Richard Makin, Work in Process

Club-moss. A bye is needed, a mouthing prayer, unvoiced. Plastic tubes of ink replace the veinous system. Some don't talk to each other for years. Listen, guess the detective theme—you won't be able to see me again for some time. He shuffles to another room of the compound. Their views on the same point diverge. A dram (no). A big lie (yes). A big sleep (perhaps). Assassin and giant water, a shortened form in lieu of a good story—of course, of course. After thirty-three years they're giving up. Now reverse the psychologies. He has a penchant for rare birds, the sounding letters.

The problem again: the conditions of possibility, of any translation and its effect. It's two hours of your life that you can't get back to, so don't attempt to guarantee. I know how it happened, they arbitrarily looked at the field, and thought, right. The next step is a new aspect of mustering the second portion of the date. If anything starts clashing, just let me know. Dulldistant thuds reverberate through the compound. Stroll around the porch until you discover a place.

Victorian opera glasses, ten pounds (there are some mean spirits in this room). The first character is depicted entirely through dance, mirrors, and smoke.

True, the passport has been replaced in the bag, along with the sheet of greyish foolscap enclosed here. This stuttering pace—she wants something more loquacious, less broke. That sound might have been, night refraction in a window pane. Note to self: attempt to make story seem real.

Calyx, a cup like cavity or organ. An extremely young worker in overalls spins round and round and collapses on the floor. There's a linear bruise either side of his ankle plumage. It could be a growing pain. His number is the Number 12. Displacement is everything, music for humans, ancestors and gods.

In composition yellow, and found in muscle tissue, the liver and other organs, urine etcetera. It leaves a lemon residue when evaporated. I go to wash the face; I can't punctuate myself properly. Then he climbs on board and quietly dies down, against the vanguard of those difficult years. Sallowness of the skin indicates the first step and the wrong turn—the jealous one, your innocent ear. All other pigments disappear (think goldfish). His resolutions are more theatrical and more personal than music alone. He'll be left alone in the opera to freeze if he misses the spot, out of grace and out of years, crouched beneath the embers of an old stairwell, with chalk astronauts. Various of the archives exclude participation. Maybe you just hit it and don't remember, and in there still lie the letters of his name.

More from numbers, the suspended track where we're left behind. The trouble occurs before the lovely old walls are pulled down. They have the posture of old-fashioned bridges. He speaks of much, of the gland and suchlike. Is there something wrong with him, so dictated as he is, so full of grace, full of years. He disembodies. A smell of bacon follows him around. His inquisitor comes into the room (I hear footsteps). I hide under the table. When he sees I'm not, he starts calling out. I receive a summons to leave at ten, heave down curses on my head. The telegraph goes all the way up to the pelvic bone. On the one foot sits a stocking and on the other a shoe; in their own way they're quite remarkable. There's an upset. Doubtless it's she who afflicts, the dull wastage. Fibrous cells containing ester burst through the skin. Figures are scratched into the walls of the cell and normal colouring is replaced. Do something.

Before he dies I make my peace with him, the eyes (this has tragic consequences eighteen years later). Some words require explanation. I'm unable to muster an exchange with the apposite, so stop.

Transverse city (how apt). Just realized how much I'm going to miss you, the neural you, not the monstrance. The big perhaps drawn attention to earlier.

He is at sleep on the pallet. As usual, there are pronouns floating about his room. He runs his tongue over the firm fleshy tissue that surrounds the bases of his teeth (the insolence). He pictures a stairwell of used books: esprit de l'escalier—latterwit. That bit of cord beneath snaps in a fall. Everything slots into place. Something's released, the recognition of an error, the shift to a better frame.

She says she's outward bound, due south to pilgrim on eighty a week. The thing speaks for itself.

They are armed with scythes, pitchforks and fowling-pieces. They march beneath a white standard spangled with lilies and the device. She doesn't suspect she is overseen, floating within the shrouds of the fourposter, the lambent body. That and dream not speaks far then at inmost.

A rather nasty paper cut to the last digit, upper knuckle. Other minor injuries he sustains, despite being alone for a some days, include a shattered tibia, ingrowing hair, a bitten tongue and fractured astragalus—a sloping mass of fragments at the foot of a cliff. Talus.

Get some rouse. The analogous recollection assumes a very similar shape.

She dreams as follows: I am going into the garden. There is a crossover from the opposite postilion. Her work is found in several international publics. It's been a while since anyone has wrongly assumed she's a dancer by profession. The first postilion doesn't return to the same place. Rolling back and memory swells—a stairwell of books, shoulder high, defiant, blind—a glaury hole. Yes, exactly. Weightless here I watt; he is no more than an instrument containing a current and a shunt coil. To return to the incident of the father and the son, their combined torque deflects the spine. They are a direct measure of the circuit (James). I want to copy my own music, declare everything declared, tidy into a clearing house.

He takes the earthenware and the bottle and the key and puts them back where he found them.

Horizon: a smear of turquoise. It changes over time, but my first impression is a good impression: tiny supernatural figures pounding corn. Between the sticks, a promised hand, the wreckage. They wear scapular feathers round their necks, together with the badge. The passing column calls fright at the rear window. I'll signal. Eddies of ash in the air, and those twisted porcelain folk. What metre. I will signal when I'm good and ready.

Every now and then I peer down to see if I might find (I don't peculiarly like sticking my head in there). The customers are the reputed customers—they look like leather from a distance. I take myself off to a more mythological investigation of the affair. She's resembles a diptych. Suddenly it clicks: she swings with wax innards on two hinged wooden leaves, which may be closed like a book and sealed. The hearsay is Yes. Whiff of paraffin in the gun carriage. The lower children, I see now, they were holy saints.

Linger. Shunting into a branch line. Back then we'd only deliver the facts. There's a lot of people just getting into the mode; I'll start all over. I long to play with those wheel-shaped fireflights. He is in a storm of excitements and dust. He is slipping into the pit. Our combined torque produces a deflection of the spine. He's a direct measure of the circuit power, parted for loving, and your loves are not. He has about him a sense of duty, the only practical unit of power. Go ahead, make that brilliant revision to the word, before you forget yourself. I would like to add that the folded pigs tasted good.

Ascension pavement halo, her solarized head. The group becomes one rigid stare. When I come home I expect a surprise and there is no surprise, so of course I'm surprised. The left leg goes in, right up to the pelvis. She has a genuine uniform, doctored with crosses of lilies. It's hard to let her go. Her system lacks reading; we're going to need. I want to work in absolute silence. Playing on through the barrier, there's a whole series. The function of the coil is not apparent, nor its method of attachment to the internal section of the implant. I always trust my mistakes, my needle.

He neglects and is usurped by the French. The conflict is abandoned when it proves impractical (that's what they call fighting for their time, being genetically dispossessed). My own waiting waits for me, moves me. Those birds are martlets, I think you'll find, martlets arranged in tight blue triangles.

At heartland: elements of mutual avoidance—bind her in her winter jackets. The principle is stoic-domestic; you gain an hour, you lose an hour. Today's subject is the legal personality of the unborn, the one who bends into the remaining head.

Where he writes about the silence I have the uncanny satisfaction of reading your book. It bends back on the breeze, dying in the arms of the sick child.

We all started seeing things differently. Prayer weals. A footless bird is borne as a charge, archaic and swift.

People of a romantic disposition come here to read. My dental estates run wild. I am not there when they wait for me. I'm busy scooping house droppings and folding up the dust; all very sad, clusters of shared cells. I'm growing absent, growing minded. You are inside with your eyes almost closed because the electric signs. He answers then himself. He is muddle. I don't wish to stop here, people becoming too excited at my diffidence. I've seen the pictures. Total marginalia.

The horse crosses the bridge. Defunct meanings propel her. Dwelling too long on the peculiars, I am left here and I must. She has protective colouration and an ikon, like some takeaway god. She settles down into the vision. As it comes down it loops round. She goes forth to meet herself and she sets the vision: pier and lightwaves, a gully of used stars. The flow of my boat may check, but not for long. Glimmer of the wreck, glimmer of the weak, more spare parts for her spontaneous combustion engine.

He says I am. She says, you can still work by not earning, look at the steam rising up from the table. Others, such as the sponsors of a rapid onset of the illness, are not so sure. The solitaries disperse, happy for end, happy for close. Upturned plastic juts from the black liner (I know, it's nothing spectacular). What I did like was the evacuee sitting there, that porcelain evacuee.

He appoints himself patron saint of the hermit and the lunatic. For two years he remains immobile at the top of a column. I give you some of the new call fabulous. He has a number of books dealing with the contemplative stashed away in his locker. His legs seize up. We begin again from scratch: pieces of the century chamber. I become a minute quality, a scrap. Every time it rains we have to kill the power. I never heard the like. At his death he leaves 252 shirts of fine linen and nine glass eyes framed in gold.
Come let's to bed
says Sleep's Head,
tarry a while
says Slow Heart.

Concertina marches. Waking up in a different time, in a different place where all the rooftops have been levelled off, stripped asphaltum into a binding pattern. I've walked the canals. He asks me the distance between the sun and the moon and then between the earth and the other side. I refuse. Too many fucking questions for one afternoon. I'll give notice of be. It says here they lived at first together in an early skete.

We can expect the flipside of this, flying the legend and then some, mechanical horse power things. How does it look to you. You can disprove. I've just noticed the miniature table and chair, the withered umbrella. Send them out into separation, spoken from notes. It's hard to follow, and I think, I wonder whether he can desiphon for me. See windmill to cave, huge massiveness, an ascent compacted into fine horizontal strata. Time is set at a slippery pace. Filaments of stone touch, spasm, and collapse. He's like the march hare on a wing. Saints are buried to their necks in the shingle. The crowd lights up. Liquid fire in the sky. Our knowledge is ebbing away. All drafts are inclusive, only alive for wholesome people. On the pavement an enigmatic world of light: blah blah blah. A slippery pace rushes in and establishes itself.

Could I have some tension music, please. I doubt you'll get this far. Now, time for the immutable ring pull, the tongue of metal and the ring attached. Various species are grouped together according to their past beliefs. The drop is a lymph drop. It's relentless, can't organize forgotten dream, the bowery. This is where the noise starts. The things he writes determine the nature of the world.

Travel alarms, both stopped. Reset now at rest—curtain and nullify. Items are placed in the centre and at the rear to create a pyramid (this is a game, okay). Choose colour of name and place. A dwelling with outhouses and enclosures is connected to the immediate, to the last stretch of the racecourse. One hit strikes precisely where it's aimed. A remark is sharpened, a pointed unanswerable, wounding the typical: is this the place where the home is or was? It's said she made her records accompanied by anti-aircraft fire. And such a beautiful day, rising from the submerged edge.

Scrap mental. You're no longer here. Do you find any parallels. Why am I so anxious to keep apart these ways of using sentence (they won't say what the term is, but they're calling it a term). Two specks alight on the cilia.

He crosses the worn stone at the foot of an opening, port or dock, and into the local drainage. A hair-like lash is borne by a cell. He is retired throughout the life.

Two specks drift across the field. Turn head to nearest star. I've decided that all the stores are going to have the same colour, weekly green or weekly pink, different ways for different colours, the daily reprimand. Tomorrow night, I promise, a sheet of intuitive rock, more or less parallel to the bedding. We could actually mix the two together to make a third, now that the knowledge is lost. He has evidently transgressed a rule. I leave me out. Don't attempt this at home. At the base of the tilt-page sits a ledge, a bed of rock—the undermind.

Thinking of you, as liners move through our heads along the east-west run of the port. I'll have to come back to finish you off. The crackles serve to enhance—spanish fire. You treat the two absences as though they have the same motive. He runs away to join a travelling circus. You're welcome to stray, an extra teaser for your innocent ear. Traffic ballads and more of those red-tiled roofs, block-built shacks painted neapolitan yellow. He's used up, quite dead yet alive, worn threadbare. The scene is distorted by fleeting impressions, the general bodily consciousness. He keeps memory alive in the scores.

I see her after a long time and uncannily she's restored. Nearby is the stadium light and upcry. Despite that nervous tic she has, her steely recall adds up to something. I think we're safe to here. She begins to chatter with contrived animation. I ask her about this thing and the other thing, and she shrugs. I'm never going to do this again in time.

Having no more ink, he's forced to leave off for the present. He busies himself collecting beetles. He composes it all in his head, history repenting itself, the unmistakable tramp of Roman legions.

His demeanour is sinister-affable. I must design new kit for the lads, but we lack. Don't cut me off. Count from one to ten then fall into a deep pocket of wounded air, mad as cheese. Oil the spare feet, the spoils in the locker. It's hard to decide whether his gesture is a still pose or part of a movement stopped by the camera.