Richard Makin, Work in Process

Yes she says I think everything goes very well. It's daylight, my god it's daylight. How long will it take to sink in. This has to be done pacing, no other posture will do. I've such a headache with this now, and yet I am still making change, soothing eye dotage.

At the centre of her forehead, a little above the bridge of the nose, is a hard hub of bone, the consequence of manifold butting; a tertiary eye for a tertiary age. Where it falls open it falls open, and stays that way. She is struggling against the days, she who gives me leave to ask: Let me know the curse that hath brought thee so near to me . . . An overabundance of signs has been admitted within the gates, an overabundance of eyes. More than any other member of her cycle she is a success—of a kind that is no longer imaginable (precisely for this reason she may also be called Nowt). Numerous impressions cluster and press. It has to be said that she has moved in the death with no little grace, all in all. She gravely listens to what the men on either side are saying. What else can she do: an absolute barrier, scar paper over the cracks. Cesspool drainage should mask all trace of crime. Something just floated over the top of my head. Apparitions. Disjecta.
Further the field extends, the distant prospect over the plain.
I have found expression in spite of the ban on it. I'm in freefall—firefall. We need separators to divine the liquids and the solids. That said, never stop exploring gravity. The seconded one, it's him for sure, come back to haunt us. Now what we're fucked.
What songs the syrens sange!
The evidence is puzzling. Puzzled coincidence to put one in the mood. The market's been told change or die. So entirely cut was she that she did not turn back a second time—Shibbolethe—the forgetting ear, but still no read to reason. She makes one know what a father means, that one is never through killing the father. It's always something you least expect, I mean that perfection in the game, the twain together felled. By self and violent hands I quote my self; I quit myself. Now I must cut lose and remake my own twin. Mismuse.

Seems he'll have to go back and remake. That's another decision put off. He goes on, his tone becoming amorous, distracted—there's something of the minnesinger about him, lovesonger of noble birth. Which air crash were you looking for exactly, he writes. He hails from a lost ward, from a root of dough—a zinc attraction . . . Miracle knows enough to keep motel . . . Aliens choose our town . . . It's a short stop this one, a battle of trees or letters, lettered men. He won't risk a percentage; there's a time to act and there's a time to be still. He'll leave and he'll never come back. He must have come home from somewhere or other, at some time or other. A crash programme to restore the heartbeat is instigated.
One can imagine him. Neither the sabre nor the drum. Scant expression in that unique instant, in a little talking book—the thing that was willed, and nothing too small. I loved those former winters, we feared them a little, so hard were they and sharp with burning hands. Upon that blasted plain I chanced upon two pessimists. I see them now as if before me, a brace turning a lizard over and over in the dust, galvanized by well-meaning cruelty: the anthropological temptation—bedlam and crap alibis. They seem worn out already. One of them falls, remains lying there, unable to get up. I want to come back as a lizard. I suppose everyone does. That, or the antichrist. Minor royalty basking in the sun. One lifelong cheap holiday, whole fucking globe covered with sunbasking reptiles. But there are other miseries, mañana from heaven: dead fox on the path, gently raised up and laid to rest in the neighbourhood garden.
Shot of the photograph, seen from the same angle.
She recalls that memory of him: dead fox in his arms, as he lays it to rest in the neighbourhood gardens. Still-warm blood muzzle. Nothing worse than is. Relax and talk for longer, together, to gather. Thanatoseros.
One turns to lines. The words pour out of him:
Found today that détente can be the figurative trigger. Il a la gâchette facile. He is trigger-happy. One turns to cowardice. These images are brilliant. There must've been a mage out there today. This day I see black crosses on a yellow ground everywhere. I've allowed myself to be distracted. Hoarsely stunned the other says: A fall wouldn't do to his neck what we found . . .
Some delivery. You expected a package that day. All that go let go, and with it disappears the voice, lax and re-lax, sipping lime cordial, muscle in. Olive green on M., the isle of . . . By the way the dead . . . It was falling on every part of the dark central pain, caught off guard in a summer of shrikes. No time to time. And I had such fire in me then, striding across a ruined land strewn with ruins. Did I not sleep to stop up the sun, where reverie released, regular and inevitable at the foot of a white wall. And beyond the white wall a white house. Through a garden an olive grove cools the step. And within the white house a room. In the centre of the room the nine sit round an iron bowl. The impossibility of repeated actions. The loss of memory. Past and tense presence to fashion a future. To reach these two's a goal.

He stops to sleep.

He tries to rise and sinks back through interruption's various modes, hence, once again, the acute discontent (i.e. crisis). It renders him mobile through its variousness. Seeds like these are fragments. The seminal dusts of plants are highly inflammable substances. I'd tell you more but I don't know what I'm doing.

The roads will be quiet that day.

You cant.
A fist goes in. We're all going into the sinbin now: Sinbin the sailor, Djinntag the tailor, Tinpan the hailer, Mingetag the failure, Bodbag the mailer, Fintan the jailer etcetera. Leave me one of my faculties, please. I fucked my shoulder that game, tore a hamstring and slipped a disc, but it was worth it. And he is so full of shit, another registered design flaw. It's just the awful slowness with which he moves. That's the role he has to play. All we get is life. I was always finding myself in the wrong cabal; I must have missed somethink. All the other strangeness of the medley reads like nonsense. You've spoilt everything.

Brightdayler.

In the form of a hawk.

This morning on waking, a taste of balloons in my mouth. Lingering acid in the throat. Empty helium cylinder beside my cot. I am not myself. You get a phenomenal amount of low-grade intelligence just from talking to people at checkpoints. There's a current running back, contrary to the mainstream. On average every twenty-fifth car yields a yield. She can't have it both ways; if she wants anonymity, she'll have to remain eponymous. And you could see it coming in the brushwork, in the tonality, in the use of black and white—the composition, the subject matter—but the signature, the inherited reason or observation, is worthless: fields of saturated colour, agony in the garden—rape seed through the smoke rings. And we do not meet such expressive clouds. Chronology of her times, listen: every season she adds another year to her age. That makes her think she's older than she is. That makes everyone else think she's older than she is. Actually, I don't feel thirty-four myself. You see, I think my consumption's dropped. Among the questions projected onto the wall: Do you danger?—caving, roulette russe, dwelling? Me neither, but I do keep my own bestiary, the old hobby horse. The corporeal shall go in the next chapter; let who will come in. In this most discomfiting sickness, quoth she, For heaven's sake, let us get ashore . . . Now I must dismantle, and then rebuild my own twin—there can be no such thing as an abstract addressee. Stray leopard in the compound, bigly big softpawing the concrete. A door left. Ajar. Must see to it. Excuse me forgive me.

Neither the sabre nor the drum. The attraction exorcised by the magical powers of the opposite sex is well known; again, see the chronology of her times. She will say, How strange it will seem to you . . . Listen. The wind chopped about the death, had noticed me or come to see me. Now I am better I sit beneath an old elm tree. My father's a temple. He'll be the life of the party, the soul. He once had a big break. Some fool repaired it, glued the members back together, made them as if one. Still, thy ghost I invocate, timely-parted. Salut.

In the distance scans the swooping beam of a lighthouse manned by a hermit. The light codes. He's got his cock out again. He's bored—well bored with hermitizing. He wants to go out. He is young as undead. That distant cell's a crypt, and well placed for the eremitic life. He's forced to be born time after time whenever his twin indulges in too close contact, like a thread through many beads. It turns itself off. It turns itself on. He recollects once painting something; our very own painting across the wall of our very own cave. No need to go outside anymore. Shadows flicker and spill, in vanished scenes stretch painted limbs we thought were dust: a bestiary, the hunt—assorted beasts with shaman attendant. Portraits of objects, misdeeds and little bones. Animal palindromes—junk DNA. It's the same for all living creatures, the only thing that changes is the order of the letters. One sequence is repeated half a million times; these repeat sequences make up a full third. Their meaning's unknown. Most of his body does things he doesn't understand, such as, (1) the trick rope called the road; (2) the climbing rite. One figure has antlers, a Venus in furs—cuckold's horns. It's me. I look ridiculous. Even in his name as this. Thousands process across the limestone wall. All you've got to do is pray for a time in there then walk away. It's true.

He begins to pray. The sun also rises. The iron rivets burst. The shaft shivers. The pivot shoots down. See. And that's not all: arrows and letters signal direction and leverage, fire-working and metal-working kick in and a new planet drops into place between the sun and mercury. Scoop out the head bane. Drill through the plate on the underside of the skull: at the house of the great tooth bleed the hare woman explodes (as advertised). Above, the Gulag Borealis—incubator solar, incubator lunar. The cardinal question in economic life is blue spirals or orange spirals. Compare. While we await decision prisoners are still chained from birth in our underground antrum, able to see nothing but moving shadows, the hole of reality. From time to time you'll be required to go back into the cave to govern it. It is my hint to speak. The you I recollect, but I have now been disremembered. Yet the word for I consists of my initials, even when absent. I see my own for the first time in the everyday sky—a celestial name: Ram, 'And I come from far away . . .'

Bring him to the front and give him a taste of blood. End this interment. End it now. This needs a kopf, a crown. Bring me his head and a tripod to set it on. I'll pluck out one of its eyes. A stream of light flickers on the cave wall: the father in the form of a hawk. Everything happens only once. With a sharp object remove the remaining crust with a cloth dipped in oil. He walks toward the ice cairn, his face steadily directed at the hatch in the bow end. Ready.
A vast ship. I forgot to say.
Bring me a spell.
How to tain someone into a fog. Where you need: two slugs, four snails, two onions, one worm, two chopped of head, four cups of blod.
One, you get slugs chop them up.
Two, you tack the shell of the snail.
Three, you chop onions.
Four and get the blood out of somebodys head and put and put it into four cup the stir it and say abracabra onetwothree turn this man.
No. I found it. It was just what I needed. It reminds me somehow of my earlier homage, where I'd had my fill of remembrance: the unnameable white.

My own head was once shot off in battle.

He buys a field with the blood money. He'll die as the result of a fall. All his bowels will gush out. So much for prayer. The end is predicted: let his days be few etcetera. People ask me what that means—they assume a strategy of obfuscation. There's none. The last prejudice is drifting off into a sort of free-floating anxiety, yet still capable of feats such as keeping the temperature in the compound stable—the clever play of revelation, and quite cavalier. Meaning here is residual, a reliquary of signals. More laundromats are opening. Competition like that could stun his book, with profit. Are all those implants a pox? The result was yellow. The skin of the skin creeps.

While there's still time he's been made Pope for a day. So he says. I believe him—he's capable of anything. Yet still he's The Property Of The X-Ray Department: we attach the ends of his nerves to sticks which we turn in the palms of our hands; thereby we draw the nerves out from his body. They are purpleblue strings. The body twitches and spasms in a most remarkable manner. The keenest among us take notes. The whole operation lasts no more than seven or eight hours. The spectacle proves very pleasing to her eye; we are once more in favour and can expect just reward for our efforts.
Contrasts become glaring, glassy. Elsewhere on the ward she's busy; she can knot her own labia, body thickly impastoed, surviving ear pinned back with tacks (perhaps this goes with something somewhere else). The operating theatre's a hard spore shooting range—we're going to see changes, mark my words. Use your penknife and a knitting needle, an ash reed pen and a levitation compass. Don't worry about that. Nobody's going to steal that here. Movement changes the forms: cradles to beds to graves . . . She has had three separate dreams. It's good to have their goads and seminal plant dusts: a necessary otherness these days. As she speaks amid the mob of unnameables another book opens suddenly at our feet like a trapdoor. Drill down by sound alone. I don't know what thinks me this wicked night. I'd guess at happenstance—home and happenstead from out the world. The signal is a form and the letters form a book. Matchstick galleons. You'll have to explain logic gates to me where there's more time below.
I can't tell you, all I can say is, it's here.

Couples of things, x's and y's.

They're made of nothing. He always falls short, like some Jehovah he researches things then he leaves them behind where he found them. There isn't much to add to that.
Harden not your heart. Their habitation is desolate. None dwell. This theory would gain plausibility without the skeletal element. All I can add is that there is a visceral urgency about the way he writes himself into every page.