Perfect Station (for DM)

August: she seizes the head and carries it off. The pilot. There's no evidence that she'd actually existed before moving to the lake. The other protagonists may have been right all along: she's counterfeit, an imitatrix, whereas he was once a singular first notion, the simple idea of some individual thing in the mind—he of the galley-sheets, the evocator, selecting and schematizing his material. Yet together, a walking eclipse. Nothing here's exaggerated (I'm not really here either, am I). Now, this thing of the bridge, pneumatic battles are poised to battle . . . Ear the right showing face slightly tilted, now strike . . . Seems paths are prepared to cross if need be. Unable to decide from which stack to feed, she starves to death. I have nothing to say about that. Just then, way high up through the clouds, something like a shoal of herring. Soluble fish. A masterstroke. But I don't think I'm going to trust any of these remarks on time's cold compress. He was executed by wearers of albs and gleaming raiment—yet seen in the context of his times his request was not so far-fetched as it first appeared; magnificent ashlars are still visible at the temple platform. Thereon is placed a limestone object bearing an inscription. A sprig of lithosperm stands like a little tree laden with dead sea fruit. Outside the world the search for an acceptable name continues. Somewhere imperceptibly he would her and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled . . . It's sunset on the sixth of August, and his personal revolution is about to fail. Further along the axis another birth waits in lieu. There are exceptionally fine views in the round from this hilltop. Cook the stones. We're ready.

A marvel turns inoperable, ceases. Only the undead could make you feel this good. Faultless horizon. Flattish sea. A distant mort. The neighbourhood may not be safe. In at the first and the earth rests on its back. Its head lies toward the south. Its right shoulder lies toward the east and its left shoulder toward the west. Its feet lie beneath the big sea. Its spine stretches the cord. This makes it look like an old thing. When I said I was going to join the search party, she said No. Nonetheless, his corpse was found—a torso, sans teeth, sans eye, sans tongue, sans ear, sans brain, sans liver, sans organs, sans everything. Unhead: diskopfed. His brutal execution in a quarry.
An object is surrendered to the mind. Obey the summons of recall: white oleander, the turpentine tree . . . It was the best of time, it was the worst of time. Now a new undertaking: Me, rebuilt, neither from the past beneath, nor from the past above. I should never have left that lakeshore manufactory. Now all I'm left with is an old family snapshot (not ours) but around this kernel there is everything: a little strongbox with mysterious brackets, ski deposits, icemen. Enter. One protagonist hangs from the ceiling by leather straps. He is quite inconsolable. Now he's frozen onto a stone slab; mustn't waste the traces. It's said that with less water there's more tin. I'm chasing the sun—an ill-starred project: it would suit them just fine to trap me in the pursuit.

Starguiser. His body a tomb. His body's in his mouth. Place it at the threshold. Cast out breath beneath signal, make waves—pressure under grace, revenant memories. Some I'm resisting. Above the dome of the head a copter copts. Beneath the pad of the foot a dwarf species of lady's mantle, weed of dry wasteland. Pungent anecdotes. Fictive ships. The piercestone. And another hid his eyes behind his wing . . .
A proposed book of days. Lines I am. Anyall.
Farther up the slope, he's in just as bad a shape. He's shifting again. For him to be at last isolated, identified and cornered, exceptional circumstances are needed, such as are met within the narrow confines of our ship. We all gather in a shivering cluster on the deck. He bears the track of a bite. I think his days are over, all the archived things. At the same time the most sorrowful tales descend gently into memory, our most special and mercurial territory. A green wave freezes beneath the prow. I don't want any of this to follow me: homogeneity of intention—a short film of a single page—the lineaments of a giant with rictus mouth. Where none switched knowhow. Wishupon wishupon. Awake.
I want the songtrack like fingered glass.

Axt

Thunderbolt & Lightning. Very very frightening deed. Enter three murders, of crows. One, Two, Three whiches, and a couple of what-ifs. Hautboys. Torches.

FIRST VOICE: Reintroducing, one damn good grimoire. Cathartic reading. People carry their ancestors about with them around here. And the world is full of clashing forms. Two make a pair. Lovers anonymous—lovers oblivious.

Memory laden, she breaks the skull to ease that pressure. Human vehicles form the underpinning. Trepanned to the death. Light, but.

SECOND VOICE: [Subdued on a chair. Rest of stage dark]: No longer anything to be done in that direction . . . What jinn do we serve.

THIRD VOICE : I don't know: go on as you are. What I say is dimmed before I flare up—we all kill ourselves in different ways, more or less slowly, with more or less kindness. One of life's details. You never forget [Reads]: Turn a fog into a man. What you need: one spit one slug wishing up water. What you do you have to chew glass spit blood and two cups of water one slug and wishing up likwid and the magic worlds are make them into a man.
Clearly he has access to equipment and books. Is working on his own and living on is own. A position of quiet trust. Bears the track of a scar with purpleblue rim. Talis man.

FIRST VOICE: Somehow this ain't so good as the first spell.

Short film of a single page. Awake. But slow. Panning. Scheming.

SECOND VOICE: Who did attend these fictions?

THIRD VOICE: Excuse Me & Forgive Me.

FIRST VOICE: The loud and muster.

A dog is killed on the ridge of the roof. This modifies its sound. Its blood is allowed to flow down on both sides. They cast a die for the animal.

SECOND VOICE: The line of intersection of two vaults. A rib along the intersection. To build into groins. An early form, per'aps, of abyss.

THIRD VOICE: Now . . . Shadow shadow shadow shadow . . . That's four shadows . . . Surrounded by deep blue shades . . . He had none . . . His flight was madness . . . His rich gifts wax poor: grace gas, grave wax, grave gifts—gift gas . . . Her cerement the colour of damp ash, she comes to him . . . Greysunken, as one . . .

Cage. Silence.
The dark. Five seconds.

Dogster

No one spoke.
Dead side of the street this.
Gradually prepare to enter sleep. I'm sure I'll be more nervous at the time, when the interim suddenly collapses.

You'd better get used to this; I'm not going away.

*

When I first engaged in this work I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined. The plot is simple: illumination, the plan of memory without. What offers do we offer. I'm pretty sure that it was once left here. How is it, then, that we posit an object for these presentations? My greatest fear is the expected. Let's forget and consider that they may come at night, may come to appreciate diversities in their own manner, for their own sake, in their familiar and relentless absentmindedness—come hither to write false novels, a book of remnants denoting place. Me, I'd sacrifice him again right away if the choice were mine. I know many fans will disagree with me, but he's inured, after all—burnt in—that business with the ceiling and the leather straps that stretched and snapped, they being unable to support his weight. The earth's pull took over. Now his front and visage are not so pretty as they were before his ordeal by gravity, a manner of strappado. Still, he would not tell us on compulsion; no lag existed and his timing was indifferent. And this brings us to why I am carrying an admirably polished torso: a replicant is needed. Stories will spill out through him, our bloodrunner. Time for his aftermath.

Yes, of course. He proclaims the cob is undersea. Upon the deck stands a wayfarer. Variorum satellites. Bread is sown in the grey sunken valleys, where drowned men sink backward to sleep. Glacial quivering flowers. Genuflectors.
It keeps coming back.
Accept where you are. Consider the sudden question: would he seek these things out or encounter them in the course of a life, as a consequence of unrelated actions and events? Serendipitously impromptu. I forget the question scar.

The flower sought is distinguished from clover by its spiralling sickleshaped pods and short racemes. An uncertain inflorescence in which stalked flowers are borne in acropetal succession on an unbranched stem; a not dissimilar group, a gleaning or gathering. Rootstock. A cluster or bunch of anything else. A reliquary of signals, like a dog that haunts by scent alone. Upon agape the glaucous bloom, a residue. The gathering of hair in a fillet or crab shape has become fashionable again, people carry their avatars about with them around here. Brought down and trawled into cycles. I'm dedicating the edible flesh with pieces of mind. The trail peters out. We're hooked. Nothing seems as important the longer we remain. It's what we weren't ready for.
A new look. A new range. Open fire.
Compression bag included. Now cease. Nicely timed. The nodal point, as it were. To stop place. Bohemia. Glass limited. While and paper in flight: his brutal execution in the quarry.

hand and foot
they're bound
in the same place
a father, son
where wedges pound
the white fluid cooling
while trains run the track
linking direction
counterwise
so brace yourselves
he's teeth in his ear

*

apples, some whole
some halved
painted onto
the sky like
flying wallpaper and
everyone looks up
of course

Shoes were taken on. The stretching of the cord, a multiform taken as a single thing. Yet this is not all; he's the other in a dust veil.