Richard Makin, Work in Process

It's clear that the universal watchfulness has completely isolated him. The gift of mourning, else forget. I used to think that the day would never come: the staggering heart of a workbreaking djinn. I loses itself here. A pause of forgetfulness. This is another now, and no less a now. Other people's narratives always look cheap; the issue isn't for or against, but what it means to the psyche. Until tomorrow I cannot sleep. Its silent track in the water disappears, right there underneath you the invisible. She heard him say alive a life a life you love.

She puts her needless candle in the shadow at a distance the deadcart rumbles, a tumbril of used heads. He tears off a piece of the dossier and eats it:
And I think too I felt the last flicker of that nerve as I grew up. But why does it disturb you now after this long lapse of time. It was a bit tricky the sea was rough. They their very selves are closing in around a structure yet unbuilt. And they are asked again and again whether they do not want to make some use of their knowledge. I've been back to the old terrain; they're digging up the worlds she buried in our trenches the earth. And the occasional piece of disused leg. And too that severed hand. Assorted members, a hash of organs. The front line doesn't seem to move. And what shall our new ornaments be? These brief flarings? He commits the worst crimes without feeling them at all, and while you're about it, you'd do well to find a protector yourself. We must venture forth and at the same time dwell, to reduce this newfound freedom. He knows he's going to die in graceful circumstances, puffed up to infernal proportions. He implodes. He is everywhere. Ever farther, ever higher. Still more fiercely than you the difference. Through this one might drive the logicians into a corner: the explanation of the name, namely. We can no longer be sure of our own transgressions with all the epileptics around. They undermine the whole terrain. They smile when one says. They taunt the reader. In ear and ear, in many ears one after the other. And how come he's still selling off a firestone cell? It's supposed to be open. He appears to be gently laughing at everything, still more fiercely than you the difference while the ladies knit at their names. The very last one and I challenge nothing. I said gently. They seem to quite like themselves as players. Nightdowsers. It's the uniform.

Night fever and animals take them. A ram: a paving rammer: a pile-driving monkey or god. Beware the striking-face of the steamhammer. I don't wish to tempt someone from speech, but welcome to the bulk. They reply that they take pleasure in all the knowledge passing through them, and that for them is its only purpose.
The worst thing about being here is the doing nothing. I think it was.
They all fall. Do you know what it is, I shall, in a gesture of helpless compassion.

How did he do that. Lady luck. He sees that the spy is fearful. He is followed by a large number of victims approaching along the sunlit road, and harbours fears that he may be evolving into a tortoise. One bottle falls to the floor and breaks some burning mendicant. A scouring blast whereby nomenclature serves as a purgative. He's axed to death in antigravity, despite his vast central offices. And me without choice to land for a quick charge.
A pig, as it turns out. An angry red rash, white tendrils from out the headskull, cankered growths from a sclerotic brain. Don't look now. The mind is holed beneath the waterline.

Date of death unknown but mainly in his own words.

Lost theatre. I want to get away from it all. Funny how people are drawn towards the core and disregard the offered supplement. An improvised fancy not unlike his simulator—of so young days, a childhood right here, never abandoned. We shall leave them in the earth but the earth is ours all the same. Clustering and swarming, he's through with the familiarity . . . back to airborne paving slabs. Surely I'm due to get even after a great shock like that. What communication have we only desired. Blessed is the fruit of thy seedbed. A wall passes between understanding understanding.

In his pocket is a crumpled note writ on a scrap of skin with rusty point, in soot and charcoal and blood its filaments knot. They're offered up to night. She domineers, licking ice off the panes. It all depends on you. And this seems like a good place to stop crawling about. She partakes of a standing bath in latex, peeling animal skins. Fleeing the nidus, she's still bound by white bandages (more like the girth or strap that holds a saddle on an animal's back). I couldn't find her, nor did I have time to look. See to it and don't forget. I see the meat through my glass, and I remember too I once saw that bride survey a world through her own. It's for him. The marriage day was shining brightly, away in the past tense, the latent. He's a viscous mixture got by destructive distillation of wood, coal, or peat. There. Another list. What true project has been lost.

I think I'm losing stuff here. Her hollowed cheeks show at once that she's ill. There's little time to lose. As she speaks she hands me three sheets of notepaper and three envelopes. They're all of the thinnest foreign post. But their path together betters ours, being more pristine, less weedsome. A nice new ditty is called for. It's the rush and the roar of the rain that she typifies, trotting on ahead into the dim distance. She has to start making decisions.
Now, my critique of her frontispiece: a darkling sensation of pleasure and pain. The stuff: a natural bituminous substance of like appearance. But a brilliant picture all the same. Lists listing.
She's offered the night, a falconer, and a short, broad word bent somewhat like a sickle. One who sports with falcons or hawks, he slips ever forward into the dent of her footstep. His efficacy is measured in reference to the cardinal points. The same image persists. Citations fly at the random air. To aid digression a fracture opens in the antiplace, a caesura between fragments. An obversion unhinging an infinity.
Listen, longshadowed upon a promenade moved by machinery. She's seized in its gore. She suffers till care is renewed. The very last one and I change nothing. Divination by art is the star fetish once more. Arsomancy: prophecy by alignment of arse. They want him on fire.

O to relinquish the third person, the third man. I've been a fool. We should have dug deeper than a grave. Dissolve.
Location dawn.
A small group make their way down an avenue of graves. At the end of the mall three men are engaged in digging. Fossors. Nighted colour. Like his black mourning garments and his melancholy.

The greasybuttered toast at his fingertips. The zinc reflective circling.

It turns and turns, void of purpose. We might imagine a democracy of letters, which in their tongue are words of great signification: In the place of big sleep. His heart is a brief uncertain murmur, his ashes grey as thought. He sings a song you already know, something about the quantum state, the outermost electron in a calcium cell. There rises before my eyes a detail of the last letter which has escaped me: it is not a typing error. A lot of young agents would kill for a hook like that. We're going in (North Africa). We're hit below the waterline. We apply the same word grimace we use for men. Yes, I think you are, I think you must be, a little older than we. Finally the movement, the pure image nibbling at bone, embalmed with gizmos, embalmed with minium; red lead—its bright pigment, scarlet to lament the space within the cell wall. The vermilion brush with the law—everyday people, the family stone. Mercurial sulphide. And sly with it. This attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions. The narrator cannot share this view. Callousness and apathy are the general rule. He turns the bloody screwplates by which logic is forced to retreat.

To stimulate bone growth we try shrapnels of sand, eggshell, arsenic pellets, bear traps and salt grain, finger rust, clay, sharp pebbles and grit, anything we can lay our itsibitsi claws on. And other models: hired assassins from a panel-beating gameshow, the scupper in the real. He has no thoughts of his own—he's a committed eclectic, is declassed, with a metaphysical prowess that condenses and sediments. He's the envy of all present. He declaims that the thing-for-itself is worth the pursuit . . . Sorry, there is a meaningless file on this that you won't be able to open: the mayonnaise has run a little, dividing the trickle of warm blood into two streams. That'll be the day. Deadringers. That'll be the day when you say goodbye, that'll be the day when you make me cry, that'll be the day when you make me die.

All of those at once bugger what an unwholesome and badling day that shall be. We'll never reach the real jokes, the patters, the segues, the stutters and the arguments—not caring of how or where we fall. And why are we ugly today. Push the red button and follow the instructions. Each and every one of these statements is saying the same thing.
Not caring of how or where you fall.
Come. Sit you down before you.
The persistent tense persists, choking with his own hand. What. No reference has yet been made to the ever. It's in the mode of having to be its own being.

A puma amnesty's been declared. Must take mine along to the local Repository. First though, the lonely boar-spears . . . He pays me for the structure, the syntax of porn set into modern cosmogonies. He's protected. The building has no windows. It has movable cracks. His head measures up backwash—but it's work. He picks at his indifferent teeth. Radio filings, broadcasting all manner of reckless crime, into wars and robberies and frauds, and news of a sea that can no longer bear ships. I must first know what I'm capable of before I know who I am. Or is it the other way round . . . He's forgotten the word for that, rumours as big as apples compressing the mind organ. Steps have to tend towards an object . . . Great trumpet-loads of breath . . . In spite of all the unnameable things surrounding him he is not at all neglected in his appearance. He even reads books: Splendor Solis . . . Pygmies—Some Helpful Child Gods . . . Fragments of mechanical toys. He's not, as folk say, working at the car wash, and can summon through the agency of his will women in gold-mesh dresses, men in black velvet pulling rabbits from silver hats. He's one of them, and he's always been a pro-zero, a kind of pyrotechnician. Like orange and yellow confetti and skyrockets, synapses crack across his gaps, forming one inert and noble gesture: ATTENTION. He scours clean all in one, in the I-plaintive day. Identity as it used to be is a performative contradiction. Surely this means I must have come from an old old gene.

Tonight she will see for herself the big forehead and the too-close-together yes. Up to the teeth and forehead in the very face. Give in to what provides. What rests. What remains for me to do. Can can do. Soul-lime. Together, an hundred and forty years in psion (it would help if I could type). Do not pass go. Beware of the.

I let myself go a bit there. The compound's full of pacing game: the odd dead fox restored to the living—roadkill—and when I refer to cats it is safe to assume I mean the great panther beast. I like this street. On the other hand, if you have a big big house, the people will never hear you scream.
Not so. Listen.
Tycoon holds his fire. The game is on, under the lightfloods. And you can make a free window, key claim your own cell.
I am imperious, me. Not you. Me. I.
Enough.
(Everyone's genes are old, you fucking idiot.)

Go back to it. Greetings. What time we have. What times we had. Ten and/or two. Now I'm the paper's London correspondent. Go back to it. I cannot. No really? So disprove what I say, apply your own conceits—and you'll find it resists. The pavements are narrow and uneven beneath the numerous gaplamps swung to show more clear a longing line of wooden hovels. The thing: we take dwelling and building as two separate activities.
A haemorrhage of paving slabs, since dug airborne. We should be so lucky.

Down and pass over.

I did not ask for this and I did not make.
No?
Yes, he sure enough surely is one of the old school of hard knocks. Open crusha.

A trading-boat, a down-going carried by impassive rivers. Right well! I thought it at the time an enthusiastic flight, but it's no matter what I make of the past now. The longsweeping right hand signals its short, nightly pause in fury. The inter-view. Using rammed earth as a means of support. Sky full of copters. An osmosis has long been taking place—insider arts. Now, pick up on that.
He himself speaks cockpit—that which joins together. He falls out Icarus. Accordingly, it is spring; the edge of the sea. The physical evidence is gone and the crime dissolved. The only lead we have is a cache of photographs bundled together in an old leather portfolio. These are distributed among the agents. Each bears a stamp, and his is named THE PRELUDE.
Dust as we are, like hurtless light, I relieve him of a terrible temptation (the headless tumbril's back in fashion). A watercart comes hurtling down an embankment, straight towards him. He does not flinch. That cart is so much firewood. And on her elongated, fearful cry, we break off before the D sound as we

What happened?
They erased him. He kicks over the phone booth.
It's not hard to imagine how that interview went. They were really odd ones, his inquisitors, in particular the one with the head embellished with toes.

If it crawls from out its funnel-hole will you notice as you sit there on your step? I've picked up the habit of eschewing. The fact is pure and simple: he is here in the day. And this is our public humiliation post. Those were drinking days and the days were drunk. We inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent. And this is our inquisition room. And this our whipping post. With an electrical one, they're really hard to control. It's quite comfortable, actually. You can see by the marks on the ceiling that it's been in use. And this is our public humiliation zone. Bye it. He is there voiced to accept the request. Very pop'lar he has become of late, o yes. I can scarcely help noticing him myself. Yet his partner lies upon the point of death, I hear. There he sits alone in his song, forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles at the air.
And he is, like any bubble, an ace refractor. Monseigneur, by contrast, lies idle beneath the carriage and the horses' hoofs. In that posture he's sure to be consumed, a minor noble of needless exchange.

Remote and madder flowers. Smog all on board or a menacing cell. And then things start to get really confusing. This is a public humiliation zone. So make yourself at home, each and every one, and humiliate yourselves.

It was but a reckless manner a palimpsest.

Back in the night, with a finer definition than I could have cobbled together myself: his grand conceit. We're meeting at the bell tower, five o'clock, there to witness divination by the knot of veins in some victim arm. On route I steal a pen, body covered with prayerweals. Veinstuff. Lost I hear all understand all, but how to exhume my innermust. An innocent bystander's suspected of outrage. Unintelligible without an image, he says, eaten up by the farces of darkness. It turns out to be the so-called, impressed upon the matter at the vertex. Out east, a crumbling city of canals—in a district juicy with bribes. He's liverish, grey-mattered. A portion of the above sky is magnified wildly. He writes vague on a sphery glass: Sitting or kneeling you couldn't . . . More room if they buried them standing. Both ends meet. Not the anatomy of an inalienable. The ligaments of the liver are five in number . . .

Take compliance advise on violent warning markers. Take my word for it. Dissolve but he hears them always. Get out the light. At this distance, however, we can't be so sure. Crime and pun. Criminal wordplay. An argot, telestic. He's found soundly beaten to death with his own.

A fell day. It was a bad day for busyness the day that was. Like her epiphany: the song of the streetsweep. One to whom a certain response is owed.