Richard Makin, Work in Process

One day you were walking in front of me without knowing me. And later, now perhaps, you're here once again, with your back to the open window, with your notices and warnings and bad fate, a fate that's thrown out of itself. When this is used and exhausted, another sequence runs.
Recent fossil wingless, possibly a generation earlier. The familial history is intertwined with an inquiry into its cause, a narrative which explains the topographic features (the pillar of salt).

Have you here any besides—
bring them out of this place.
The sun has risen upon the earth when
a sudden squall, haulers in the rain-lashed
august against the bodily frame, and he says, No,
I cannot detonate with words.
Indebtedness arises various
to chain or link together,
a series of hinges depending on each other.
Slowly it arrives,
but already this looks a likely place to stop,
a double blind beneath the incarcerating rib:
systole and diastole.

He explains: When I say heart, I do not mean the organ. This is set in an indeterminate past. But there is now a list, a meaningful list. It demonstrates the efficacy of the mechanism.
No portrait in this book is the character of any actual person, the humans are all default humans (said blandly and bitterly). The breath slips out of their hands and tumbles down the mountain. For a while we're on a list with no promises. Extras are needed, pi-jawed and smoking at the face, voiceless labile stops, tonguewise changelings. Shuffle them round in themselves, at his wondrous, paraffinic sea.

Drone spelling-bee at the work window
from its habit of combined labour,
battering at the threeperson'd.
Somewhat in that wormwood,
and crash, only three pulses left
less than a third of a mile off,
for an instant standing like he who was
killed one cloudless long ago
by summary bolt at his own quotidian.
I haven't given it any thought myself,
being apt to slip or change (see mind)—
traffic loam, factory smooth, polished monthly
bit by bit. Arrowed like this, despite the graph,
directing we the usurer—
but I think the roof's back on now.

This one's a professional hexer, profile lost, all at sea in his hereness-and-nowness. Envoi! Envoy! Light strikes a wooden orb. Its mystery bleeds to the surround. He records crucial fragments of overheard dialogue and personal mediation, ever undergoing a powerless attempt to establish himself. He is incapable of doing. He carefully hoards these fragments. Let's put him back in his place. Let's imagine him as the earth while the moon circles round him. We might change his opinions, if only for two very good reasons: my alacrity, and the lack of seconds left to us. He becomes a willing candidate for a series of tortures, mental and physical. I am better off like this, ripped out new and glittering.

A chain of anchors on the round table, and today's date is the Seed Date. The drama's enacted in an unearthly metallic atmosphere full of eyes, at rest for a season. There are tiny vibrating structures on the surface of every cell, spreading currents through the surrounding fluid. Ciliafire, says one. Periods of damning work are punctuated by punctuation. Strike out that key. Relate the sense of each object. She lets out a pierce, harrows a cry. A spiked frame smooths and pulverizes the land, then draws over it to tear and harness, rocking back and forth under influence of the moving air. He responds—his own self—and opens his circling arms to hold her up. She is no longer there. He falls, his face utters Tell this to their heads.

I'm only concerned to find myself where she plummets back to earth. You probably know someone like her. This thing you shriek of, is it vendible? May it be bartered? Flattened under the hammer? To defend themselves against themselves, I may have to join you—
See End, the envoi—seek, form, and apply. These three have to go, otherwise the evening gets even more confusing. I can't remember what happened. I could never remember what happened.
Just now, an earsplitting siren.

A meteman, boundary layer, withdraws a volt from the staple, pulling inward spasmodically. He goes to attend to his teeth and misses his own exorcism. Today I feel indescribably sad, and for no reason. At the inner corner, the articulating reticule. Does wearable make any sense here? Without, void, a gradual circling, with skinned knuckle keys. Certain of the them sink at night, deep into the clay and Thanet sand. He comes, highly resistant to his own corrosions, hauling a collapse to sling out of joint. The area in the middle represents the sea. It ripens. He is two-dimensional, yet a free repenter. A slope house.

Where once you were.
What were you once.
He says, I was once an eye, and now am not.

An unreadable, an axewoman. Move, cut the silence. He is felled as if glass. Because you are tired, because you are here and you are tired, because of the clearance, you are here and you are dashed to bits in the foreshock, caught at the space between high and low watermark. The enveloping disc, unachingly real, spins like the white of an egg or the eye. An assault with storms, clouds, frogs, mirrors—time collapsing, odd pairings of older and older influence. I'll keep singing until the day carries you away, each of the pair, atom boy and atom girl. Another night without you here and I'll go crazy. The terrain overlaps—the swell of contemplation, but always forgetting what to say, startling to sign, and lifted into a solitude.

The rent between cloud and sea has been named the horizon.

She wins her battles quick, hence the need for scant arms. Let me destroy the situation with candle pictures; I warn you gravely, I can be ugglesome myself. And she's big, with a shingle-pink circle cut into her front head. Tell me of any past impression you've maintained in memory, of anything, the image.
Variform dead on the fly-shelf this morning.

A narrow constriction of land links two larger territories. He still before shed antlers the snow. Their upper parts are sometimes daubed and sometimes played separately. She goes into the battlekeep, lifts the latch, cautious, but the door is barred. She feels for the place where the spy-hole is. The pin fits flush and tight. Music. The back cloth is illuminated by burning. A wall of human face. Is that clear. The scaffold implodes. Now I am going, embedded in a horizontal moment, for which we must be parted. Never now I am going so. A dog move his tongue. Fist-born, threatening that you may know, he puts a spare difference between the one and the other. She's hid him these three months. Now she can no longer conceal. She's out of control, cries muster everywhere. You cast yourself off. Let them lead, let them bring me to the hill.

How suddenly great the loss of what one. How suddenly great the loss of what one parted from, a friend, a place. Went, and never returned. She corresponds to the feminine atom, always tracing back to the same sparse points. Don't turn her over, she still carries breath. She seems to have fallen through the gap between work and its indifference. Better allude to the fact, the reflection, rather than state. Better the sleep and I shall wake thee when.
Their roles are sometimes doubled, sometimes played out separate. She goes into the scale. Music. The bud on the roof bursts—slates open. It could be worse. He crams so much into a small space, he with his chalk collapse and trailing ghosts. Now I am going. The old well is full of rubble. Flint knappers crouch to spark at the inner cell of the hive. With a snapping noise, to break in pieces with blows, as stone. Be prepared to turn it inside out.

The day will not waken (major chord). It's these teeth. Say to yourself, I'll be back in a minute, in the time of a lifespan. Good. Back in a minutia, rerisen in her eye, and all things well.
Are his life-days to people anything useful he reckons, No.
There many brandish. Brief hands at the window. One of the men is ready to turn against us at a moment's warning.

When one must be parted, how suddenly great the loss of what one parts from—a friend, a place. How suddenly great the loss of what one. Look, the sea rises, downshowering, lamenting, it runs high. We'll end silence in just one minute more, hope if only. The drop falls. I feel I'm standing on high ground, a grassy hub circumscribed by a moat. Standing there yet mobile, with a strong supporting cast of almost forgotten Shapes. They carry a burden called the overheart. One says, chance is hard to fail, chance is hard to find. Little-kindled wrath, teach me your statutes.
A vanished continent is posited to explain the distribution.

That day the sun had not yet risen, also, to the bone.

Earlier, much earlier, he writes: In each subsequent act I'm rising and returning to a state of purpose. I'm like a paschal statue, concealed, yet present. I divide myself in two, thus do I stave off the opposition—this people, whose head and hand you fear.
The knowledge becomes part of the originality: calendar chambers of overvaulting years, a trick to adjust the natural divisions of time—an almanac of place names, or table of months, days, mortalities and seasons. Or of special facts, so many substitutes, a list of documents arranged timewise with summaries; a list of canonized saints or prisoners awaiting trial, a list of revenants and appointments: any list or record. To annul and index in accounting to divide, relating to time and place of utterance, proving directly with a sunwise motion. Turning deasil to rising star.
Consider yourself lucky.

A rock angle, re-entrant corner with a crack in it, to camouflage my erudition.
And then she says, if you leave, don't leave.

Look, that's the picture. I'm trying to build an aerial composite, which is to pass to a dead hand, i.e., one that can never part with it again. Side by side lie patches of unlike tissue with ancestral tics, stag-headed like the dying back of a tree, with mandible appearance. Somehow I grew up thinking myself a brave young mortling—mort-safe and mort-stone. She walks by and notices nothing. A note sounds.

He wakes with a surfeit of electricity inside his body, the jujus too—a fetish or charm, a toy to grant a careless life. I give chase as he goes blind about his business, as one in youth who flares up in an empty room. Dissembling the body, he pursues a remaining track.
Tear out his inside,
cut him up into little bits
and send him homeward,
to think again.

Apparently from saw empties. Confining and breaking through, she now wields the knife. Her tread is lame, a lifelong hobbled. He will most certainly be offended. It sounds like someone breaking open an under-ripe peach. The signals on the wall are the best in town.

A bit of uneasiness. It was a busy highway at that time, and regularly took the imprint of his foot, a conveyance set at the opposite extreme to his costermonger head. He adopts the diamond posture, into the fragile, with a decent spine of clay. Don't be unspirit by the organ rotation.
I wish we'd come before.
I wish we'd come back.
Before what.
At last, the famine.

So when I goes to sleep, I says to the external: she feels some shame or guilt, or at least some desire to conceal her collecting.
He hides her in his hind brain.

The vessel is broke. I'm in need of replacement: an argosy, a great merchant ship of Ragusa, or somethink the like. Utter the keen now, unabridged too far. He whispers close at the inner ear, I know too much about thee and thy cowardice.
A ship's foghorn warns a loud. A ship's fog-signal scans a beam. Swarming across the vault are repulsive-looking lead-nosed bugbears, bat-faced mormops accompanied by muted strings. Imprecation clusters about them. I see what happens here. He is torn from his brow and twisted to pieces. He conquers happiness and retains it even in death. Break this open and swallow it (memory's an act of attrition). Anyone else? True, there are some exceptions. One runs up with a message that the heavy artillery regiment has already mobbed off on its own initiative. It's their adrenalin. Let go my hands. Cock the rifle. She takes the opportunity to leave. She can't have weighed as much as a butcher's knife. Her mental state has improved, but her military situation is still uncertain. Her throat feels sore. The fingers touching it don't feel anything; it's not there like the rest of her is there. She sees herself leaving. She is determined to leave, but she no longer interests herself.

A gape is eroded through an older stratum in an overfolding, exposing the younger beneath. And a man is perforated with translucent spots, clogged by growth of bone. Two membrane-covered valves lie between his middle and his interior.
Now we've heard it all with our own ears. But it's hard to concentrate because of the pain, the image.

Quite an elusive little runner this ear is. Straight to the impluvium, and plop, he's gone. Those things breaking the surface look like fingers. Nine easy lessons. We provide the badger. He offers his tip without being invited. The food is simple but good. A glass display case is used to protect the more delicate specimens. Such a container has been named a vitrine. We retreat within a bomb-proof chambered vault with loophole galleries. He doesn't stand the ghost of a chance.

An ancestor stirs beside. Any moment the slant sun in the eye. The public feels cheated. He wakes with inexplicable cuts on his hands, seared and split knuckles. Everyone is accounted for but the windmill tilter. I repeat: a dog move his tongue. He is foisted upon us. She's hidden him these three months. She can no longer hide him. He casts himself off. He puts a difference between the one and the other.

It's not here yet, is it. It impinges. Where do you dwell. Idle talk controls his curiosity. Don't forget to forget. What sort of voices are we talking about.
The total stock in a scrubby heap, long since an encampment—a rubbled hill fortress, iron in the sap, a cairn-capped margin of debris, a tell of stones. He takes one up to place his boundary.

Know who that is.
That's meteman, when we catch him.