*

Still thinking under the preliminary head, then he says, come on, we'll go down the tunnel. And we go down the tunnel, which is enclosed, and suddenly I come out into an empty space. And I thought I had died or I was in a cathedral. How could I ever find the nerve within this place.

There is a cracked frame; there is an illuminated glass. The mouth to our left-hand side is bathed in watery sunlight. Strangely muted atmosphere. I have an overwhelming urge to leave something, to add to the pile of used books and shoes.

At least he inhabits himself. I can say nothing, being both seed and obstacle. The remnant has three tricks remaining; this affects the way it sees and how it relates to the story. If it comes it comes and we must withdraw into ourselves. Never again do I wish to learn from the inside out.

There's a little bit of a back-story here, descriptions of lock and saltwork, abandoned pump-houses; detail of star-eating habits, surgical lead, descent into remote copper mines, broken stone and other mercurials. The song carries ballast like the bed of a road. These are reworkings, lilting from the day and sung to a melody called east. He's found guilty of simulation. I saw it happen with my own, with palpitations of the spleen. It's a relief when I begin to excise. Because the light has to shine through, the lock must be a sounding lock.

The construct remains the same over time and changeful circumstance—griefstruck and weeping, at rest and in pieces, flesh that fades at the first silent touch. Some things are blurry and some things are in shadow. He's a permanent. His concrete form is determined late in the game. Let me give him something for the pain. No verbals here just utter capitulation, chained or linked together, connected in ranks, a series of things depending on each other. For instance, the chair that still stands in its allotted place.

*

It resembles a stook of marrow spines. One of the brood is renamed and raised to the second power. Some lose sight, tip up trade and adopt a variety of positions: a lion rampant on a visored crest, a postilion struck by lightning, a sheet of sparks spreading across open ground, all semée of crosses of lilies. I'll soon be there at the centre of a calmer day, pinned back to cusp. Much of this is spadework, but I've brought my own meaning with me. Every grey looks as though it is being illuminated. We are the open.

Of birds who tore off they're wings. Sparks of light in flux yet with rhythm and unstoppable, downwards—south to the sea, in surrender to a stabilizing mobility.

*

His motive may never be known. It looks as though I may have changed my mind. I add to the name. We're sustained by blood pies fresh from the municipal slaughterhouse. We build a defence of felled trees, boughs facing outward into crushed space. A supposed mark of dishonour sits on the coat of arms (her). Apparently I am never used. Now that we've nothing to lose grief grows in layers at the centre.

He is the king's man. I'm told in the ear there is nothing left but to battle it out by word of mouth. There is a residue of decay. They wear the same skin and fight against mutual theft. Time for a final word. The radio keeps saying his name, interviews with people who've been told. He's trying to prize open the uncanny—he fails, but in its pursuit lies a glimpse of salvation. Crime is a gift, embrace it, he says. What recall. He does this thing with his remaining eye. He is no longer capable of forming the idea; it has become him. I walk out from their dusty light, out of doors and into the colonizing air.

*

A history: neapflooding tide of smallest change—left aground at minimum amplitude, meaning helpless. They must make a clash for dear life at the top of the century, and now I hear What's-His-Name has been culled. I know the story, of course, and it's still dear to me. The other replies that the process is a slow process. Nothing like a judiciously placed conjunction of opposites: I occur when the sun and moon are working against each other.

*

It was good to find oneself in that company. He ambles in at the close of the last moment. Count to nothing. Components open in character toward the feared it. We're due to receive gracious random in sleep. I could possibly finish in the allotted time, given the right conditions. Count, do nothing.

He's never when you expect. No one here is looking at me. Outside, soft machines grind to a halt. Eviscerate, now.

It participates. It demands only a few subtle movements to compensate for loss of memory, to imagine experience. You drop arms dead, elbow-deep in another gentle comedy of errors—vasty in a waste and desolate manor. It survives in its pure form: a taxi rank in a parallel universe, without connectives, beside self and beyond arrangement. O, by the way, the hammer is always at the top of the column, confabulator.

*

An inland sea with ice floes ringed by conifers, at its sandy rim a family bathes in low winter sun. Logic eats the image, swallows it whole (economic exigency and domestic connivance). Elsewhere you can see galaxies and everything. They have raised an outwork of fortifications whose two faces form a salient angle. The origin is unknown.

He is not here so I have taken it upon myself to build him.

The ice is climbing, and much more. Shades approach bearing rushes, each with his own personal erection. She will call at any moment. I take note.

Source material in progress, his formidable concentrate. I'm not sure about some of these translations but there's still time to move the pieces from here to here. He's a personality in his own right, with stalk harrowed from immortal. One button of his isotope is used. A spiked frame or other contrivance alternately soothes and pulverizes the land then covers it with distressing seeds. He delivers a minuscule tomb: fugue and grainy thorax of a longdead dragonfly.

Whereas I think this needs isolating. A carriage is drawn, black-plumed horses snort and steam, funereal and racing. And why archaic.

He steps over too soon and lands among the smothering waves. No one trusts him now but he was once a brilliant tactician and commander of men. He should be able to control; we have him now in abundance. A burst slug oozes on the frozen pathway.

I am not lately. They all drop paper size and gather small. Back in the day they were duty holders. We stop marching and strike camp for the darkness. When day comes I will still be here; you will have moved on before me.

I have kept the default word. I crackle and drag. The head is realized with such intensity that it grows heavy and weighs on the beam above, pulls at the space beyond. This must be shored up before the head draws everything down into its earthly compass.

I remember nothing but this thing of the ballast head.

*

He holds sheets of paper with patterns composed of tiny letters on them. One forms an elaborate eye. One forms a needle, another a horselike creature, yet not horse, for sure. I don't know where to put them. I don't know what else to call them. Drop to the floor.

*

A cell is set within a row of the same. He installs himself in the tiny cubicle and clutches a book to his side. He clutches third rib from the base of the cage. Everything in the book exists to end up in the world. Look, this is muscle, this a layer of fat, these are vertebrae and these the three spared ribs. An impression is made on the surface: an angel fleeting across the municipal junction.

Meeting him is something of a revelation, like meeting oneself in a dark alley. His humour contaminates. It has also been named contagious abortion, communicable to man as Malta or undulant fever—a gigantic Recent, wingless of Madagascar. The procuring of this misshapen being is an elaborate affair; it will surely die at the close of the story.

I don't know who beat that idea into you, but you'd do best to forget it, cast it behind you. It's as though, unawares, I've been waiting for the man all my life and have finally mustered him. Speeding headlines rattle through.

Spelling error embalms wrong corpse. His manner is ease in authority: keep the boy suspended, night image of the cathedral and suchlike. He conjures up a row of numbers; these act as markers on the unlit runway. Objects and letters are arranged on a wall to form a candelabrum. Here, pristine materiality is de-lapidated. The room is the lofty white, and is lit by light.

Make a list of the places you can never go back to. Now make a list of the places you can trust. One must incessantly attend and prepare; he is angrier than anyone present. I too have the memory: it hath me. Lines have never been my problem, but I can't start afresh, not now. Bleach everything out and see what remains. I think much about the old dwelling, the compound. It is and it is not. Keys of glass resound in the skullframe, the darkening cartouche. The room holds hundreds of ornate electrics and is divided by two rows of massive columns. At one end a dais. This is flanked with many-branching standards and a frame from which the imperial has been cut. This is where we stop.

*

Dapple-plated scavenger: men for whom. I appreciate all the time you've taken; at heart this remains a good country, maestro. We still have the pictures on our bodies. Upon the floor small items have been placed at random. They have been situated. They have been placed throughout a bad long night when meteoric stones crashed through the ceiling.

The construct signals. A nice fertile region is sewn up with hop gardens. It resembles painting to the extent that it's contrived; my task is to resolve the composition. Black letters are painted directly on to the wall. You no longer have the promised energy. I once worked in here, before the time of my obstruction, the always book always to come.

Spelling corpse embalms wrong error.

A badling—there are seven of them—come skimming over me. They're followed by the three old style pieces. No, I say, I won't go on. Objects have been placed on small ledges cut for the purpose. It's hard to testify. It is hard to tell. Manifestly autonomous, they are set in the middle and start to tear each other apart.

*

He is from my country, he is from any country he chooses, it depends on the situation and the nature of the stunt. He knows everything. His adversary is the true adversary.

Be quick before time, come to the terrace at six, we're round the back. You have called at such a late hour and there is little left of me; I am used up in myself. I can see the substructure emerging beneath my skin (that won't survive).

Significance stretches out. This is how he reaches—then there blazes forth a source of light, a look like love, alarums above the archway, gothic sweep and grace. There is a void outside of his westernmost heaven; it is panic made good. By subtle increments despair creeps in. Notebooks are bound to the boards placed over them. I can't decide from up here.

*

Now we come to a difficult season, a bit of a nightmare at the races. He mistakes the beach beneath the tarmacadam for the finishing line. I suppose it might be said that what transpires is well-intentioned. In the mess tent green and white predominate. On the third floor is an introduction and a tiny framed picture of the heart. Out of modesty, the head turns. The image sits upon the back of the neck. Something is said and an outcome is predicted. The flesh is yellow and slides obliquely across the side of the face, extending from the inner angle of the orbit, outwards to the anterior margin. The veinous hill is long and slender. Chance falls, rhythmical suspension of a disaster. It lies to the outer side of the artery, but is not so tortuous as that vessel. Small scars form on the shaved scalp where beads of grease bubble and fizz. When I recover my senses he is the first thing to meet my gaze. The pits of keys flicker in the gaslight. I leaf the book, scan some extincture. Nothing too solid here, nothing said about the vengeance of an outsider (the undergod). The breach is within distance. He hails me to turn the vessel about and follow, not too swiftly, and to strike a judicious interval. The sooner we get here the better. Someone on board fingers the accordion—there's an oboe and a kazoo, a would-be instrument, a tube with a strip of catgut that resonates to the voice. A cast lamb, he says, overthrow him into the sea.

*

The interior is sparse, with walls of flesh-pink plaster. Long mute yet not dim—unshadowed and uneven. If one should ask for it as it's written, the answer would be: we can see a given similitude.

*

I inhale my own notes. Notwithstanding, the notion of any future time may not be negotiable.

*

Prints off the weal. This, of course, depends on whether he falls to earth or strikes the surface of the sea. Allow for slight movement above and beyond the head, track down his bloody keys. It's really hurting. Motion is carefully sustained. His trick bears an engraving of a fabulous mediaeval animal, a griffin-headed horse with the wings of a bat. He feels a swelling under the tongue. The music aches and insists. That's the word around here, but it has its lighter moments—all is not cabinets of atrocity. I give the red liquid in my glass a little shake.

You know, now she has stopped. She leans forward to divine: the algorithm of birds in flight above a ruined pier. The effort is achieved. Compile a list of familiars: a calcified artifact of once-soft sandstone (use indeterminate), the top of a stocking, a tin hat, and so forth. I'm flung clear. The flat hurt earths. Do what is right and worship none.

He sees the similitude. It's something like The Meltwaters. Under oath he gives evidence of his unworthiness in the world. Fear cements the compact.

Too girl. I can see something now as weakly luminous, now as grey. She has an optimistic outprey.

I can pluck them apart and they still register. Talk doesn't occur as a condition which is present-at-hand—it could happen to anyone. Seems his uprooting is consistent, at least. A test is set by toy vote (pro hoofy). The table is a Frankenstein table. There occurs then a downward turn, the broke vessels are forced out, attached to the core by threadlike hyphae. It's like a load off my mind, I can tell you. Cast lambent.

*

Just tell them my reason. I'm headed for a showdown but can still see the snow line from where I'm standing. My adversaries all wear the same skin (if only I'd known at the outset). The tabled conversion is like aether. Don't move a muscle. Question, did she lose anyone close. Answer. No, such coincidences have always populated her world.

Now he plays the role of dissenter, the voice that links. He enjoys his redundancy, which is fair enough: if I were asked my opinion I too would never speak. There's money coming in. It seems to be open season. He keeps looking across space at the host. Do not hook up.

She wants some grim form of excellence. You roll together and then you drop—you could call it the feast of the unloaded dog. She will take up a place, but a place, by its falsehood, is never where expected. She severs all ties to the base marker.

Or one could not. I never before thought about these things.