felled by a single blow he plummets onto the metal rail. Gazing down, someone asks what he means by intuition. He replies, instinct leavened by memory, and could you please withhold the electric whilst I scramble free of myself.
In a random climate, shades beyond a pane, warped blinds rise in the heat of a distant rectangle. It doesn't seem to be growing any longer, the raised weal of fortune. His eye has a most revolutionary aspect; I'll be ready and waiting. She sits and reads: a book a devil's gone get her.

You can't sign the passing, there's one in there already. If he gets bored or excited he starts chewing at his electrodes. But the more he's tortured, the funnier he thinks it is. Ranks of opposition most various today. It's dead but it's here, his head replies—a head placed bang in the middle of, and a little higher than, his flashing green epaulettes. There he goes, biting at the electrode. A hot iron is applied to his undercarriage. His cries infect my sense of ear, the repetitive rhythm of his hydraulic, be wrong, be wrong, be wrong . . . His legs lie nearby, in counterpoint to a discarded bottle—sans message, sans everything. His head is truncated in front. He asks, are you too named after something strange or interesting? It's difficult to remember the beginning when it's the beginning of the end. And I'll tell you why: this is a result industry in which he's reduced to a doting partner, the cornerstone of a quartet. Overhead, zebu cross, humped domestic oxen, shunting dragsmen of the proximal star.

An immensity cloistered in a dear room.

Seeding across a continent in a sealed train, close above which buzzards circle in the curving air. Various existing opposition, including the founder of the gens. We're being held here in order to regulate, yet I think fondly of that time back then as a time.

You won't see another one like that ever. I don't think that part was quite ready to be detached from the rest of him. Now his thoughtless head is blocking the drain. These are the kinds of things that happen when one is not paying attention. But he'll be reutilized, and is feeling pretty optimistic about the future, like two squabbling flies caught dancing in the sunlight. More oblique symbolism, this time a dilation, a shift which produces a figure similar to, but not congruent with, its original.

Old back, pain fading. Decide yourself.

Building up to the weekend, there are two parts: the inner core and the outer core. Each damage to a compartment degrades the whole hull. Don't flag these up; these are bodies, perfect achieved bodies with organs reinforced.
I think we're in the wrong place.
Yes, he grunts.
Granted, there is a marginal risk of getting involved. Then there are the nerve agents: no one said this was going to be subtle. What's that funny noise. What's that on the floor.

They are rather more insouciant than their counterparts, slowly osmotic, ungraced yet blessed within their astronomy. I'm obliged to express doubt myself, starvexed too as I am.
Now, to the end of the progress: drawing on his breath thick and short, his body cased in claw-bark. Drawing on his breath, thick and short, each naturally succeeding the previous.

We're in a fluid dynamic, one on one—the neural peal—hanging in a thermal funnel above an alphabet pinned down by sunbeams. The final hunt begins. Each stripe is magnetically aligned to the north or south pole (this is all best-guess). I think they'll settle amongst themselves. Is that time-running-out music? The bigger effects will start up any day, once the bigger causes have had their fill of things. It all hinges on that. These are the kinds of advents that happen when you're too being, when you're not looking out, not paying attention.

When I refused to speak for a time, for one whole week he forgot all about his glory years. His translation marks the stages of a misread life: A HARD REIGN is perhaps the most artful expression to use here—a contrived solution to a difficulty in the plot.
A carriage bears down pulled by horses at speed, driven by tricorned postilion, the whole caparisoned in jet velvet. Three waves to one beat of the pulse, triplebeating the battened heart: untie, unite, break open that knot . . . No details are perceived across the unseamed surface. Abroad in its own time, its blacks implode a nothingness. He taps his snuff box with a clawlike hand.

His shell-like ear.

That must be them: he bears a duelling scar, and she a dwelling scab. Their ripples reinforce each other in geometric progression.
It's always quicker going back. We list our skills, so we can be made useful. Colourful and confused, she may not be what she seems. Her sky is indescribable, an unbreakable epiphany. His tardiness is legendary. I keep drifting off to myself, in at the discontinuous. Still so I got no star, a form of existence without.
A consumptive drawing.

Room balladeer.
We will a ligature, and lie strewn the white flocks, hence the rather severe titles which refer only to musical forms, never the picaresque. In memory of my reader, I keep letting slip my concentration, pastoral by bliss. Liviabella on the lino, la conchiglia, the shell after the bottle imp—symphonic prose and chamber musics. Infinite room above. One finds himself possessed and loved by something selfless—the explosive ones, in sight of burning fuse.

In a mangled wake the grudging roam. A break in the narrative, a luminous ring around a shining body, old friends in new, made manifest in an outstanding work of pieces. Place names: the place. My money's on the buy hand, noble to the fingertips—like a man who fights on through a world of shadows and traps.

Ranking auspices: a company of larks, quails, roes or ladies. A flock of any kind, though rarely a collection of objections. Air whining these days through the old reticulum. What a lovely death, and what musics to expire to, talismanic where the root affords a red dye. A random is contemplated, one pertaining to railways, trains, carriages and rolling stock—operations by magnetic levitation. From every orifice pours a thick gluey sap, the word from out his without. This is what is meant above when he cries, This is pouring out of me. He can't control. His fold is an aggregate of many appearances. He's given a second chance (he shouldn't have been adding things up at this point). But I think there'll be a good dinner in it for you all—strapped as you are crosswise upon the table top.

He is strapped crosswise upon the table top. Never say end, so close to the seven deadlies. A recital is granted as an accompaniment to the process, as if in lame counterfeit. His bursa pops and a viscid cud flows forth in pussy rivulets.

A fluid-filled sac or saclike cavity to lessen the fiction.

Substance still present in the smaller fruit and debris of tissue. The rest are busy strappadoed above the dining-table.
Thought I recognized you from somewhere, you're an X, are you not? You were there that day, tell us how it happened.

I'll inspect when I can get closer. At this distance, he'll gradually wear off.

Yes, this is a long march, but we're permitted stops along the way, stations of our own crossing. I'm going to get out the light. At this small distance nothing matters; it'll gradually wear off to the selfsame.

He is wanting of teeth, and consequently cannot bite, but if his vomit happens to fall upon anything, it's curtains. He returns. The island seems changed. Its pneuma has been sucked out through its arse and things stuffed in to plug the gap. Now, is that too strong to speak of?
Enter, limned goldenly across a panel ash:
on to the
                                  on to the open
                                                                          sea, the opening open
                                                                                                                                      sea like me
                                                                                                                                                                                like thee

And a man the image of, one big-winged. He looks up at the sky and falls out Icarus. Accordingly, it is spring; the edge of the sea, beneath a mesh retreating at the speed of night. Scallop a scaly gauntlet now with joints of steel, with sinuous radiate ridges and eared hinge a valve upon his sleeplessness. Untimely ships—stones and queer engines—headless mustermen, and he snuck in his vernacular shell speaks only of what is said and nothing else, nothing more, nothing better absolute.
A pool or lake.
A sheet of standing water.
An arm of the sea.
A boundary.
An object indicating a boundary.
A measure of lead containing land.
This is what it is in the full sense of the term: absolute, entire, sheer, perfect, downright. Yet his head's assurance is frail, so deal with him as I prove true, and exit.

Even before knowing the results of the analysis we're evidently stuck at Bedlam's cupola. Twin statues gesture and beckon, trapped under a film of dialogue: Begone about your business . . . Come out and scour, search and destroy, seek out one who wanders and struggles and gets lost, and gets lost again and again: a private assassin with a view of the harbour, nightfishermen—that long long conversation we were having before it happened.

She's not what she seems. She lives in a tree with her venomous herbs, to her the sea is old, cold, and mad. She swoons away.
Now, he says, how much do you charge.
Auspices, a dish or other object of like form the shallows.

Wonderstruck she calls inaudible. Only brooding now for now and malice. No further alarms for the England.

Some days I think I am the dead himself and do not know it, have yet to be informed of my own demise in the matter at hand.

Dolce. A day like another. None of it is of my own originating, but if my advice had been asked, I would never have arrived. It was not asked—no less, no more.

Archive frottage: an ancient engine for casting stones or bolts. The soft-toned organ stops, softly and sweetly, my sweet nothing doing-nothing, the clear and pleasant idleness cramped double in my funnel hole.

Back bent coughing like a hag, he bears his grudge with a jolly green lapel. Thus far of them train who follow their well-loved, a line aligned, typed small and aliened alonesome.

A human baby is born with an animal tail. It's reported. News-sheet spread flat by a passing torso. Some son that turned out to be. I abdicate all responsibility. Under nature, still, so it's cast like a crest. Such a display is limited to the persona concerned. It lays a rare egg with thumbprints and a mouth, crawls from its moist birth canal and tucks at the fur, where milk pores ooze. Without, footfalls on cobble and the bobbling bladder of a she-goat or pig announce. Back then I could jump over cars, I jumped over people: tug-boat pilots on the Rhine, arcing to trade a circle. He aims above the waterline, in his sights are honeymooning ancestors, the last of our line. He's trying to assassinate me before I'm even born.

How can anything remotely like this be sustained.

He's made himself quite ill. Anything to do with cigarettes closed down. Smoke was proscribed. Fire was banned. Waste light, waste earth. By slow degrees we're weighted and flung into the estuary. Still yet we're germinal, spokes in a mouth of seeds. On that last Monday they had planned quite an outing.

The impossible has merely been delayed. Stop the train: he's left his heart behind. Remains nor cold nor woman, in a build-up of static charge. But she's not what she seems.

I had the big fear that day of the track.
A more or less exact social index, a material image of a still-warm body.