I'd like these notes to be left unread, or better still forgotten. Scanning the instructions it seems this part is to be played by the dedicatee himself, the great love. The time is four years before his release from a forced-labour sentence. Here he is pictured leaning on a balcony rail beside his attractive—so much better with his face on. I find it hard to look. There are obvious hints of collusion. He's the joker in the pack. Miraculously he is still alive. He will not stop, nor can we sunder him from his stalk. O, yse-schokkill! and suchlike arrangements of letters spill from his mouth. There are obvious hints that he has been sent. It's a silent night; hold on to your scrabble.
Ibex box.
The instrument has a different centre of gravity and all sorts of new colours emerge, along with wisps of dry ice. It's technically fiendish and has been written in a surprisingly neat hand.
He & she
He and she are identical yet completely indifferent. They're associated with the idea of confusion. From her inner pocket he draws a fragile root and the dried claw of a bird to chew on. It's said she's a stonemason by trade. We've cut her bonus. Since reading her I've made a mental note never to. It's all party this and partly that. About here the river forms an ox-bow. Is there something I should have done which I have not done? She misuses that and which.
Families are invented to distract people from the relentless passage of time. I need to go away either before you leave or before you come back or before he leaves and the other comes back.
I'm to be restructured. You get my picture (no). I will read the first bit first. They appear close. Nothing is nothing like it was. He will soon be unable to write anything without people crying out that's him and he never writes anything else but this. I have and I am. My problem is. I am of repute: I have a reputation to deflate. In readiness, I am at hand. I am not good at that; I am always written as one word. I always tell people what I'm thinking. Which work is worse or word? I want to tell you of my dream panel. I like that, the physical effort required. I can only say what I know. I can only say what I collect from time. I have named the found thing the oedatross (it has wings).
Her face says a thousand words. She is cut into. Her face is saying. Her face is saying I talk with my hands and spit thy share.
I am capable of improper use. Plumes of smoke swirl about the chamber. I am No—I am really am. Abyss persists as my workaday form. Before all things, dream and song unskin me. I am sorry I am. Now stand back.
The wired room.
His impressive library corresponds to the number eight (mine is seven). It's a veritable writing machine. Somehow this can't be correct. I am incalculable. All of a sudden I can't concentrate. I decide to learn language to give myself something to do. Outside are insurrectionists with guns. We move away. We lose contact. The meridian shifts (precession). A battered chaise-longue plummets from the sky.
I have written since I am. Votive fictions, uncensored quiddity. The cell faces north. I write with my back to the sea. Visitors are rare.
I read that he's ended his life by drinking a litre of neat antifreeze—as if a mixer would've helped the situation. A bug patrol has been established. He says is is a question that only stupids ask. I can no longer afford to be generous. I'd laugh if I could. I can no longer afford to deal. It's an interesting distraction, all these years. You see, I am not the girl that did undone. It is the last thing I do. Drinks should never be bright blue anyway.
Chamber harmonies.
His impromptu in a flat. I am at a loss in fictive science—dug in 'neath the kirk, in till a rout comes. I am listing usage of the odd word.
1. Nis halloo hire in deo hire!
2. Fairer nis noner than he was was!
3. All nis not good to the ghost that the body bloodeth bathed!
My original meaning is a sounding together. There is a pursuit. It should feel very warm in the strong shine yet the flesh is cold to touch. The body is carefully tuned to lie on its stomach and is cleansed. It's our thirteenth anniversary. I am tired now, sapped. I can't imagine listening to him without the mumbling accompaniment. This totally is me. This has me thinking of the man in the dice. You see it works: suddenly I'm in a tunnel beneath the dolomite.
Birdland limefill.
I am there then I am not. I've had a jolly good day. The dungeons are made of white tiles and barbed wire. There are infernal machines and lots of cheap sex. There is no other show in town. Open up your network. She says she wants a baby—anything will do. She's an expert. He doesn't.
We don't know when this was written, though presumably in the summer. It survives as originally set down. Much of the text is spoken. How can this be. He writes because he isn't happy with the job offered (gentleman usher). He is held in a grim struggle with a phantasm. FEAR is writ big in big neon.
Since she stopped seeing him the world has turned to ice and has flipped about on its axis. And her voice, the air she sings, signifies a most deformed and frameshaken changeling.
The sign in my early notations combines several tongues of flame into one symbol. I am nothing. I am something I have never done before in my life. We're still on he and she.
Stillicide.
An eavesdrip, servitude allowing one's drop to fall on neighbouring ground, otherwise forbidden (roaming law, slipped to fall).
About his neck on a leather cord hangs a magnesian stone. It contains two different minerals: the lodestone and another shining like silver. Perhaps it is talc. He is not the progress we require. Exile him from the day. His flesh is bruised. Exile him from the night. With his riotousness, he parts from the godhead. Mandragora, nor all the drowsy serums of the word can't save him now.
Interpreter! Er!
Hire one before it's too late. Let this man's mimicry be forgotten. Let this be an everlusting caution to you.
This weather I do not eat. I think they have covered up the old Martello tower. It has fallen into disrepute. Call attention in the telegraph, the glossy Saturday pinks. The migrations that occur between it and me—this is the great cause. The brilliant lustre ascribed by the alchemists favours the latter view. Ask these woods that hem us in.
We have reached right into the deep moats entrenching that unhappy city in concentric circles. Contained therein are smaller and larger ring-islands, a shrine, numerous springs, a palace, towers and gates, covered channels, a radio beacon, bridges and docks, an early warning radar outpost, gardens, a hippocamp, a stadium with gymnasia, and canals leading inward to a central citadel, and outward to the sea.
Substance.
The substance we carry seems not to be identified with the lodeword, despite the semblance of its name to our familiars. I wonder what he will do in his house, then.
How do you write one asks: iron, and then we first make a wide circuit. It is. It is not exactly. It is close enough.
Our stone is called the lesser numbers one and three. Note how from-shapen this philosophy is. Remember not to exclude the sovereign triangle. Crystals are growing inward from two directions to meet at a spearshaped aggregate. Get out of here and into the day. That hole made of light is the exit and the entrance. Remember to take all of your beckonings with you.
A reach of water, an open ditch.
He says when I write I write about what I'm doing and what I am not doing. My veins contain magnetic ore.
So is noticing a likeness seeing, or isn't it? I am calling upon you. My reclining body is cleansed with brackish water, the sandy encrustation. Tomorrow you are going to have to.
He has dispensed with centuries of radiation (the so-said seven plots of earth). How am I decided. As he's observed, everything is mere semblance—anamorphosis. It's a perfect day for writing: a gentle greyness of air muffling to be. Here we have dissimilar yet related concepts, and a tendency to lean towards death. At which point we simply reverse the name and everything starts up all over again.
I tire. We are about to destroy a land which harbours enemies. Text us what a voice. Their theme is his cockaigne in the old old town. These encompassing hills foreclose us. An attachment is about to place itself in our midst. This chapter is about how writing is unmade. It is about how to compose with the offhand. Whiff of dubbin and new leather in the air, the still-alive and stitched-up orb. To write while locked out of time—I know what he means but cannot.
A star that guides.
I wake and find I can't. It's a miracle. I am appointed fetisheer; I have read me, you see. I'm a carpetbomber by trade.
It just keeps coming. One finds oneself thinking of a voodoo list—coarse textile made of gas, rags pulled to pieces, a plastic doll. A passing voice says you look lovely together. The scale is an all too familiar scale: the operatic style, the unconvincing. In this fragment there are other confluences as well—the path to the headwater. There are angels behind the glass too, where the road dips into the sea. The spectators are really impressed (one obtains what one refuses to strive for). I wake and I can no longer find. Is that all you do for a living? Do you want to return all the hairs of her head—the blood, sinew and tissue, the whole the sad violence of intercession? I'm glad I suspended time with you, despite all these questions.
Executive mummery.
He's got the most uncanny blue eyes I have ever. Look at him. She said exactly the same in the previous century. I read to forget. It looks as though there's a woman behind it. There's so much to unlearn. You'd think there would be something, even the skin tone—but it has not changed.
Across his forehead is a scar the shape of a giant centipede. He spends another night on the beach. The wind is so strong off the ocean if blows eddies of salt and sand against his sleeping form. Here even the monsters and demons have a stunning plausibility. He dreams.
She sculpts in marble and translucent blue stone: a reclining figure—a felled warrior with attendant detail, a beautiful death. Then they return to the planes of existence. She smiles, a mythological expression of the truth that souls. I ask about the reward. She says I have all I need, and anyway, who would want to be visible in such a world? Duplicates are identified and one double of each is disposed of. She detaches herself. Her assistant is the idiot. She declares time. The story is obvious and pressing. She is so pleased, she could have crossed herself out with both hands.
By morning compact banks have built up around him—a burial mound.
The understanding.
Businesslike air for a time then suddenly I'm pulled to pieces. I have made a fetish of my lists (swap reading for writing, and back again). I have read since I am. Scattered remains, mostly.
Now the story goes. I have not these things. The latter is distracting, the former evil. I feel so guilty: I want to be both animals at the same time. I was once literally. This is the last. The world exists through our latest breath—through a process of happenstance. There's still time to contrast yourself with the unconditional. I was not actually me. I am out-blown—extinguished and disappeared. I am the delimiting term added to birds in flight.
Nothing can endure where order is. You always want the impossible. Shake these words all together, and see if they can be anything but the pit.
Short story.
I go bodily into the chamber and speak, calling him by name and inquiring how he has passed the night.
He replies between sun and moon I consign you back from whence you came.
What do you mean by this. Before I forget—tell me, now.
The case remains shrouded: a project to fill a vacuum nature, with ejaculate.
The following morning I observe a cigarette burn on the upper flank of my left forearm.
The ridge of a roof or hill.
There is too much information about ice in this section. He's mastered the language of economics in a matter of weeks. Now he must fall to pieces a little.
In the snow the shed horns of a stag lie half-buried. The people depicted are generally us. We use a mixture of aluminium, soap and rust, which we scrape with scalpels from abandoned vehicles. We survey the body laid out before us on a trolley. It has a depression that flutes to a hole to drain off fluids (the trolley). All comforting diversion ends here. Identity has not been established, or is lost. I am unknowable from externals, mired by encrustation.
From his remains a jelly of phosphorous and petrol is manufactured. Every step hurtles him back in time. What a fragile lead this is—I hear the diagnostic click of dislocation in the new: earth-hunger, a voracious desire for land. During the years the island underwent constant bombardment from the air. He is filling the place of another. I cannot wait any longer. He is suffered. The winter gardens and promenade are flattened. He is a deputy or substitute (sphere of drunk).
They are no more. They are now only imagined through the experience of others.
Remnants of furlike patches and strange lateral flukes.
Tenth cranial nerve concerned and bitten into.
Remaining tooth fractured.
The art of hosting is lost. Repulsed heartbeat, anti-rhyme of breath—night wandering et cetera. This is the last thing I ever want to do. I never mention. I am inconsolable. Gram-negative rods, fixed in the present, are releasing plague. Evidently our sides have fallen in. Freedom from the source is his abiding passion. Torn out in leathery scraps, here's the third opus of his set (from the Greek meaning pressure).
Very light.
A signal. An illuminating coloured flare is fired off and descends towards the horizon. Nothing is illuminated.
Autopsi.
A circular breathing hall in a thermal complex.
I take a careful step. Please listen. I have not done any reading. No it's not one of those. I have no concept of the distinction between private and public.
This week he goes back to retrieve some luck of his own. Then other weeks he doesn't.
Where is our state of origin. It doesn't have a programme. We lack. Someone will escort you to the ridge, the saddle of the crest. A tiny figure perches on my shoulder and whispers in my ear. I can change all of this if you wish me to. I do miss being close. I'm thinking that I exist—I write, anyway.
Interview.
Death by distraction in the seventh, the feral sign. It sometimes occurs to me that I am utterly. There is an old negro woman squatting on the dirt floor of the cell. She claims to be a famous voodoo work. Remind me she says which is the font word for horse? Which is the persistence, as generally understood? I am very impressed. The idea is to compose something with the scope of a symphony and the intimacy of a chamber piece (as for her questions, I have no idea).
A herd are at rest on the ground, some among them lowing. She says they embody the spirits of many nations—cultal memory in the present, an undertow. I detonate one of my couplings. Warp machines indicate the levels. She gives me one last warmthless glance. Her surface is a synthetic skin made from early experimental music. She deals in contraband, the wheel of the law. There's a grainy flickering image of her raising her veil momentarily to reveal. Where her eyes should be turns the milky rim of an astral cog.
This business of plying variations doesn't always work. Time has begun to evaporate. It has fallen into disrepute (not unlike a Martello tower). It's fascinating to play these complex games with notes and letters. Yesterday we lost. We try again. She says exactly the same thing every day, yet somehow it's different. Her violence is not of the kind that explodes in a single discharge. Between us we've amended the visible distribution of stars, the galactic heist. This suggests the usual line-up of slow and fast numbers.
For this to work, you have to actually withhold the page. The usual one-upmanship of show or horse won't work. I have grown into something which should in reality be a substitute; you'll never get to hear my original. I'm kind of kicking the thing about—always playing games. Things are found, not given or made. She lowers the volume to such a degree that only broken chords and heavily decorated melodies are audible. The chosen victim is preparing to shoot the chase across the marshes. Little does he know he knows.
If related once more, this must never include the estranged name.
The black leather bag hanging on the door. The verisimilar that.
Nothing illuminated.
Pagans on the riverbank armed with knives and staves they yell. I grew up on sailing stories myself. Two or three of these occasional pieces I dictate to myself. It's very lyrical. It's the word you overuse, the word which reverses (take note). This is a relatively simple method of representing atoms—the so-called lost quintet: a crack opens in the earth, buildings bleed rust, the sky and sea conspire to crush the horizon with a series of almighty explosions. I've tried to do this myself and it never works, that's all I know. There's property, and then without warning, the residue evaporates.
When he addresses the reader that's a very difficult thing to do. He has a library that corresponds to the number eight, the infinity digit (I signify seven). The whole things's dangerous, tortuous and funny. So many of the allusions I contain are indecipherable. Part of me wanted this to be a nonfiction account. That part lost and was sent into exile somewhere really really cold. It's known for sure that the war took place. As it turns out, this is all hard fact. I grow weary. Cross-checking is no longer an option; I have studied men and I know them. O to find printed and built all these books written since, in concrete and asbestos. A word or two should be said about the cryptic letters that head certain chapters—the so-called catacombs. See appendix, the world this past contrives.
I find myself in a vast open field hurling a spittle ball for a dog.
Horst.
Six years ago I was heisting scars around the circular. It's the last day of my life. We're marching across the peninsula. Ask yourself. Are you still open to visitation. There's a war on. Is this within your capabilities, the scope of your resource. The mother state is acute. Then there is a drought. Various theories have been put forward to explain meaning: Take him earth and cherish him! . . . He spits open the tight flesh of his forehead! . . . He is recomposed for burial! . . . He bites off his own tongue! . . . The fact is that no one knows what they stand for. Have yourself fitted out by an engineer.
He is torn about by the mobile. The three senses identified may not be connected. I am like the unknowing clod, flattened into the asphalt by a passing tank. I could do with some company myself—our father's murmurous shade. Science contrives to unsilence agony. Traditional commentators dismiss me by acts of saying (sonic phenomena called speech acts). I survive without an opus number. This would be a good place for any telegraph to stop. We've reached a state in which death seems as lively as recovery. The best have only one word in them—the heart's heroic descant in the underword. Their cries mingle with an eerie jangling of bells. This is the south, the terminal.
All this may change of course. The shape is taking place.
Nothing illuminated.
Now I'm going to tell you about something that actually happened to me (they don't, they stack). It affected me very deeply and profoundly. What exactly are you trying to achieve here. Vomit upward the downward laxative. It was like going back to somewhere I should never have returned to—that which is. Divination by things in the air takes place—deep aeromancy, the precioushead soul of geomantic spell and character. This includes the spurts of the body: the skin, the nerve trunk, its cables and peripheral orbits—dense filigree of bone and marrow sludge. I am reproduced by a slow change of direction of the earth's axis.
He goes through a spell then is restored to normality by a revolution. He is found with the short blade and the long panhandle. Twice she slaps the seat beside her, beckoning him to sit.
It moves. The ring of the equator describes a circle round the pole of the ecliptic, once in every twenty-eight years.
He must be clean and separate from the things. This breaches the earlier date of seventeen. Each year I rejoice more and more. It's such a simple idea: my deformed figure appears in proportion when viewed in a curved mirror or in conjunction with a particular distraction. Thus, a forming anew, back anew in code—a shaping of bees, of shapes of form.
The levee breaks me. I am expressing a failure to understand. It's about staying here and doing nothing. That window's hardly ever open.
Still nothing illuminated.
A meeting of the imperial electors before a simple whitewash interior. Up until midnight everything is controlled. There's still construction work going on. Scaffolding surrounds the chambers and walls of the nave. The slur against modern notation is discussed once more. A vote is cast (mob rule). They have created this themselves. Two or more notes are nailed to the same syllable. I am encompassed. I suppose he could've misunderstood his reward: blood feat and he war.
They arrive in the wake of chance, hurried and negligent irregulars. An example of my earlier self follows, also a number of unmeaning marks scored with a pencil. I read to forfeit. Wood smoke rises to my nostrils. It enters me, flooding all respiratory cavities and canals.
Do you know meaning.
I shall seme and scrud and screed.
The winding sheet.
His attempt at enigma.
They say things to make me seem improbable. There's a rumour that notes are to be phased out altogether, but I wouldn't change this technique for anything. It's not the easiest way out of this mess. It's difficult to determine why they do what they do. I've gone the other way myself.
Our explosive capability is reduced by seventy-five. We are to be condensed into one spectacular moment. Our appendices are withdrawn.
It nearly cut my leg off but it didn't (everyone has somewhere else they'd like to be). I have a picture of him sitting in a hollow tree with a smile on his face. Traces of grain adhere to the leaves, fragments of gloom and husk of einkorn. Yes, yes, yes he's screaming at the pitch of his lungs. The beauty of fibre is that it's future-proof.
These walls seem to be made of iron. A chest of viles has been composed to castrate memory. Some speculate on my origin. By means of the time that passes, we enter. He describes an animal looking upwards, with nose bendwise. He tells me I have evolved out of subway directions. I am invested in an enterprise which carries considerable risk. I can no longer speak (cleft tongue). There's no choice about where to sit (in a small circle of loved faces). On Thursday we start with a new letter, a new breed of English piano—and on into the eternity which cannot compass.
Imagine you're given a name but that person doesn't exist. The action starts then it stops again. No sooner had those words left her mouth.
Work that's easy.
I'm a modern copy of a much earlier instrument (the scalpel). I'm recomposed towards the end of a brief life. The form in one place is a tribal error. In a street leading down to a river runs music for magnesian tape. A number has been attached (parceltape).
Rein in the night. The boys are back in town. Cheesewire is stretched across the highway and they are felled. One is blinded by a dagger the horseman wields. There arises against me a tempestuous wind called the Euroclydon. It is beating the boundaries of the instrument. Crises recur. The chorus sings the contract. We are not covered by the takeover cause.
He comes. He is the great precursor. Euraquilo, the great elsewhere—a wave, supposed to be a wrong reading.
Bath drugs.
Electric hill, where better attested readings are found and recorded. You are reminded that this is now the section. I'll use your sharp edge here, if I may. Expect the finale to be inspired craziness, ungovernable humour. That'll stop us falling off the rim of the globe. Well into the evening and towards the night, again and again come the seven last words. A cake of wax is stamped with such a figure, the four manes.
What am I going to call you now. I contrive a theory of spirit by naming matter—all manner of sundry stuffs. You are included in my portion. There is a well-defined crater from which ejecta escape. They continue building the cone. Move like lightning. Now suspend thyself by thy corrupt form (neckname of the added name). How obvious was it that you were being followed.
I am state department. I am composed of metals such as lead, zinc and tin. They are no longer cautious. I can be cold-worked with little or no hardening. It is as if they're right behind where we are standing. It is time. I am genuine. I am found only in acts. I crystallize air temperature. I lay open and declare the same. I stand last. My end is worthy of my beginning.
Number eighty-two: the bare constellation.
With lightning soft from above and concentrated on the playing area.
This is the north, the anti-terminal. There's a rumour that Saint Francis and I no longer see eye to eye. We are at a boundary ditch. No one can remember everything. An aerial bombardment is taking place. Starting with today's group of three, we are all of one clock. We need a day where absolutely nothing happens. There is rubble and glass strewn in my cot. I think myself. I am little more than a broken triad fuelled by the politics of distraction: flowing claret with azure trim—Mohawk tassel with red, yellow and skyblue brocade. She has adjusted and it works very well: grey matter is trapped in the floor of my ventricle. Sometimes you need a reminder. Now it's bye-bye. I can't sit this way round. I am uncomfortable once more, simply by adjusting slightly my position in space. The themes are various—rustic drones and gagpipe effects. They are out of joint. Nothing happens untoward. I am appropriated to a transferred use that can survive history and the horrors of the kanal. I exist in a thick stratum of discontinuity: scar tissue translated into a nation. My use has always been rare. Sorrowful and mishappy is the consciousness of any poor beggar such as I. There is a brisk trade in used looks. Yes sorry, the later examples are due to mere inadvertence, what's called barking the dog.
What are have words, so pressed and forced they may contain my great misshape? We watch it sink three times.
You don't think there's anything wrong, do you—then suddenly you're lost.
The feeling of time moving around inside of me.
Slump at right bank of eagle, twenty-one miles above the junction with the river.
The last chapter has left me quite exhausted. My new theme is rapacity. I mean of living substance: possessed and retained after-effects—the experience of simulation undergone by self or its progenitors. You just have to calm your response in the same way (less of the or, or, or). That's when she starts to get hostile. You can't say a simple sentence, such as: You put that in the draw, didn't you? There is a sound like that of twittering birdies perched along the branches. That's it. Meanwhile she slips into a coma. If you stop trying to engage her, that would be better for all of us. My skull is crushed in and my brain exposed. Things look bad. And I think to myself, she surely must.
Spontaneous artery.
This is by no means a radical forecast. I have this idea. No, wait—come back. My discontinuity is believed to exist at a depth of twelve kilometers beneath the ocean bed. Ergo, I am a valuable finger of land. I make a pass through a more optimistic window: a simple step from my edge in any direction. He is positioned at the same lip on the other foot. My discontinuity is believed to exist at a depth of forty kilometers beneath the wilderness of constellations. Get it. You see. O are you come, the long-looked-for one who comes at the last?
Mnemotechny: the black arts of memory, in theory and practice.
A big square shape. It's not chaos theory. He says they are left with little option. But I think as a child, and they say, you have three days left to open yourself up. This flings us into a bit of a spiral. I blame the analogue figures. Finding myself here, how do I convert to writing.
So are you enjoying the rain. Iron filings are choking up my gullet. It's hard to breathe, to enjoy the normal and familiar processes of respiration. My companion, she is broken for mere games.
How obvious is it that you are being followed?
News of his name has spread throughout the body. It's hard to remember the old country. The settlement we now inhabit is more like a small village, or hamlet. Imagine the very site of the first industrial. This gives me a spare sense I can't name, a shudder in the spine. Everyone talks about the age. Everyone talks about mediaeval siege monsters, the old engines.
A stone of meteoric iron has fallen to earth from the atmosphere (he means through). His face turns red. He flings his heroes from heaven, like aerolites of out the sky! To love, he brings about his own assent. He's maimed after an ancient god of the storm, who we thought we'd left behind us at the time of transportation. Now the first rumblings of a hunger gather in him. I am fashioned of clay and spittle. There's a vehement refusal to relinquish the third person.
The mobile are fast gathering. He is pulled to pieces by the rubble. A name spurts from his mouth.
Love.
They pass through the same air lock, then another, then a third. In this way they sail across time and country. A door's been left ajar. This is a nice surprise. Drugs were commonly used at the time as a form of restraint: hot-forged black iron, baroque pearls, spinels of jade, slivers of fire opal and olivine, splintered bracers of jet. I have barely warranted a mentioned up to now. This is my first fully-fledged experiment. It doesn't mater what it takes to win this philosophical battle. The most exacting thing is not doing. If you separate, the aspect is lost (something about my punctuation). An arc of sunlight bends across a watermeadow full of buttercups and giant daisies. In regard to spelling I bow unconditionally to Moloch, my spiny lizard. Metaphors too. I never investigate further.
You have those photographs of you. I have seen them. For his part we need a really good storyteller and a parley of instruments. I lack knowledge. Our aim has to be the objective that never was—the phantom goal. I want to say something before I forget: the green crystal found on the beach has to be identified. It's erroneous and misguided and a danger to the world.
Now it is evening once more. Our expert is busy doing the ash flow for the gulf people. He has chained his plants to the railing, less they are tempted to wander. Imagine you're being unusually cynical, as well as metaphorical.
Have you snapped the cover back on.
The safety catch is off.
I am numbered among the eruptive rocks and meteorites. I know what they're up to. It turns out all the texts ever written mean nothing. Suddenly I find myself in cherished and worthy company. A pit opens up at my feet. What business had I with hope! Some things you just can't explain. Stop wasting time. I tell myself. Approaching in the distance are puppet travellers, Chinese shadows of returning exile. And excuse me darling, but what will they decide to do to us next. Under the window stand boxes of blanched human bones.
Scar music.
Across my forehead, stretching from temple to temple, is a curve of string enbedded beneath my skin. It's a different spirit. It's shaped like a giant centipede. O shit it's moving. It's probably a lot more lethal than I imagine. It's similar to a ridge of basalt.
Gunfire on the radio. A wail rises up to an earsplitting level. I remember there were flags on all the lampposts that day he died. The topography has a grotesque elegance—blasted trees and sculpted waves of limestone. Big tidal rip; a crow in the rain—the granite masses of old town. If you're unsure don't move a muscle. It was quite an experience. I am forever something which should be substituted. I am composed of different favours and tastes. How could this have happened. At last, an achievement of my own, not owed to any other. I will just punch a hole in your ticket. I don't understand. When asked, I say I know nothing about the others.
We come to a place where boatmen cry out. It's the return journey. How can you leave, with your limited resource. Their stay stretches out to a month. One says, this is a corpse at least many hundreds of years old. To save time we dig a fresh pit and half fill it with quicklime. Did you say relate this to anyone else—another time—or just to myself. Tell me what you need. It depends on the scale, doesn't it—I mean the ideal of the intimate in art, the ultimate tie or bond. Any use of the word is best avoided as unnecessary and confusing. Time was originally a period of mourning in memory.
Recall the host name, composed of the opening syllables of her sons. She has that keen desire for food which is sometimes manifest by persons just before death. See remaining ties to this earth—to one grained and rarely spelt, extinguished by a single seed in the little ear.
Battle-exe.
In the next stadium.
Of phase and anaphase (autocop). There is just enough of a pause to obtain ourselves. Time becomes a countdown. You're like the man who's seen the man who's seen the man who's seen nothing.
The narrative.
He escapes his assassins and takes a lover (back to the narrative). He ventures off into the undergrowth. A tortuous and roundabout refugee trail springs up. What's the price doing at the moment. I open the book at a gloss of names. The opening sound is that of the narrator preparing the listener. He emits different vocal colours. By the time of publication, however, he has been demonized and erased. Five hundred files of people who have failed flutter across the empty square. We are at the very rim of a continent. His voice is that of a lightgrained and flexible tenor. Do you have any idea why we're still here? We are those foremost in battle of our party. In this edition the word is translated.
I, object.
I need another break. Without recourse to shouting or melodrama, I won't be able to make it to daybreak. I once signified a remarkable portion of land stretching out into the water. I hold letters of transit. Meaning sits beneath my threshold. You are not getting out in your lifetime. You will drown in the river. The end.
Time, do not bend.
You get those looks. Great minds. We think it started somewhere in the street. It will take time. Learn the grammar of silence while you still hold rank. The clock reads an hour later, perhaps a little longer. I find a fragment written on a blackened grain of parchment. I'm about to discard it when I think I'll keep it and actually read something with due attention for once.
It could be that he simply forgot to name this section.
Recognition.
One day she actually recognizes me. I try returning her gaze but it's pointless. This really disturbs me; she has neurological repercussions. This tears her down into a kind of dementia. The next stop for her is stonegate. She is still in the house. She can still move around. I leave her a message. She has her oxygen. For a while I say that nothing is happening. That expression some day keeps recurring.
The explosion seems to have worked. I find myself charged with singing electricity. I am unconvinced. I isolate myself through extreme behaviour. I need breath space. I drain myself dry. I am without conviction. It's not about a crumbling pillar, it's about the suspension of a sort of drape, a veil or curtain—a giant fucking lie. We cannot cross the causeway where we were born. Let's hear them once more at the very end of the combat. Add names, places and dates as you see fit. This read much better before I started changing things. I have to stop (defecation, ecstasy).
Apply fingertips to eyes. It takes her a while to arrive at language. Now she talks to any stranger—dim the breaking east with her bright crystals, see! You have a slow set pace.
He's not sure who he's in love with. Lets step into this tangled web. No one can remember anything. Apply remaining self to eyes: the crust folds into mountains by pressure against its solid sides. It encloses the spikelet. It encloses the alphabet.
After about an hour, back in the street.
Start again. I can upgrade this for you. A name has lately been given to those solid bodies which have been seen to fall from the sky. Because there is no one here I have no choice. I am on the entropy. The voyage takes me to uncountable tropic islands. I can't go on. There are gussets of nervous energy. Pass away, unto the sea and the sun—the salt that cakes my lips. I'm not interested in what meanings may be tacked to myself. Suffice to say, I contain carbon, all that's known for sure. I think if I ever met an actual writer, I would not know what to say.
With the first thaw the boys return and secure many fine gems. He has them removed from the axis.
Gunfire on the radio. His eyes are plucked out by a knife-wielding horseman. People are designated as back at work or not back at work. I'm amazed by the swiftness with which he dies. Bands of pagans raid the pilgrims on route. Break this up.
Shadow of head cut across sheen.
Mind out, it might be dangerous. Sun behind me, to the west, dipping below horizon. Tuck your mind in. I see above the gates more than a thousand rain down from heaven. An adjustable metal band secures the reedpiece to the family mouth. It is literally as if your own needs are forever dismissed. And how exactly do you propose to rescue these characters from posterity?
Egma shibboleth.
Outer bract sterile, alone or with others. Chafflike.
He sizes them up, prices them out, and sees how much he can get by way of wreck. Consider the toxicophagy case—that morbid craving for poisons, voluntary blood-poisoning. Yes, that's the idea, a separate vogue of consciousness which adds other facets and hints at narrative voice. We separate tin ore from the gangue or rough by stirring the slimes in a kieve. The long wait seems to be over. There's a loud cheer. A block of the earth's crust remains in position while the ground around it subsides and slides toward the molten core. Tomorrow, a shipwrecked dog marooned on a desert island and a trip to a rapidly advancing moon.
Seance.
What was it like being dead?
Well, he says, the best thing was that language stopped.
A character.
The character known as A is placed at the junction while I remain within the main portico—a covered ambulatory consisting of a roof supported by columns placed at regular intervals, usually attached to a building but sometimes forming a separate structure. I have my suspicions. Spurs to language have been carved into the marble walls. We could call upon the last few pages, those who haunt. My theme this mouth is translation.
Tidy up. I am sleeping badly.
Translucent moon hung full at apex, at apogee. Now it's literally moving away from the earth. Suffice to say, it is a point in the heavens. Now it's time to return to the ancient world. I don't want your prizes. This is a monoglue about her final moments (brief, by her standards). Her name is often used allusively for the female condition. Her only option is death. The details are still vivid and sharp: the mountain ranges, peaks and troughs, the textures of her arid surface. I realize the satellite has turned about on its axis and is approaching the earth at great speed. It's as if my head were a telescope—yes, that's it. Behind me, a little to the north, the moon strikes the crust. I learn later that it's been approaching for generations. There was no way of telling. I pen a note to myself, that steady stream straining to hear.
The visitation.
Today we're celebrating the living dead. Make something of it. Suddenly I realize I have no idea what reason to give for my visit. Think: what have you spent a lot of your lifetime doing (idle observation). A pavement of sapphire stones spreads out at my feet. The causeway is lined by men in cloaks of grass armed with jewelled staves.
Clue.
He goes into the library with a revolver. I can hear his heart beating. A cloud covers the mountain. I eavesdrop. He is speaking of a mechanical chaffinch. He is a man insanely preoccupied with words. Three crooked nails are perched in his voice. He is transfigured, the soles of his feet are frozen to the spot. His double, who always appears at the opening, sends a shiver down my spine. He comes in through the shattered shadow. He is composed of pure shadow. He grafts attention, standing in a place where he will surely be noticed and recognized. He is two-winged (the ankles). I'm aware this account leaves much to be explained in the history of the world. I myself have plenty of shadow to spare. There's a bullet in his frozen breath. We analyse everything, one detail at a time.
We are going back to deliver the rudiments of education to the remotes. The part of the prince is left out for this one night only. He is the chief actor in the play of his own resistance. Under big billowy clouds, he is the permanent impasse—a stone, glittering with perspicuity: magnesia, sulphur and mercury, proportionate by nature and made most perfect. Permanent red.
Dogs have no sense of themselves; they are just being helpful. He comes back and embraces me.
Tone poem hamlet.
We enjoy for a few moments the silence, signified by a narrow strip of white page. We exist within the subtle tension between the press to act and to remain idle. We have to take another look in the ibex box. There's no point. What room shall I have. It's like a game (quietism). Can we have three rooms. Is there a bar. For as far as I can see there be mummers. The tense shifts—warm jets of evening air. I'm not referable to any known root. I look for listening. I will tell what I am when there is time.
He discovers the lip of all the earth. Among the questions are whither thou shall, and why I came. Once again, love—do you hear me. Do not quake like the earth. All the talk is of an external body taking over, polyphonic kyrie—random utterance—fearsome doubles with octaves and a lattice of scars on their arms. He will not find a more flattering treatment of his fiendhead. It's all about love, death and resurrection. One or two lost Fridays.
This is what I really want to do. We are discussing insomnia. No zephyr, so swifta wind that sways and frolics to and fro and the like. I am magnified as feral anywhen.
If only we had three rooms. Clearly this machine does not like motion. What would they be. Late anaphrase with slash room, drifting towards the poles of the spindle. Maybe it's the separation that is heavy to bear. We unearth spare games: slash office, slash wardrobe, slash study, slash snookered.
Repeat. Logistically it's not. The game is up. Up into place of time—aback again, aback anew.
It must be terrible. Each contestant with their own massive beak. The heavier particles are allowed to settle.
Synchronicities.
Chimp mask replica. A shot in the fogness. We shall now speak of this major boundary above which the various surficial layers tie in. Come to yourself. You are possessed. Take things one at a time. There are three types of sentence (long, short and life). For reasons as yet unknown, I have come up with some bizarre story. I pick up a flyer. I read between the lines. From the pavement I pick up a tiny plastic soldier, his right arm raised to shield his eyes. It's not clear, of course, from what. It has disappointment written all over it. It's green like that stone on the beach. Things move in and out of focus then discharge. It's not the same green mind. I think you can look at anything in this way. He says his son has been in the house and stolen his share. I think this is very close to the end. I don't like looking at things. I can't have. Which one of us do you think will be going home this week. I'm not very good at dreaming. I'm not very good at beginning. Blocked keys are very much what I describe. Only the void is entitled. Girls are more realistic. I hear rounds of applause floating through the wicker gate. Writing's an ordeal (that's just too big). I'm recognizable but sound completely wrong. All you can see is what you're looking at through your visor. I am swallowed by words. My brand is new. I am swallowing your words. Her colleagues call her the wanderer the seducer or the sorceress. I'm characterized by descending chromatic laments—scenes from a plague land. Black rain scourges every window. It's a disease that destroys many lives. Each time they're picked up and used, then ejected before they can regain consciousness of who they are. It's a perfect system whose energy replenishes itself along the boundary of circle. He has got me in his power at last. I'm under the limits of my personal two thousand. I am contiguous with below, with the grey commissure of the final discord. Now it's brightening up. That's all I want in life. It's notable how rarely anything remotely familiar ever happens to me. I am a suture of junction, a huddle of fibres disconnecting two nerve-centres. We extend up as high as the aqueduct of Sylvius: simultaneous motion-cycles, simo-chart wrestling, hydra serfs begging alms in the rain. . . .He may be chosen as the sacrificial victim now. All doubt is determined and cut away. Only the void is entitled. Had I as many mouths, such an answer would stop them all in their tracks. Second war soviet.
Kino in the woods.
The roof is made of chalk and charcoal-ice, red earth, linseed oil, buckets of beer and oxblood. Why don't they recognize each other. It leaks, of course. The runoff tastes bitter and austere. These eaves are no place to drop from. This single and peculiar life is bound up. There's a thirteen-year-old backstory here. By calculating the wavefront scattered from the numerically defined object, I manage to shift his left arm a couple of centimetres.
The bodily movements of the worker are represented in relation to a time sale. They are not found within. Five or six small convolutions are grouped and concealed within his fissure. He has a slave, not in use. He is alone—he is all one word, a footnote to mediaeval Europe. Tomorrow we're riding towards the sun. Wire us. I have organized a match for those who can count, to take place in the world-famous Chinese ballroom.
He's a man of lasting obsession. Our theme is the thought of the heart as aesthetic purpose. He is going to scourge me for my bad doings, like a window. I wish to wake from this frontier of sleep and dream—and literature, where the horrors of the water crossed to get here are relayed to the outside world.
He acknowledges the recovery of the body. Smaller figures reside therein. There is an illegal traffic in sacred things—the archival tide. The voodoo lady says the devil has finally gone out of the child's body. Besides this there are some spatial deposits connected with the root of a certain nerve. White feathers fly about the room. There's an overpowering smell of oxblood and tar. He feels deluded and betrayed. There's an illegal traffic in legality. There's a pool of petrol in the forecourt. The last lights go out. He had the foresight to build himself a spare. He's offering tacit support to the private. His imagination's been ignited in some special way. In desperation he hires a ruthless moron with no style. I woman walks a dog on the beach. He gets there first. With its blue eye it resembles a wolf. It shows that there really is a new and different. He staggers about the forest with bleeding sockets shrieking. I don't remember the rest very well (it's an opera, stupid).
This paragraph constitutes the direct stimulus to his theory and his origin. It's the key to the whole damned book. Entropy I can't.
The frontier.
I can't live if living is without you. The frontier tissue is now gathering momentum. An official enters. Which of you has previous experience of being sacrificed to a sea monster? We are all dressed as victims.
Dense sonority characteristic of flatlands. Ghost impact brilliant today, a leaky vision. She examines naming practice and naming results. She takes notes. We begin to realize just how desperate the situation is—when wolves and tigers howl for prey, with songs of enough and songs of plenty. I am waiting for her to make her first move. Nonetheless, I am still dry-eyed. I invent a strange childhood. After being strangled and thrown in the lake there's comfort in the final grouping.
We (a family) cross an endless snowscape on foot. Three of our company die. The landscape is stunning. It makes me want to press on, despite my frostbitten fingers and thumb. First I must find a job and a place to stay. That morning in the bathroom mirror I notice a sliver of metal growing from the flesh of my right cheek.
You could get rid of the remaining wood. I wait for a few more trains to arrive before I give up. The passers-by are about to witness a shocking incident. The result is an irrational prime number and the mangling of an old woman in black by the noonday tram.
Buy that and I'll pay you livery one says. I get up to leave. I operate a simultaneous cycle with my remaining fingers (in this story someone's always watching). There's an endless barbecue, a spiral headcase leads up to a jacuzzi. . . . I think I'm going to faint. I know what I have to do. There's a chart in which the bodily movements of each worker are represented in relation to an adjoining historical period. We're linked by a magic corridor. As we pass over one among us breaks off and soars away from his companions, leaving in his wake a great ribbon of air.
Check and seal up all the hatches with molten pitch. I'm looking for a style which is detached and elegant—albeit quite robotic (you know, Georgian retail). The opening has had to be camouflaged. Twenty-four masters come together in one place. It's unusual. There's not a lot of room. Consider the sacrifices they've made. There begins a period of echolalia. The teutonic robot bomb is a potential hazard—one of Old Poker's universals.
Trees of this variety tend to have a flattened top. Herein are tableaux reminiscent of classical painting. Spaces caused by the removal of an entire fan remain unfulfilled. He alone knows what he means. I am so sleep. There are many spirals. By writing I sound out letters. This means. The trouble is we don't have much to throw into the balance on the opposite side of the planet.
Aside from the mysterious splash, no, I don't remember. You have to look at places. It's good that there are things to do in the world—isolationism's no longer a practical method of policing. Everything is empty. Now it's not. I mean the meaningless repetition and imitation of the movements of others. I did not know what to do that day so I did nothing.
Crystallomancy.
Both are transparent bodies, through which they view each other's sorrow. His limbs remain for some time in the position in which you placed them. Get your kids and leave. The canon has been arranged such that each variant, having arrived at an end, can begin again. This cycle continues indefinitely. He wants to express the mess of life. Bounded by faults on all sides, the outer borders of the two fields of subsidence begin to approach each other.
Morph coda.
Spinal crest and fornix. Muffled phrases decay into the distance, those sighing half-steps. Didn't you leave without paying the bill. The thing resembles an arched formation, a hollow place in the brain that bends like an bow. I am raised up to its extremity, suspended from two white cords. I am approximate. There are scales in my orifice. I signify the upper or convex shell, the excavated part of the skullbox.
He's asked how he functions. He answers I speak without saying. That familiar long horn note sounds (something bad is going to happen). Are we still on track. He is convicted. Grant me some silence. All the zones under our control are wrapped in smoke. Are you trying to achieve beyond yourself. He represents the late, a crucial stage in cell division.
The repetition of the same word in several successive causes takes place. This is mere happenstance. The daughter chromosomes move apart towards their opposite poles. Transformation, not action, is found to create form. To be on the safe side I remain rock still. Separation of the sister segments begins to take place. The portion has four diversions, including an intercession of the dead. The whole region is a corpse-factory. Then again, he says.
Nor shall they acquire vast sections of the earth in change. Saying they had not horded silver and gold was an outright lie. Nonetheless I am healthy and held in good spirit. I can tell you nothing new about myself. Why don't you just move—nobody's going to believe you anyway. Fierce dispute attends every direction, every point of decision.
He holds the trump card: the U of Infinities. It has saved the European arm on more than one occasion. In his negative aspect he also plays the intellectual oppressor. We can never agree on his mysterious insight into other people's words. Perception is required for this to be fathomed. He decides to sacrifice himself and hurls himself into the sea. He divides himself by night and by day. He writes of a flaring light at peripheral vision (right).
And he pursues them unto a city called H, which is on the left hand. I only know to when I know to. They rise a hundred and fifty feet off the ground, and then drop back.
Back again to form, and still more form.