Richard Makin

St Leonards

XIX


Here's the same thing speeded up and played three times faster. We are moving in a large circle. There's skin on the table. This chapter represents the management of light and shade on a corroded mental plate. We can see the larger structures—the dome of the church, the heads of the gondoliers, the white dove in the eavesdrop, the hill of the skull. We're perfect. Now drop it. You're a black hole to avoid. There's a hawk on the track. The nerve breakage around here, it talks me through myself.
Random letters are found scattered in the gutter, teethed with infant incisor, traces of fecal matter. Debasement recovery, please. I have tried it twice already.

He falls, armour clanking, across several acres of battle-earth. I think I can make it now the plague has gone. Something ascends. All the fleetings disappear. Scattered oak and ash in the headscape. This is the time of our great lament. Look all around, nothing but. He glances at the barque prepared. I can see all the obstacles. It's an age of denigration into tasteless ornament. Look straight ahead. The crime wasn't staged using a stone, that much is clear. It's going to be a blunt day. In the opening section twenty voices enter successively with the theme in attrition. His own portion isn't cut from this, the cataclysmic prelude. The other twenty enter with neural material. He places the unspecified child out of mind. All forty combine for the ending. This triggers a famous riot. In my absence a metal box has been screwed to the cell wall.
He asks, why did you abandon the painting why.
I think the tide's coming in. That old trick. Number one: detail of anklebone or astragal. The opening rule is that two lines sitting together must rhyme. Another image depicts a valley of the future where children are sacrificed: mountains of black earth collapsing into a void, lightning strikes, frost-rimed mirrors, veins of red vulva that corrode the eye. The sheath clenches in a spasm, the flesh is corrugated to urge inward propulsion. Now he has despair to reason with. The base feels so much better than the top.
Monochrome. There's a man in a bat costume. Clitkit spanking games. Every ankle is swollen. Home is everywhere. The old isolation reruns, the cutting effects of light and smoke—the tain of the mirror. A card or die with two spooks lies upturned on a baize table: Roma cardgames, impeccable futures. You're the favourite to win tonight. He knows that he doesn't know. I start saving up for today. He digs his hoof into the ground with force. The others settle around the sounding table. He knows that he doesn't stand a chance.
The rain the thin film of rain.

Isolate. You can create this incredible silence when you sing. The refuse of the city is conveyed to slow incineration below a craggy hillock, a place of torment—subduction zones, transformation vaults. Geist of chance.
A barbed net is dragged across a riverbed. The lucky number is fifteen. I see murderous iron hulls, porcelain crabs, shattered cylinders. Seven days from now you're to be fixed forever in a life tide. More items: a mailbag, the top of stocking. Exile in mainstream. Faint gesture to lifelong ladyship. Today is independence day, not tomorrow, today. Downriver a man is suspended by leather straps above a huge block of ice.
She is dethroned. It costs three hundred. Here, the tortoise is an alchemic instrument. It is independence day because I just said it is independence day. How long can you last you, another says.

Bedelta delta. On the street above it's daylight. There is little to see. Black earth, Nile earth. A land of animated statues with warm hands. It's a contracting market. We all die soon or late. There have been several causalities. We form radiating strands that project from under the wet sand like a vicious root system. Call an ambulant. There's also an unchanted subterranean forest with tunnels. I made this thing. Something outside me proclaims my authority. We're at anchor precisely above where the hulk lies, or so the gimp says. Whip a cord with silk about his skull. You get the feeling this would benefit from words accompanying it. The garden is a moss garden. From over the garden wall the wail of the lykegate: obsession, lemoncholy, shadowdance and furies. I observe a scalloped outline. The old isolation returns, the twist of some softer material. We move in a counterpoise direction—opposite to the course of the sun (i.e. the wrong way). There's a solitary rock with lichen circles, like that moving statue. He goes to fetch a needle.
We migrate to a country that does not need. A thin movable membrane passes across the surface of the eye—the veil. No matter where you go it seeks. He brings me a glass of water, a matrass half filled with green liquid. No matter where you go it will seek and find. I would love to climb that magnet mound with thee, omphalos to crater concrete—the landing pod. Across the chalk downs striated shadows of impossible speed: tracks of blood, fecal aerosol on white sheets. Good to hear of your film. I losing impetus you I love you (no). His name: Augustus.
Thick-set clusters, the usual death-apples. I'm all written out.

Excerpted notes from navel commando. Are you working all night. Time within him is drained of land. Rush upon the nearest earthwork. We're in a calcified era. A yarn comes with a hard core—the centre, the boss-stone. He makes a decision. We reach a town harbouring an ancient oracle without its walls. The music is out of tune. It's ambiguous and difficult to intercept. Continue listening until first quote. Do you remember the woman with the accordion (the usual death applies). She takes away his heart and eyes. He recovers them by stratagem.
Image of this man on a barricade, with bandana and pitchfork.
Home to nowhere, he forever rearranges himself. Insert two distinct sections with rhymes everywhere.
Glagolgotha.

Two-spirited—wood and fire equals carbon. Running and the blood of the runner. Inspection of entrails, the mantic device. Too late being happens. Is he blind now, maybe.
Back off, that's a private object.

Metal plate in skull. A sequence of wrapped heads, as if for an arctic season. Lids are gently prised to reveal which eyes are lost. I shed my first today, post-everything. Space it is, liquescent jet peepers. Now I can, unsight and seer.
I mean. I forget myself, old anchorite. A palmy period of literature ensues. Increasingly rapid repetition of word and phrase. Again speech, in close akin.
There are few entire moments in this key. No one knows for sure. He never returns to B minor.

He's a sort of transnational revolution—efficacy of grace, absolute predestination. The word is his domain. He migrates. Faint whiff of afterfuck. Why is everything. Root of turf, helical smokestack rising from low-slung thatch. He has no knowledge of the person forgone. I am disclosed myself. He sits sullen at his corner, rocking his pipe like some dead resurrectionist. This is not. Much later he departs to wander in a land called wandering. We ourselves migrate to a country that does not seed. It holds a quantity of simple and restrained bounty, of a rather sombre kind. A more prosaic twist in the tale is needed. Anyone of solitary or secluded habit is vetoed. We have no money and nothing to eat.
Why be. He says I know we must meander, mister irresolute. I think now we have exhausted the current oracle. One passing says you are Manifest Hereditary Evil. I no longer wish to relate. A robe reaches the ankle, the sloping part of my internal earthwork. I want I am. Clicking radio samples. I see time in you. That's my territory, lilies. I turn away years myself. A dreadful science is made. Think nothing of nothing. I've never looked back at self—the art of no. Anyone who withdraws. Say no.
Bit of a skip in the narrative there.

The mucilage in the gland of the lip dissolves. The mouth flesh is flat—skipful of word, like a big slippy fish. In the lab a long-necked chemical flask is sealed at one end. It's trimmed. We utilize jaw. Entreaty yourself. I'm the eyes and ears of this battle group: ermine moths, caterpillar webs—lykewake wailing through the dark tunnels beneath London grudge. Uncountable nous. I detect you and everything you suspend for. The dramatic personae include invisible speakers, Doctor Freemantle and all the aces, and a hermaphrodite or imperfect female of the fox kind. He is trampled by a dancing bear which has broken loose.
That aqueduct. Outside, broad rays of light fracture and nominate. Deep dig into wet loam of hearth. We find illustrious ornaments of foreign greatness. Dig deep into hypothalamus, in and out the empty block. Use the double-axe. We unearth a structure made of beeswax and feathers. I recall you said it would be a September when this came to pass. Search alone self for home. How long have we got.
She howls herself down a fight of stairs. Never pass on them. She's pregnant. Narrow lines radiate from her head. The steps are divided into three parts. Now she's not. Such horror stories. She collapses down two. A son comes with a pillow to smother, finish her off.
We pass at undercliff. It's what she wants, this coup de grace. She miscarries. I can lose you. I will come wearing feathers and noise. It's quite easily done. It's not enough to spool out the intractable thread—a uterine law of nurture.
He slices himself in two like a flatfish: inoperative will of the unvisible. Twenty-two's a useful number.
Cunt and paste a bit slow today. Fremd, estranged and cold. He examines the crowd.
She says I would love to climb that ferrous mound with you. Mons, venerable and exalted. A rush of trees stride out of it. Unsafe arbors. A type of circus town.

Now, of manifold conjunctions, the unity of the civic type in play—the speech, the story, or whatever. A vacuum sounds off. She likes a day out. People exchanging youth for youth (family). What is she in herself, or immediately mortal? It's a unique decision, a psychological for upbuilding and waking, al fresco drinking songs—gauss before meals, otherwise known as an extinction. I don't give advise. Give me the south. They're like two little grooves—the lunatics and the intellectuals. Four knucklebone dice are thrown. Take me to the middle of town. Start off with magical as everything. They argue over the remains of the chicken.

She is one who, on parting, I never know whether I shall ever meet again. I answer. I have unlearnt my words.

I am looking at my ingredients. Bring him back. I bet that thing's not here when return. Anticlimactic, she can be edited on the table or around and under the table. There's a million numbers. Giving up the dog was a bad job of nonsense (one year of a life). It means poverty—at the same time simplicity, and calm.

Blackout. It also implies an inexpressible inner hidden in deep. For example, sex with an androgyne in the antechamber to a parliament. We must meet our new lodger. Terrible promise of inconsequential loss. One is graceblown. Get to work boys. We can show them what love's all about—I get violent when I'm drinking. I'll bring crayons. I might be off time. Try this at home next month. Will call when back above board. Can we beg can we borrow can we cadge.
Change the circumstance.

Figure of full moon on rootflax. What colour was the middle of the flower. Riot your eye over your eye. It's misleading. Do you want to do your book—a sequence of dots will do. She is without heart. This is like compression, words pouring out of me. Pass me a toothprick. I do not believe they can do anything to me. I search for her grave and I cannot—a beaten track, a trial in the snow. Stacks of silverfelled birch glisten beside the moving track. I've never been true to you. Air of alcohol. Stop staring. Go to eyes. Units of magnetic fuck—magnetic density, the ferrous rush. Many many hundreds of miles away. . . . A thin film of rain, gentle compromise. Africa. People growing food, keeping goats, that kind of stuff. I've come a long long way for this. Everyone has to put on clothes and work. He discovers two lesser stars which revolve around the same planet. I'll text you when I know. The women carry heavy jars of water from the river every day. I've been walking for seven years. At dusk I doze in the night of fires of which with cramped wand and frozen hand I stretch my sinews. It's diseased. They don't complain. How far is this dark continent. He unblinds a ball of string to match his way back. Black up your face, green. It's not logic but it's a consistent method. Use mascara. A wild shout is taken up. Careful it's expensive. A dangerous torpor is transmitted by lice. It was like being here, only cheaper. Strange beings flock around me on every side. One of the wheels bullies at my foot. The sound swells. He leaves the walled city. The air is pierced. Show me where it says anything about a market. The more I hear the more I became entranced. Go back and check. He is stoned by the others until he dies in a more interesting way. Every day we say our prayer: barroom fights, be here in death, or fail. It's up to you. Click on a moon, moron. We don't speak or touch in any way. We break out of ourselves. Back in myself I can't hear a word. I want to cut to the part where he's dead. One says, as I get older I find myself more engaged with the dark forces of smallness—chamber music, the atom, chalky Rorschach deposits, that sort of thing. I've never been true to you.

Gene electricity shivers through my palms. It's night and there's nowhere. We are officially rhizomatic—unlanguaged, com-pact as the mossy turf. You're breaking up (the soul's code). There are two reasons why the women don't complain. In this clan inferences aren't shared by family remembers. List and re-itemize. I've got to get back, having it is giving it.
My ears. I re-enter life. There's something else, something not shared. I make up my mind to walk. Work falls away from me. Scent of rolling brine, a suckling sound. She dies. No one cares.

The reclusive cell. The first mood is a sense of detached loneliness. This comes from being completely. We go back and recreate music from the past (I'm a species of inverted religious thought). I become my own count-down. Remember when you said that people were extinguished? Such inquisitive writing. Many of these little figments are taken from old folk. No stone has been left unhinged. Having burnt your fingers, what do you have to say for self now.
Who (wants this).
The midnight gloom of sorrow at any loss. Ordinary things are seen in a clear translucent night—rays of artifice, pages cleft. I tract and regain footage, tract and regain footage. Repeat, everthus.
Me too of later love, you are all my love you later love, and I—
No times then untogether.

I wish we had a map with us. It's cyclical. Isn't that rather obvious. It retains its larval character in life. She won't like the sight of those nails. It's still capable of breeding. The trolley goes all quiet. We just have to drive out and we are free. Listen, his mpretship lasted only a few months.
My thumbs are receding.

Christmas in the first war. The trench. Join the dots.
Astarboard. The only harmful thing is the vision of a spinal cone. Dry your eyes, man. Do the obverse and run. I don't know how everything related so far came to happen. He says inappropriate things. Three further windings intrigue me. We like talking back to people. If any are to be deleted, suppress the last. We haven't stripped all week. I believe I'm already used up. Notwithstanding, I'm a neutral. Save the oil is for longdistance. He explains that pi means against in language.
She appoints herself trouvadour for a day. Longdistance is another word. Such a tiny head. There's a lot of sulphur. Anarchist variations. It's not a question of opting for sacrifice any longer. There's cabling in the tree. The world's her domain, with workaday revolution. Nobody's selling.
His body covers upon his fall severed acres of sacred ground. He encompasses an abandoned ferrous fort. Nobody's buying. He develops a measuring instinct, the drive toward an absence of meaning. There's blood on the sheet, rounded pebbles roll about under the bed. He is again trampled by the dancing bear which has broken loose. Things start happening by themselves. He purchases a walled garden but is still late for the game.
A sex cell. It smells like a storm. Trust it, eclectic to the nostril. All this transpired, trapped as ghost of moth—lamp and wing interchangeable. I can no longer feel my face. He had winged sandals when he came down to see me—flapping astragalus. Time is a detail that survives every story. Apply to all of everyday. Cordelion, gather no stone. An implement for restraining a ship by chaining it to the bottom of the sea has to be invented.
A question is asked by the possessor of a specified object. Threat thyself. The speaker no longer requires another word for breath.

It is unknown and unknowable at the time. A device for holding a balloon to the ground is invented. To think worth of the little I remember worth, or the like—anything that grants stability or security. The disorder described above is known as Colony Collapse Disorder. It's uncritically restrained. Where there's a body of troops we're sure to strike someone. Note that his prediction may not have been a fluke.
Seascape and memory. Vortex of dead children. I seer a murder (I'm an official tasterman). Two men hurl books from a chest into the sea. This is it. Another films. Absolutely every note he plays is archived. You've got to the kidding. I am intrigued by the reversal of the bow—no style, no heart. A mound of dead ones. He offers a hand and his stone is warm. This art is the art of making do with what's here. I hope not hope. I write letters and leave them on his tomb. Expose him to more weather.
Another cantina. Tie him to a stake piled deep in the silt. I have no heart. Another advisor comes: drive a large metal cylinder into the earth, an inverted pyramidal figure—literally, a bodygate. All the gutters are choked with weeds. Rain pucks against the window pane. I am total work. I am this week. I am a big heavy sucksack.

He is the semblance of cat. A siege mentality sets in. Damp roofs decay—collapsing buildings. Heads catapult over the parapet. I won't be here for much longer myself. Emptied into a dirt ditch, we draw friendly fire. Now the tide's coming.
When you rise in the horizon the mouth of all peoples. The lykewake train advances towards us, tenth pylon of the still-heart. Sew open his lids. I make my own way. Senseless hidden reverie, blind at gully. This is an obvious reference to the roar and destruction attending any storm. I know you. Worm in the oesophagus. I know your name. The chosen form of divination is that of observing the way in which people die. Having it is taking it.
Chen. Fling him out—miscast him, out east of whodunit. This is turning out better than I expected: long stretches of blank walls, empty vaults and syllables. Let's hear it for predictability. Englishlooking plain beyond the city ramparts, the earthenworks. Cage. Silence. Use binoculars, a stethoscope or magnetophone. I wouldn't go in there if I were you. She won't let you bring those nails into the house. Then comes the arousing shock, a thunderer. Call nineninenine.

Only the line at the very beginning is considered. Padding towards me along my beach is a fabulous hybrid of wolf and panther. On the other side and a little further west is the west. One speaks and points. She's coweyed. He's dressed in his woodpecker disguise (deathbodied nowherewolf). My block is drained. The rocks are firmly anchored to the seedbed, a lick within the body complex. I hear upon my knees. The guidebook mentioned lycanthropy, but its too late now.

He calls himself, writer. One steps with grace upon a gentle ice floe (composition's the art of transition). He stands. It carries him off to the estuary of an abandoned city, and beyond to the opening sea. There is nothing. Advise divination: the number of futures from knots in the navelcord. Our song tells of various unsuitable materials with which the shrine has been successively built (wax, feathers, pupae etc). Stop telling people what to do. In a single precise movement, a shape forms. Yes he says, I am alphabet in origin.
A single green lion. A new kind of light in the sky. Everything claps loudly. Its name indicates its colour. Now release me.
Shinglebook,
Typhon—
danger,
aeolian ink.

A film of thin rain. Mappamundi. Blue.
Accidental strangulation by dangling cord. If you've just joined in, it's too late; we are blindly prevented from ourselves.

I meet a stranger on a meandering mountain pass. His throatplay is a warning. Rhyming mirrors. They will be nine. I remain unfazed by his account, despite its corollary. I've been looking round to see if anyone else is dying. Can't you read the body language. I know not what is to happen next.
Genes is to revelation what the selfswaddled O of ouroboros is to sirspent. E and F both mean the same thing: more hacking in the green. Vultures pecking at a heap of cash. Fiscal sky burial. He fashions gods after the likeness of his own appearance. Like my extraordinary and iron-black liver.
A selection of songs without words follows.
It looks precarious rocking there
balanced on a tiny silver ring—
that egg and loganstone,
how does it feel.

I've become a word. Nobody's going home till this is over. Composition's the art of translation.
The magnetic hull of an illuminated book. I can't hear what you're saying. What a time for something to swallow down the wrong way. The rest of the evening consists of dissecting yourself and learning how to do so properly. This paragraph is a series of unrelated chords that came to me by instinct. The shock terrifies for a hundred miles around. One binds to himself. Delete all joy and quit the compound, far from the old assassins.
She says I wish this life would quicken. I do some thinking: impact statements, erroneous settlements. She makes too much of things. I'm a force-feeding cap, an enormous undifferentiated object. She talks too much of herself. I never understood what they meant about the bodyworld. Count me out. Count me in. Meaningless refrains. I'm a space superimposing itself across time. On your knees. People bore into me, deep into He's become like a fiend to us. Look out, you don't even start you. They shave off all his edges. There's a hive in operation, the withering floor set up at my base. I can't believe a swallow went down the wrong way. It has caused an almighty. It is composed of octagonal units of separation—a solid bound by eight plane faces. The manuscript is held back to this day.
I'm a pardoner, floating in time about a central spool.
I am night.
I am killer, reeve and cook.
I am the law.
I am the thief, the wife, the friar and the lover.
I am summoner and summoned.
I am merchant and goods.
I am franklin, physician, pardoner—shipman, prioress and monk.
I am none but canon or yeoman.
I am manciple and parson.
I am witness and redactor.
Sense the style of period sense, the local colour. I am all governance and policeye work. Make your way up the arabian castle to the ruby—we're not called half-urban spirits of the night for nothing. Watch out for snakes. I am derange. Turn aside from and furrow into tremble, night for nothing.

A small writing tablet. The cornerstone has rotted, the supporting column. Sifters of language, catch my breath. My incapacity to retain any logical connection is manifest. Now we've a picture of a girl, tall and slender, tongue round her knees. We are condemned to eternal wandering. She inspects her shaved cunt in the cubicle mirror. Now, should the governor of a besieged fortress go out and parley? Twice I enter. I feel it there, the triangle squared—squared then circled about the empty skull. I am forgot. I am foreshadowed in the dead. Metamorphosis of salt—chance (narrow shoes). I shall here and now fix the actual day of your going. As Gabriel I journey westward in feeling to the roots of his father—an enchanter's nightshading genius, the head agent.
Starfishing off antibe. He is conscious of but cannot apprehend our wayward and flickering existent. There is a redundant strip of film containing miniaturized data, cardiac output. I've had enough of tragedy, the realm of harkness. I subsist mainly on shadow plays and externals. I resolve to forestall. He probably bases his statements on the theory advanced by the astronomer, not the other way round. A structure is like a bridge going nowhere.
She is sad and weary.
Illuminations needed.

I'm held ectopic in amnesiac fluid. Echo disjunct. How much more of this. Deliver me from the promised land, I've had enough. There's nothing to invest me. Must make will. There's a change in the wind discretion. One deflects the kiss as it flies. See found text in war gamete. See grace note. His heart is bricked up in a pillar. More etudes. He's probably right to leave the domain of the air. We're reduced to skimping a living as performers. They can't agree on the change of facial tissue. He soon finds himself at the heart of things. He crosses the great water at a higharcing bridge. Everything bodes well. An interrogative arrives, Pan's mouth rinse—wind in the hollows. As he reaches out he salutes with a gesture that has something foreign about it. The other hesitates. Are you near the tank or a bit further on from the tank? Memory of dazzling oblique winter rays. Say something. Fires in the turret. I do not offer. A sleeper is embedded deep in my trunk. No one speaks. When we remember the two names of the two brothers we are derailed. First guess he guesses right: a life of husbandry—tillage and thrift with two oxgangs.
We are high above the city beside the fortress that overlooks. We leave the three fallen men where they lay.
Far was something gained. Books were damaged on route, mound-high on the swaying oxcart. He only holds now in seeming. She says I have reached the end of a sentence, I expect a reply.
A house inhabiting to dwell and forever to till. Let's meet at the amusing curve, puckfister.

Here comes psychopomp, decked on her brilliant wing. They've jacked a load of golden seven in the ash of her hair. At present she's toasting under the four orange elements. Silent luminations gather in her head. Ocean in mourning. Our slogan is the false impression: the helmet, the wheel, the barge. Have you ever written a test book or an assay: lichwalk dirges—likewake years. Carnal oboe with icy windlass. We are out of range.
A purchaser. One who summons and one who pardons. Sea foregoing.
Suntunnel pelf grieve.