Richard Makin, Work in Process

Here the outline of a journey is introduced. Bolt of sun. The geist. Liquid cells are sprayed over the top to fill in the gaps between things. Again vast stretch of time. An elegant couple on a launch at sea (that sea). She's a carrier; strike her deaf. An object falls from the sky, something like a huge hat pin with spherical head. It pierces her heart. Slowly she draws out from the body. You actually don't need to move your hips, he says—if you touch the iliac belt the whole sacrum moves . . . I have a feel for it. I just picked it up. It was easy . . . A poem of retraction—backsong: dead-centred noon. Where sinuses burst. The jaw clicks like a geiger counter. The brain pan hums. Clash of live social accents . . . Where labour evaporates. Breakneck somersaults, electric purity—mesmer and hypnote—machined code, cranked up again and again: real high. Jewel high. Five fathoms high where my fathers lie. Crash of thunder. Crash of tinder . . . Briefly we discuss the problem. I need a continuum. Ice cliffs and sump oil. Gravedigging sappers: sapheads. With two assassination attempts under their belts, they're a new creed of underminer.

Whatever it was (and I wasn't sure) I wanted it back.

Antarctic whaler. He carries the thing coiled up in his pocket. It won't go away. I won't go away. Supine across the sword-mat, braced for an additional lashing, his fabric beaten near death. Try and hear a few old words on and off. String them together into a little phrase, a few little phrases. Hence, above the man's head, a watery fluid sustenance—the inside outed. The trick is to get free of your own dead body in one piece. He's little altered, some excremental god; the word out of its clothes, salt snuck in every wound. Maggots are used as curative. But he's nothing like the ultimate, the lost but one, spoken and suffered in the light of a last morning, with magnificent clouds—the great celestial bruise.

The orbital muscles around his lips do their duty. He whistles. He's one of the wasted people I work. He's no match. It occurs to me that he's the very thing. Bearded then, tanned on the outstretching boom. But not tonight and not tomorrow. Rig now to get some sleep, while the fish is calm and steady. Causal bastard, he says, talking a spell. It requires silence, a conspiracy of silence. You lose a certain sharpness while it becomes something else, dwelling here in the world, full of manners, full of names.

There's activity over the distance at the horizon line. There is yesterday and there is yesterday. Purple breathmark on her passing face. She peels. Mass burnings and martyrdom; a reduction in the populace. I love and I must. I'm destined to a short life of fiction and daily domestic action. That's really easy. None of my friends understand. No one can known how happy I am. I've aged ten years. Where was he when we needed him? I'm ahead of myself. But I don't see it like that. I'm a bit calmer now about it all. This aerial's quite useful, listen: But yet let reason govern thy lament . . . Across a field strewn with thorns. Scatterlogic. All these incomplete dictations serve to torture us. Those distant lights of antinomy, of false sleep. Compassion, cold compressed.
I can't.
Nowhere can he find the key.
Test the articulation.
And he lay there in the night thinking, It equals which:
Behaviour of: forehead on ground.
Behaviour of: rushes about.
Behaviour of: sits with back to fire.
Behaviour of: washing equals rain.
Behaviour of: washing inside ear equals stranger.
Black equals cure.
Black: lucky to possess.
Black: lucky to touch.
Black: meeting.
Black: seeing back of.
Black: visit from.
Do you ever stop. No. I'll lose my jaw. He'll lose his jaw. I did warn listeners about the irreverent. Now he's drowning at sea. Now he endangers health by sucking out the breath . . . an issue to do with cracks. Now he endangers health if reared. He's so isolating, don't you feel. Now he endangers the health of the unborn. He is mutual unlove personified: Thine head upon thee is like the cardinal quarters, and the head of thine hair like purple . . . Seems the old king is held fast in his own galleries. Sunking. Pacing the solemn floor. Syncope, anyone? A cutting short, a sudden fall of letter pressure to the brain. So forms the imago, the last or perfect state—insect life—the optical counterpart persisting in the unconscious as influence, foundered on a parent or other. We've heard a rumour of sentences, of a high throne where the tracings contract and bring themselves to an end. The beginning is like the close. High of beat. The egg of it. Nullsome nunsense. Onoff: pharos, lighthouse on the north side of the bay. Killing nine lives. On the table. Shutting up. Shutting up raises a taboo (certain names must never be mentioned). And that's the vaticinal rumble of an approaching train. Keep 'em coming, tooth scraper. Shell tooth. Thoth.
Yes, here comes Thoth with his hapax legomenon:
That day awakening to find two suns in the
alembic firmament,
oxendrawn against the windhead.

Drowned downriver. Found floating upriver. A languid flower that has fathered thousands. The telephone never stopping. Just watch the results. It's amazing. Just one minute into your watch and a jet of fluid is discharged from the orifice. At the forefront of the stage is a curtain, a proscenium arch like the dome of the foreskull, and the coffer that frames tradition. Arkshelled with transient high voltage, his head chamber's a boxlike bivalve. Dig in, dig in, to visionary models. We're all but buried . . . Up to the thorax . . . But no one would move till it was destroyed. Let's get away from all this. I will keep it very careful . . . The rolling sound . . . The drip-drop-drip of a tap; dying ice, the tortured sound of flushing melt waters. Maybe we have them without knowing it.

The street lamps are lit, bending the horizon: alignment eastwest, or is it westeast. I wonder what a bone spur is. Desiccated spore cases are strewn beneath dense foliage. Big-drinking trees. Spent shells and live cartridges. Check the soil you're built on. All I need is something to aim myself at, then misfire. This isn't the time, I know; a code of honour requires silence. Doing the agreements, doing the segments—the body of evidence. Stuff like that. All the witnesses are long dead—besides, informing equals disgrace. Any single act can change everything; the key event between the piers. A face at the door jamb. The food runs out . . . Beggars more like crows than humans. Someone had a crow on a stick. It is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks, a manner of synth man, his overall blue. He starts a brawl. Where did he say? Someone Island. The all man, the atman, the altman. Within divine the real self breath. Then I hit something on the road.
What happened to you.
What happened to him.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing . . .
What happened.

The clockworks. There's no window or airlock to the chamber. Just as well: keep out of the moon, it may turn your head or blind you. In the centre of that hole is a blue carrier bag plump with coarse black hair. Someone's lost their head. It occurs to me the proprietor may wish to close up for the night. But we've got a direction—we've got to start. There are bits you can't do without, and bits you can't do before other bits. This feels like the end part. It's a lovely thought though, being in here with the old old selves, scratching at the smooth sides of my tank with sharp dirty nails. Non sequiturs multiply (they take some struggle, believe me). Consider all this then consider them both, the sea and the land: strange analogy, strange meeting, turning to meet some thing in yourself. No blood reaches here from the upper ground . . . I know, I know—it looks all too easy.

You're simply making a virtue of your own habits, which I'm at liberty to choose not to share. There's money in the bank today. Also a series of shocking. They enter my bones. I've been bound with ropes. A strong wall surrounds me. Iron bars which can't be opened. She reacts as if it were a normal occurrence. My prison is reckoned within the deep without. He's with child. He rocks beneath a boulder, a logan stone. Letter-pressed to the death he rocks & rolls his stone across the abdomen. He delivers. Nothing to it. Too much oestrogen in the water ration. Never much of a midwife, I would have made a better job of it if I'd had a bag of sequins and a big kitchen knife about my person. When it comes to dreams it's not a question of meaning but experience. When do they come for me. Wherefrom do they come for me. A tragic error of flawed science has taken my place. Now we'll have to beat a retreat. Sound the mort. To seaboard! Beat the flames and beat the sea. The sea! Our sea! (he obviously loves the sea). And we all gather in a shivering cluster, a veritable cloister up on deck. Captain's on the bridge, glass eye out. His body shudders under shade of the stern, beneath the starfield. There's evidence of the civilisation that carved it. He casts a glance. It survives out there, glimmering, porous, about to disappear forever. He turns to face the dog sun. He's following his family tree across the heavens. The characters who see. The other hands have stopped their song and crowd craning over the bulwarks, standing on the saltwater piping: the natives are coming, herds of the surf storming the reef, riding four abreast. Me, I'm trembling: it's the rising smell of burning flesh, feeding the howling rut-the body within which sparks of light have been imprisoned, a hesitant soul torn by doubtsome conflict. Just as one sees in real life: a step backward. Sinkapace. Upon the solemn floor. Both requests are refused. He wants to inverse into the revisible. Nothing lives under it, or within it—see. But I'm getting a bit behind, tired now, hands firmly bound as they are.

He had tied both sideropes to the hackamore (a single length of rope with a loop for breaking in). You all set, he says. He lets go the head. I rise and step away. In at the foaming street they come, hellmade horsemen brought down from thunder-head.

Aerials dowse in a desert, quite red, cranes hang rusting . . . sand blown corrosion—random transitions to glass or plastic. I come up with indeterminate readings. One sequence runs, We communicate between the vast spread . . . Swaying radio masts—aerial dowsers, gene core inanimate. A stray map on the pavement: we're observing local signs, random topologies, eximperial, exempirical. You couldn't say we have much faith. But I'm getting sidetricked. He's speaking, the other, the monster with the trumpets, flutes and drums. Occasional disaccord strikes to sling tension between the counterparts: memories of someone else's father, everabsent. Apropos the last point, with radio glare—with monologic utterance, socialist abstraction. Fugitive glazes of madder and orpiment. Come back. Where.

One sequence runs, So long as dim still but the cloud. I never have a second thought about my work, now rock her off . . .
Stonepine wall in his stovepipe hat, he sits and reads till dawn, then disappears—without, a word.
If you like—there's no other sign for it. Of good family too would one think it. O, and lest he forget.
O.
Now I have a frozen bone in my ear.

Night. He looks up at the sky, a mesh retreating at the speed of light.

I just think he has incredible self-belief. He moves up against the window. Back to the void. A giant shadow moves. Innumerable triangles. He's recasting his mind. Aerials dowse over red dust breathing in the sway of a censer bell. He takes himself off alone into that desert and lies burning on the naked sand. From the almost imperceptible flicker of his eyelids a shadow races out and over his body. He turns to Sirius. Venus through the houses. Diamanté lizards and other small reptiles. A belted man bearing arms. Dissolving phantasm, vector of a disease, beneath the disfiguring star.

Close by atop a column, the other dare not move.

And there it was, a sort of twisted. So there's different levels after all. The sparks are held captive in very low spheres and need to be lifted up. Come to ask yourself, again, of the misreadings. Well, around wordfully some whom noises pour. But change is coming from unlikely sources: he saunters in in his Latin quarter head.
I just don't care what things mean. It's probably an illness. But you, you have a head set, I sense you have a head set. It's just that it's quicker to say what you have to say and then leave it be. I'm sure it was a manner of comet.

Endlessly referential. One unseamed. A huge public event, a huge public rent. The kind of way out a person invents in desperate circumstance. Nerve shelta with instruments alive. He sways to and fro. Discussion of the gateway project means more dowsing: autumn berries and leaves galore, most probable.

Not a single offer for his head has yet been made, and I am beginning to see why.

In composition, one sunbred. Heliocopter. For years he's worked as a wandering scribe. He doesn't care what things mean. It's probably an illness. Let me de-scribe for you: he's anti-elemental, that is, the complete text follows him to the grave and beyond. It's imposed from outside: heartpulp of eaglewood. Where's my aerial. A seance of images: the election of Fuck, with his dynamic personal poverty and his preaching power. Of these, fires and animal sacrifices are the most predominant. He's been lawyered to death, and yet remains analytic, transcribing in imagined terms the data of spontaneous memory, softwired into a language that's hard and abstract. Now move. Leading up, elevated, up again to lead. No scape from the self hood, the being-here tics. The glistering tainfoil. Every time the flood. Now raise the floor. Thy timely parted ghost I invocate.

Yield the ghost. She-giant. Hung in ghastly night. O, I see now: solid triangles—equilateral—and having a triangle as the base. A cluster of pyramids. At pyramiddle, the apex: the all important capstone. He is swamped by admirers, his deplorable weakness. But things become clearer, free from quotation of any kind. The eye of the triangle.

Stray placentas, surprisingly cute, hover in the air about our heads. Womb flak.
The players: twins, or friendship's offering.
The time: some time near the end.
The place: last page of the dead.
Here it is in facsimile, complete and unabridged, alongside its cursive equivalent. It unties the tongue, unties the race. Always that spur to regain the passed—my passed, his passed, any passed—forever thinking the thither. Last page of the dead, coning out to a dripping point (it had begun to thaw again). I have been a stranger in a stranger land, ruled by mosaic, the champion oppressed. They said the water may come again and it did, but not in any orthodox fashion. It's obvious for all to see—the promised flood. I think I'm turning mad; I'm remembering exactly the same things as him. Tables display the totals divided in full. They're the sum of all present. It's no longer enough to invent new mediations to suit the tenor of changed times. Again: a true act. The colony is where the coven lies, where an unknown world of thought corrugates and vaporizes. He's said to have murdered a colleague and made it look like suicide, the live production of a corpus: the man who is never where one is looking. Much masturbation these past few days. The floor of his hermitage is streaked with the acid bite of his semen trail. Sympathetic magic. Think we might just have some more rain to fall. Directly overabove: a rosyfingered plane track, fragile sky vertebrae. Fossiled vapours that never fade. The sun must be the final agent in this parable. Mastabatum! The window's barred why. From within the sing of his sounding voice . . . Very fine is my valentine. Very fine and very mine . . . He's the thing in itself that will eventually lead to everything. Me, I'm reduced to a mere rim of brick, the tungsten wreck.

The man returns the next day. He insists on paying the fee, the whining kvetch. Yesterday just trials off. You forget, you remember the past backwards and forget—but if you do, Do.

I did in some sentences succeed in doing this, this thing in creating a balance that was neither the balance.

A spasm of alternate contractions and relaxations. The sound of a drawing cork.

Hullo, Mr. Ellipsis! Halloo, Sir! His crazy blue hat atop his quartered head . . . under his canonicals, his shady mob cap—cauchemardesque in the sleep beneath his flatblack mortalboard. And within a marble hall a riverran a living tide. Chewing on that gun . . . blanks and gunpowder, knuckles shuffling, dragging, and the huge moving shadows on the rocky walls. That was no mere onester, and I've got the measurements from the Thames here to prove it. Once upon a time the full reference was given by writing the letters followed by the easting and then the northing. Those days are over.
So I just thought I'd tell you
to turn back the other way.
Literally, the straight direction out of the head, any head. Say, the head of a landloper, one circuitous in perambulation, driven at the knee. An interloper, with birdsong on route—a goldfinch with tumoured head. One of the thirty-six has suffered the turning effect of a tangential force, and lies now hardened in heart or feelings.

Thus, his head is divided neatly into sixths, the acrobat with the fireworks and everything.