Richard Makin, Work in Process

What makes the adventure so impressive is the way it was made: a wave of it, over the tip of his ear and over his thumb and big toe. It's a production being produced as we watch. She makes the characters out of silhouettes. The film breaks the land. She cuts them out of herself. It's her sanctuary, her berth. Bring a picnic. I wake up three hours later. Steal the image. Gather fungus. She's playing with a sort of tam-tam made of crow skin and wood, pricking at her hair, pulling off her shawl, any attempt to sustain motion. Any primitive substitute for doing nothing. Everyone knows something about us, either the truth, so far as it's accessible, or some exaggerated rumour. I feel so ill I take to my bed and never come back. There are two solutions: I chose the bed because there are no people near it. It's situated in a room in a sealed apartment. Its scale is based on the night. We now have a full cast of bodies. Books cling to me. I am subjected to an electric current passing between the two cells on either side of mine. Everybody thinks about us more than need be. Nobody will actually speak. People have become shy of placing. There's not going to be a later on. I wrap myself in a damp blanket. There's a new kind of etiquette on track.

She writes to say she sits overlooking. Between her and the sea is an ancient pine forest and the sun is striking the surface of the water. He is looking at the same surface. That's where the sorting lies, exposed to a copper plate.

There's always a slight panic when I do this. Let's move along a bit, to his brilliant occasional guesses. In the parlour he sees a spinning wheel, and a machine sewing up a torn face. Let's recall that you don't get paid for my privilege. I stop and wait. In me is this meter. You can choose from one of these situations, build twice a house. Its chief component is a benzine ring with attacked carbon. I work round him. The atoms are the same proposition as water. I find a big stone, a new kind of metal I've never heard before. Extend idea to kindred. I establish an arc between two electrodes—anything for fidelity. My liver becomes very warm. And that's about it. It's an exact discipline. My politics are never.

As it happens, he isn't fit to speak today. He's been overeaten. The large things are made larger, and are also swallowed. In this way the same things are made samer still. The idea is to cultivate memory. This doesn't work. You must get bored doing nothing all the time. I will wake them all (he's a nine percenter). His brain is exposed—too much salt. It sloshes about in its bone cradle, precariously supported at the rim by a corona of metal antennae. I fetch an airgun and am now sniper for a day. I don't know where he's gone. I appoint myself assassin. Bring dandelions, white flowers. You can tell everything that's to pass by studying his physiognomy (the front of his heed). His remaining kidney is piqued. The others are persuaded to leave their organs behind. How refreshingly messianic. The needed herb has fluffy white flowers, a matted cottony pubescence. Others have only one row of teeth. Back with you into the wall, Headkeeper—you're not the same person. This has appeared under a number of titles, but I'm still relating things as they happen without changing anything. There's an old-fashioned light at the back. It's got one on the front as well. We are wading against the tide. Just get the funeral over. Tail gone now. Landscape with twisted mouth. He hustles the boy out and bangs the door to. It was about to burst in. I learn where all the rejected mail ends up (isle, adjacent). I spell out entire sentences on the roof of my mouth with my tongue, where no one can read them. The head already has my name, my race. He's probably touching nose to floor by now. He's tied up and then there's nothing. Only his column remains, abruptly awful. It's like that with me. Mirror, turning her yearnful face towards camera. Pass me the drip tray. None of the ants fall off. These days his head is much the time half buried in some cunt or other. After seven minutes of this, we may never hear from him again. Day here means state.

Shadows less sharp. Go to the top. Move that closer. Boy holds a stone, a feather, and a fossiled thing from the years. Iris wide. That's it, think of yourselves. He doesn't even turn around to look. I am unsureness personified. I get bored withholding. When I ask for his sigil, I get the evil eye, parallel rows of seal-like impressions: leaf scars. Very intimidating. Here comes the big vegetable me, balanced between two sicknesses. I'm not here next week, or the week after. The hunger of imagination. He indignantly reduces the memory to a squatter form: it's the pyramid with convenient slit. The dominion originally expressed is not. He would never dream of using it to his advantage.

She is understatement. She is past care. She is undercurrent. Leave the stones here, leave them be.

He goes to the rear to clean his flask. It is: it is only an observation of how things are. That gives you a bit more flexibility and a hint of what's to come. It's what I've noticed, just by peering out. Smell of fish glue and floor polish, impoverished flesh, gimlets of strained light. When it's blue it's very blue. It's like being a treadmill. You speak of an estimate of my life. Don't touch anything that looks like this.

He points and laughs for ten minutes, straight and tiny. For him, this is a matter of thinking, at home and in every form, all day bent buggered over his crucibles. He actually gets to keep all his finds this time.

Look, this is sharp. What if this fracture is the mythic. Make her sound like some kind of goatfish, shed scales beneath footfall, crunched into the gravel path beside the vestry door. I think she's vulnerable to one or two of our components, to the inconsistency of paper. I once went straight down to the base. So much for the humane type of lamp. He rejects this uncompromising scene (my original unpromising now seems preferable). I will be left as quarry for chemists. So much for the human form. It's hardly a communard dictatorship, or at least, not what I expected one to smell like; such singing in the ears—screams, wailings and discord. Morse code it was, his bell. Cow horns tattooed on his arms, just the outline, while he saves.

Study for plate wash, heightened with white: a young man pulling on a rope. One man up one ladder and a lady at the top of a house, arms out the window, as if to say, where have you be? She sings a song about how tired she is of waiting.

One insists on concealing his fruit. He cuts down a branch heavy with clusters. Do you know exactly where we are, Magister Sound? For a while we sit and watch this grim eating in their silence. The noise is always there, just above my head. I think we need to gather together like this, as in the old, fingering piano keys (this is a group that aren't technically mad). Such velocity: he guesses his way. I live slowly and nothing interests me. It seems to have died twice, and is now shunting to the outer beacon. The reverse, with eyes only eyes.

He says, I is overcussed. Slow torches flicker into the late dark. I am sometimes associated with customer. I know the evening well. She's in the back yard, I write.

I write to all the friends in transit. I'm sorry about earlier, she says. I resemble rust. Everyone seems to have found out except me. Metal oxidizes in the air—your bicycle out in the rain. Just testing. In this version of a previous sentence we have defrayed memory. I seem to spend all my life talking at some stage or other. Sometimes I feel that by writing this narrative it is actual happenstance, a series of scapegoats. Funeral tomorrow. He reports: long way back, wrong passageway, please forgive. They give him six to eight to live, the freshman with the less-than-fresh orders. He chooses two, the less complicated option. He is new to the job. In the next room she lies blanketed in a dropsy trance. I can no longer breathe the air they breathe. What lies between us and the wall. Distant crack of unlikely ball on bat. The other says dust particles, and the right answer is air. He receives a good beating for this (the bat).

I have to prove I am my mother's son. The defeated army flees to the north. Blockage in the lung. Acute pain. If it smashes it goes over the floor and you won't have anything left to bargain with. Dim pang located below rib cage. Hour upon hour the ration of sharpening air, inhaled beyond uncertainty. The hub drops out. Blood is the obvious. If I can find the long walk, I shall read the reading and thank them. The location of the pin signals an armed location you must travel to. Things happen, don't they. I have, you see, an array of erections and a spring loaded retina. It is a receptacle for capturing and storing things. Wait for me. Your job is apparently undone. We're going to have to grow one of our own age, see if it translates into something useful at the bone-deep level. She's now famous for being a victim, all sorts of shapes and dolours. Brink of the hole, shillyshallying before the end. Who to bring in before the window closes.

The remaining branches are less whispered. Egyptian is now extinct, he says, and who more suited than I to set the public record straight. The advert shows some of the symbols needed to cope (a kind of trap). Child, child, I am Repeat Myself, rotating thus the plane of polarized light, beam swung out from the old liver switch, the tower (or projection). The country you ceaselessly uncover strikes one as enormously pig. Up, pockets! It's comparable to a pitstop. The surrounding nations seem like narrow border regions. He is horrified, pirated. He can't learn to use the colourblind word exactly as a normal person does. Gin and cake solve everything. Is this the same man of whom we are a part, he who is paid, and refuses to task? He is partly back-formation from salvage. Sound of one-head clapping, dog panting. Bunk supine.

He has a reputation for short stays. Beyond the outer marker I see the array. Approach control is dawn. Scramble all the codes. He arrives carrying his large green sack over one shoulder, her with a delicate Japanese dog—arm in a basket, feather in the iris. There are four new here, father. Black jets strafe the pebble beach. I don't get paid for nothing, for giving, for sound information. Distant lights. The good burghers bring in massive boulders and deposit them haphazardly into the sea. We'll have to make do with unbroke news today. Folk try to shade their delicate head, skull fragile as burnt eggshell. The sense has gone over to the other side. He sees her everwhere. Taxes too on wine and bread. A third of the way to the left, and we're still making good time. What is he waiting for, eyeing those handovers? He's been adding her up.

Eye blurs. The next station is a form of bad land tenure. We're making good time. The egg white crystallizes. He carries with him everywhere a large green velvet duck. We're putting as much pressure on him as we can. I'll have the herald's bollocks next on a plate. They've realised the spring loading on his back is loose and things are dropping out onto the track. It's said he bears valleys, and speaks—the flesh part of a disposable. I've given into you. There's two much foliage, but we see nearby where he's hid. Dispatch him, but keep strictly within the limits of a notional taste. Don't lose any of those rare nerves. All other countries are found to have no twilight at all. A magic feather which he can produce at any moment for protection is introduced: a flightless bird, fast-running, with tail-feathers that resemble a suture.

The giant strides made by two bodies.

I lose three of them. It's always worth checking. Today every detail appears sickly. Dog panting. Sackbut. Salpinx. An early hook for pulling off a horse. There's a rock at the bottom of the canvas bag. It glistens in the sunlight, as if jewelled or flecked with glass, splinters of mirror. It isn't. Other objects have bone without skin, or skin without bone. What is he doing. I keep it. I think about making a picture of it then change my mind. This feeds the option: a cracked white town with rivulets of rust, and thus encores my misery by my folly (the rock). The tip astronaut hits the deck. She hands me the box with clouds and a painted sky. The foresaid city was once in China. The words are all wishing words. Still very poor, I go there. Carriages at midnight are pledged. I walk. I hail a hansom cab. I hear the promised consul sound. Inside is a black ribbon bound to an invitation. Alongside is a bar of soap bearing an address and a numbered telephone. When I arrive at the place there's nothing, just an empty space between two buildings. Clearly the preparations of an assassin. And sure enough, hurrying past is a young man with an ashplant. His left hand, as though paralysed, lies flat on his chest. Upon the ground—this is more like it—the membranes that once joined her arms to her ribs. I've ringed her thumb whirls with red pen in case transmission scars the imprint. No, this is me, there can be no doubt. I don't undertake these things lightly.

A man lying on a bed recalling Morse to check he is, still.

Local people siphoning fuel. I forget his name. Quick buildings, not unlike extramural Paris, which I hear was once a popular city. On all sides of him meters and controls, an instrument for measuring time by the stealing of water. The central panel glows with data. Do you know what this is? I've been sitting here for hours and nothing has happened. He seats himself on one of two stools facing the panel. An ashtray. Correct. A lament. Unsure. A wall of windmills, hence the name which attaches itself to that part of the island. I think that's enough for the time being. They do that split thing with a spare atom at full cock. After only six days, they return. She's confined. Now she can't be bled or shot. Still, cartridges are distributed and the guard alerted. No one suspects the significance of this drift in the narrative. Do they speak. The hair on her tibia falls out. They split the element. He settles where he lives. He has happy memories of the rows of a year past. Clear blue sky today. Let's go back: godwitted black magic, ignition then life. Look at that crowd, among whom sits an exemplar. You're looking for meaning where there is none. At this point we oblige by transforming repetition into a memory. The hair on his tibia falls out. That is already said. But she.

They're advertising the cyclone vacuum, an iron basket for combustibles placed in a beacon, lighthouse or wharf. A torch generally. A hanging lamp. He'll get jealous. I make some phone calls. It's surprisingly easy. A good day to be under sail. I have decided to split by my wits. I am body chef.

Child with toy, makeshift, with helium rictus.