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Richard Makin

St Leonards

III

The words, actually. I will take the black clay with me, also the pencil cuttings. The people are he, she and I. Quit fictions, but this letter will please you. My present situation is one in which all voluntary thought is swallowed up and lost. Nails fly from one wall and embed themselves in the opposite. I have the sensation I've lain here for some time, delayed in a spell of dying. Some, like me, are recidivist.
My animal lurks at his favoured station. Nails drumming. Nails fly to the window. I seek a travel companion (you know too much, and I'm in danger of myself). I am going to have to lure him out, but with something he truly despises. I can't be bothered with names. Torture is inflicted with his praise. Let me introduce some people here for the sake of charity. They occupy no particular rank. I'm making astonishing progress in the sciences.
The detachment takes place. It enters my head. Shinglefooted, it leaves my head. Detachment takes place. The missile enters her left cheek and passes out underneath the right jaw, without damaging any of the vital strictures in her neck—the binding, the adverse enclosure, the morbid narrowing of the passage. There had once been meaningful work, now folk scratch things out of the living air.
Next on is the notorious canary tanner. He is completely broken and scattered to the boundary. His starsign is Vertigo. He once performed with the aesthetic bone, full duplex and a hub, while standing on a barricade (see surveillance, see badinage). And I: the atom grows darker. It begins with a thin scratch and ends in a jagged line. Also the penicillin shavings, remnants of overyear and drought.

How long was she out there. That's the best thing to ask. We have no means of judging. Old writing is rubbed out to make room for new, a monument turned over to a fresh prescription. A curving drive is seen running through the fields. The others are invisible. Panic breaks out in the village. Folk gather burning torches in the night. It's like a film. The story never comes together. Again, contract to ease, to erase.

The case is the strange case of the conductor's tongue, the whim of representing an earlier hour. Hold on to something. Dismantle and melt down. The case is the case of the maligned mob. Hold on to something. I've had hands in the past, I've had feet. I devote myself to his destruction. The plot is simple: the dead child and what not stack up. Will the roof shut this afternoon or won't it. I remain silent. Your head turns aside. Your head turns back. Hold on to one of the piles. You've got to remember, this game's eighty percent will, twenty percent talent. A form of illness in which two people, generally close, share the same delusion: the inability to make decisions, however trifling. What she misses is that he has silenced the crowd. Your apotheosis in those eyes.
Among the quieter routines of his life was the epiphany in the lift. Leave your clothes in the vestibule. The area of action is circumscribed, enclosed in stagnant days. Change nothing. Suburban house with blue neon sign over front door. A numerous drove of trained dogs out back. I want. You don't have to make it up anymore. I know this music, lying somewhere between, standing there holding his ashplant.
He is incapable of doing.
He's waiting for you, at cease but with life, a minor character in a mortality play whose subject is the struggle in between. Without the world (I mean outside), floats the density. The songs form a cycle for the years. Here's the lowdown, our little ambuscado. Certain words seduce. Let's change the heart rate. It's said he can transform himself into a jaguar. Can you work out the changes between his tracks. Answer: the metal box or lining of any cylinder in which an axle works—gunmetal, a composition of copper and tin used in journals. Three yellow squares of light shine above us in the gathering.

Our only bearings. And back again through the wall.

Two people who never meet. Those water lilies. Back to that day, she at the crest of the hill, cerulean dress, unclouded above. Two people alternate in a living place, lying in wait. One of their logbooks is missing. I'm repeating myself. No trace of the skullheaded lady, the sandy plain, the ground sea. It obviously went well. There is uncertainty.
Respond correctly to the question.
What is that called.
For one moment he adopts the other's voice (da monster). I feel a certain measure of respect for him; it's not easy to be one-eyed. We need to find examples. And what's that noise from down below.

One of the three persons in the head. Though I have died I have one final dream. Interesting to see you have made the drift to the notes. Undone by source, what are we do with the fact. Tenacious black clay is used lately in the jumping pit. Note to self: find a more appropriate particle. Still no trace of one of the logbooks.

Love-gages may take strange shapes. Two men rent a room by night and day respectively. They have been adapted: chrome-tanned skin of calf, with rectangular markings made by rolling over and over on the ground. They are in a French farce. What to do with this: simply to remember—to docket, he says. Heavy steelgrey symbol over frame of door. He has a very high melting-point. I should have numbered the items, as an absolute minimum.

The salamander booms to a halt, throwing off men in slips and clumsy hops. His raw eyes. The cold bright rail. His clenched fingers. I wake up in someone's garden.
He is the first of two archers encountered that day. Upon opening, there appear to be grains of sawdust inside him, clinging to a variety of glistening membranes. I can't go into this place. His number is seventy-seven. It's written on a plastic tag attached to the wrist. There are shaking heads all round, trimmed with bleached ruffs, aligned on poles like in the old days. Well, at least that grants us a limit to work within. It seems I shall not see him again. It's like haunting yourself. One wields a curious instrument for bending a crossbow. It employs a revolving cylinder, a wheel, and an axle. Outside, stacks of splintered rotting piles, much hauling and hoisting. A circuit is made to intercept. That has to change. And in the middle there's a line drawing of an horse. Hoist him up by means. I let him talk his last talk; the revelation's worth the wait. He was once struck by summary lightning while sitting at his own window. . . . Glance through: the chute oozing to the sea, the snotdark and winegreen. Spindrift lather in circuitous motion, end of the pier stuff. This signals the incident of the blue bag. Apex predators.
The water meadow.
The flat earth.
Halfway the shattered glass.

Price elasticity of demand. Depraved ironwork, buildings pissing rust. Something like a crystal flies out from beneath her teeth. Consider a household: he and she and the lover of one, an early form of unknown origin. Their game is intercepted, a race in which each contestant runs in a different direction while clutching a baton. I take a short cut when I can. Sometimes you don't hear the beacon. He is mute, caught in no man's land, a miscellany. I'm striving to make something that's already been done a thousand times: a song, a slice of music, a coat made up of bits from various sources. No topics in the cabinet today, though there is a head under which a rhetorician might look for matter. Its final words run: an imaginary circle on the celestial sphere, about twenty-three degrees north or south. . . . Orientation in response to a stimulus. The boundary. Alterations of moisture and drought, radio waves, irregularities and scattered signals beamed up by parabolic antennae. The close of the season. At the lowest layer temperature fails, height increases. Pressure drops. Gilded seabirds with long tail feathers. An unbelievable softness now to his voice. The sun turns on reaching its declination. The servants promise they will deliver the corresponding disc. There follows a fight to the death. I'm hoping the crowd will be constructively awed.
He understands the book as figurative. Fivetold echo: how can I repair myself? Cross the width. It may have been a book lying on its side on the table. It may not. It may have been a box, perhaps, for wandering about in. We recognize each other under whatever conditions. The third part ruins herself on the turf. We should try to do something when my little coast appears.

She is still with her dying friend—more of this singular narrative later. My present situation is one in which all voluntary thought is swallowed up and lost. Lend me those pistols, he says. Dead body shot and limpid (by this we mean his skin waves through the light). One of the team is found embedded in tissue or wax. No trace of the percussion bulb. Coins in the street. Mask of vocal, the Farinelli exhumation. Unrestrained bibliophagy. It's the first to get all the cards out who wins. Metallic scraping and clinking, through a fine rain. Even the most insignificant problem is welcome in these stagnant days. You may just get away with this (read aloud from here). Change all the calendars. My biggest influence is the influence. I seem to have lost the faculty of thought. Scratch blue skin. You could feel the gap open up. You will understand. This letter will please you—it is quite factual. There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do for you.
He removes a circle of glass. Believe me, if that infant had claws and a beak it would do anything to get its own way.
On the charge, beaten in the air by a leg. Carotid artery punctured. Skull fractured. No matter what happened, it wasn't your fault. It's never your fault. From left to right, it isn't your fault. From north to south, it's never your fault. This small pellet is, I presume, the black and doughty mass you spoke of which pierced the cranium. Now, do you want to try it yourself.

They pack his ashes into shells and blast them off at shooting ranges all across the region. Three months and three weeks left to go. The excuse is the hardest part. His nose once sat exactly midway on a spectrum between planar and aquiline. You have to go out as a group of four and come back as an estrangement of scraps—that's the catch. Think of something else, for example, the pellet that strikes.
Animals are box office. The first impression is recovered. Box of fire. Box of ash. Words stuck to the concrete redeem the evening—ground and delivered, with screed pull to deep background square, collided. What if one of us expires on route. The ghoulest thing is the image of her face at the fourth floor window. He is conscious of, but cannot apprehend, its wayfare and flickerbook existence.

Tell them the general needs you, he allows you to breathe in the sea tonight. I break away. First train back. He goes to search in his pack. Now you must away too. Carry with you this common place book. Utilize primary methods of sensation, the quality of being limited by a condition, like rising earth each side of a furrow, the ineluctable etcetera. I don't have time for this now.

He dies alone in a refuge balanced just above the water line. Pierce through, paralyse with sudden motion, like the repulsive story of the red leech. The tale transforms him into the ultimate remote. He, the maker's son, sees the eighth day, a popular fast in mediaeval times. The most pressing question is, does it look to you like something terrible has happened?
He worries at a tiny patch of light with his index.
And what did you do after you had made certain that you had made certain of nothing?
That settles the exit. His own identity is fading out, the grey impalpable.

I question your motive. I question your move. A game of living chess is played out in the undercliff square. A jungle of rubber plants and giant chocolate fountains are imported to add local colour, to compose the scene. His tale is interconnected, lines lapping within lines. Our descent. Characterize disaster thus: the geology of the island, the moral inks. I believe it's all about the problems. I don't know. I change at the turn of every head. I can't work out where the patterns lie, where they cut. I change at the turn of every hand. I believe it's about throwing things willy-nilly into a furnace. They return from every quarter. I answer him, now visible to the chin. He invariably favours misdirection over confrontation. The refuge bag containing the finds lies on the dissection table.
Cell deterioration rapid.
Skied slash to point as he struggles to give himself room.

The family is winched to safety. They walk down the avenue. There's a change machine. Their god sinks. It's both, it's a combination of both. Time for early void. Every word he says he splits. The parts hang there like forms. I want the entire history of this device: sonic rush, a line, a groove or ridge behind which a player must stand to throw. An avenue of linden trees, and not the ghost of a motive. Our route back leads to no land I know of.
Rewrite the whole thing as farce.
If we're all dead they'll at least have a partial record of what went wrong. They'll at least have a partial record of what we're saying right now: daily growth and habitats, our tendencies—inconceivable gods, inconceivable speed. Where we go in, most of the constellations are widely spaced. Two overlap each other. A few moths fly up against the window pane. He nods silently. A light tapping sound.
You have good taste, my boy.
The subject has to be partly paralysed by an air embolism (it's much better when they finish on a heartbeat). He survives, though his shape is now roughly pyramidal and hollowed out. This can't contain me any longer: I devote myself to his destruction. Again the fable of the horse comes to me, out of nowhere. The metal glinting on the floorboards is one of the five missing rounds. He crosses the peninsula. Uncertainty: a connection with loop cutting a deep groove—matter dissolving and dwindling. Inside the hollows, between the joints, the dried filaments.

Stitch it. Down at lavender myself—in fact just ran away. Wage tickers on about their poverty (great for stoic side). This isn't what I wanted: the head of the mourner. I devote myself to his destruction. How it would all end one cannot imagine. I've seen nothing later than the fifteenth century myself. It's difficult to be an obvious man. Consider one who could utter this kind of sentence: squared up beauty from slipped edge. A brace of oboes. Steel digger. You remember the walnut trees at Saint Under?
Check numbering pages.
The death of his shadow covers the whole region. The locals will talk to you about anything except that. There are no patterns or forms. No one else needs to know. Hallo I say, it's good to be back. It intervenes (I must leave this place). Everything happens only once. You can find out a lot about rubbish from its organization. I'll reconstruct what's past. This is a product of those unit things. So much to do at such affordable prices. I want Madagascar. Say nothing. Never say anything specific. In order to execute the figure of eight, make use of the spare cornerstone. I invite a minor episode. This is also a product of those unit things.
Top edged hook penetrates leg.
I forget to go to work. I think we're being discounted as intuitives, empaths. Let me through. Same chair. Same pen. In order not to relapse into literature a third time, do you think we reveal too much, or not enough. Need to get strength back. These were all tested by me about a month ago. There were once several percussion instruments, and now look, the debris of the planks. Friends are going to cut a groove around the table for me. Today the sense is the favoured faculty, the feared touch. A chunk of his shattered tibia strikes the hollow of my thigh. I can't leave. I ask him to sign the offending flotsam. He declines; I resist. I resist the temptation to ask what happened to his neck, and can I help him look for it.
A fan.
A glove.
Glasses.
The old phantom limb. Can't get used.
It is a step up. I uncover the first: a black mineral with filament, a philosophical toy, siphon within the figure of a man. There is a tantalus. Let us explain: his chin is on a level with the bend.
He is one son.
He is punished.
He reveals a secret.
He has to stand in water that ebbs.
It ebbs when he tries to think.
He is overhung.
He is overhung by grapes that draw back when he reaches for them.
Desert, dazzling light, reflected from the opposite window, into which nails are embedded. Also the ibis, the wood, a revenant from the vanishedness, my adjuration with solemnity. Interference.
A case. In this case the decanters are visible but locked up. Salt of acid—his scrapbooks, his chemicals. Note to self: calm down manes. Use the cards—the board, the candle, the bell. We part without having understood each other. Thin, dry stalks of grass all about. Stains of thought in the tunnel. Everything light or insubstantial, neutral with purpose. We part the dreary racetrack without having understood. We are stilled to this day, as by the hand of one assassin.
Low but sharp click.
That's ruined that conversation. Whatever happens in this light, start another soon.

Lattice-paned, lead framework, three separate windows, one swinging on hinge. Enough.

Nothing has been taken except the plaster head from the hall. You're not getting this for nothing. The distant there becomes the present, fences built of metastasis. It isn't your fault. We part without having understood each other, a removal from one place to another. Paramorphic change in the surrounding rocks. Gut strings do not like being pulled around. I am without any conceivable motive. The disease is transferred from its original site to another part of the body: feathered leg fast, tumour distant from origin. Stark light rising. Two oboes are played simultaneously by the same person. Music for films. Pass to another part of the body. There's a system, as by hand of assassin. Change of place, but still standing. She is seen tearing up the piece paper she has just found. Bring down manes. Shake on it at dreary racetrack. I hold in my rubber sides. Repeated light flashes from opening pane. Badinage, this interphase. A canary flies from the mirror and settles on her shoulder. Shake on it. The situations are effaced. This, the best and final clue, has run to its end and to nothing. Use every possible contradiction.
Tumour distant from origin. Please await me.
Wing left, three quarters missing of the vocal rights.
Indispensable tomorrow.
Stop.