Richard Makin, Work in Process

This is my first card after getting back to the desert. Nastyblue sky. An event in time. A window moves. I always forget what things can do to things. More acrobats on the far side panicking their somersaults. No barricades for the belly (he means, there is no way of barricading a womb). The fox! Mad! Time has no power against a lack of identity. The only thing that matters: back in the night.

So much for reference to the self. One quarter is the point of the compass. I think there's a limit to what he can do. His fingers are always rusty and he sucks at them regardless. Inside of him somewhere must lie a goodly deal of scrap. He tears at his flesh like a dog, jackalheaded.
You are not the undergaoler's daughter? She sighs no who are you.
Now you sound as though you're in a casino, a room with gaming tables, cottaging industry. I hear the chatter of the roulette ball about St Katherine's wheel—a rotator stud round with teeth from the lower mandible, a rose window, a rotating firewalk taken at a trot, broken by the occasional sidewise summerset. A piece of her—let him eat it, or she he. Together they are a small and early variety of pair: bone of my bones. And she is taken out—Russssssse . . . sparks fly—the rush, the smoke and the clamour. He is so impressed with that talented machine. Though the outer body wall gives rise to unexpected resistance, it's wonderful to see so close his fine deathtrap and food supply. Later they shall find him hanged and slashed and drownded: there are many such torts that can curry meaning. His manner then is less satisfied than his words.
Spurn it. With a similar action. And with another repetition of the similar action. But in the faults escaped in the printing.
His lastful words: herein my passed and presence waste. The mirror darkens. The dialectic is gone . . . But oft have I seen his timely-parted ghost.

It is strange that such a thing could have overpowered such a thing. Still, I'll make good use of it today; an analyst needs to have one foot in and one foot out of the grave.

Somewhen: she miraculously escapes torture on the wheel—she has the world's largest variable skin. Her head has been divided neatly into sixths. She also does physic rendering.

And I think I wonder has the other risen yet so.

Blood shed and clotted a glow of zodiacal light seen opposite the sun. Snail tracks. Facts distanced. He'd once swallowed a whole box of them. Disinterested facts. He's a floating vessel with quartered crew extant at the fo'c's'le, exhausted by labour. He's the all-thing. Altoman. Altocumulus. Within this context please find the alone convention and the himselfherself convention. Opaquely layered, in a region whose boundary decreases to zero, he recaptures (the author's ingenuity is apparent as he expounds his indivisibility). He gives up Everybody the ghost. From a great way off comes the sound of a sullen swell: new ideas for life . . . Who's that speaking.
Let's get back to learning our lines. They're already here, it's a question of revealing them, blow by blow, like a statue. He has found this self and understands it well, wins all states of being, where even the rocks are not exempt. Black can sidestep the social staircase. Good bacteria have never tasted so good.

It's a restraint of track. You are a little late, memory.

She inspects upon her right arm high the rack of a bite. Deep brushweals signifying absence. It could only be realized by closing the original deal. Well, yes—and everything's now all right. You are page. Whatever I read to her, I'll be pleading for you, a wedge between anterior things and posterior signs signalling nothing, for this presence knows and must needs be heard. Is this what you call measuring yourself against the world, testing your duration? I had so wanted to take myself off somewhere that irrepressible day, dowsing with my passive antenna.

Arrival of the No-gift, the nothing that things. Signal that to the doctor. He's a mere semblance—an outward show, an apparition—but he signs it well, does he not? Now she takes us all for her fools. That's not to say there won't ever be a change—there may be change, there may be, but I just don't know when—and how should I know. But still it calls us forth, into the situation.
This is all for the time being time. I'm generally getting through day by day: the inside equals O, therefore the insider equals O.

Now a certain man was sick. When it moves to go I shall give up the ghost myself and begin to worry against the strength of my buried death. For once, something different begins to happen. Let her alone: against the day of my buried death has she kept this sunk within me. What a million filaments. Suffer shame for her venous name; a name full of veins, through which a gathering of some kind is foretold. This small fragment is relented: those who touch—the old bush burning book. I remain unconvinced by the existence of such a solid layer of savagery. And the sea covers them—they sink as lead in the mighty. A couple of unfortunate lovers. You've overthrown them; you are overthrown in turn. That would make good of bad, friend of foe—hearing the large mouth mutter, when its natural tendency is to drift. All unparalleled in the unpardonable everything. You see, the word means farewell and welcome at once. Usurper.
A dog pads the passageway, slavers and growls the unusual ground. He lacks the innermost digit of his hinder limb. We resort to divination by means of scattered salt. But I'm a practised spirit, not much interested in moral dilemmas or elaborate explanations; I have not the skill. How unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops, my gapsome breaks. Well said. That's why there are all these little silences, to try to make me split them open. Hold, here's a master-tester for you. Bet they don't have that sound in their almanacs.

The back part is in the front place. Hind-brain, we call him. Old hindhead. Waste forces within him the law. Before dawn he has to make a decision. Just as suddenly as it began it stopped the sound.

Now she's coming. Here's a corpse a-coming sliding down the passagework. Something sacral, a vestige of the nave, and still attached to this row of commodities. Our dead and living meat, snuck in at the last page, softly falling into the darkmutinous wave. Generous tears fill her eyes. This is a mesmerizingly slow study in antigravity, around the shadows of her fragile margin, this unforgiven space. But how did you come by it.

Their patois is pretty impenetrable (like patios but not so flat of foot). Whittling away at yourself.

These are very very bad signs, see: outsized masks and accordions, Gaulish drinking songs, lots of maps, bloodshed eyes and two tiny metal pyramids shaped like a bird's beak.

I must press on. The close are close.

There were oldfashioned arc lights and it was eerie. A wonderful place for echoes. Everything was simpler then, there were words. He made equity in twenty, but he probably walked away from it. Away and out to.
That wasn't exactly his desire, snuck in a tunnel where the light gives out (a train).
He tracks from east to west, which is actually the wrong way around the world. How do you think at eleven and fifty-nine. I can't get beyond his selfsaid resound, the answer splinter. And the same comes to me in my cell: an unelected silence. Contact. Where are you waiting for. Why are you sitting here. What do you hesitate. You know what you ought to do—when don't you do it. It's useless to hesitate any longer. Who don't you get up and go . . . Fallen to earth, their sorrowful reply. They're elements in a team, the candlewax and winding sheet; a mass solidified, drippings of grease that cling to the shaft. Within this overproduction there's a new opening for obvious trade. Matins was never my favourite time.

Stirrings at the neck of the cascade. An omen of death or calamity, but it'll have to catch me first. Four are suspended from the top. The first stone drops into my throat, trapped between head and abdomen. His test is the unmasking of a construct, an endless sentence persisting beyond his expected demise; the outside, the night forbidden to oneself, turned away by each finite thing which disconcerts and yet decants the heresome now.

A genuine icon reived from any kirk will suffice as defence. I have to reconsider the consequences of his letter, so fine-tuned, a holy trespass anterior to scribbling. Consider the things he writes of again and again, and in a voice clearly directed back at himself: muscles with escalators, fibroid tumours where the tissue's deficient, a cluster of kidney stones. It all says: Never apologize, never explain. It gives out heat. His distribution is inch perfect.

You'll have to catch me first, false-limbed as you are.

And of ascesis: the practice of disciplining oneself is all but lost.

This is called the snakepit. It's gyroscopic. That's clever. Inside: fifties memorabilia (no, stupid, the 1850s), a working steam engine, and one Camberwell beauty pinned out to dry on a pink polystyrene ceiling tile.

Once lost but we meet again by some accident of nature at a quasi-satanic orgy, after which I feel no better than I did before (too many snails). That'll be the fault of Snaresbrook and his coterie of masterchefs. They should try using a pen for once, or a pair of concrete boots. They all belong to moments. They all open his work. Not that they're much used.
I am afraid of it she answers. Shudder to think it. To go on.
Applause.
You'll know it's not that one because it's not here any longer. That's just for people outside. And that's a rare point you bring to bear upon your identification.
I do, I will.

She's just playing the game. A knocking is heard. Re-enter, running London another street. The corner echoes and re-echoes with the tread of feet. I am exceeding weary of tongue. I am limited to such statements as it is very nice up here. Well persuaded matter can never become anything but matter again, and I have no greater dread. Everyone is naked, everyone trembles, everyone is weeping. If I thought gold flowed in their veins I'd have every one of them bled to death. The ceremony lasts a very long time. Good conduct well chastised. It outlasts many of its participants. But where did the surviving half come from?

The two other passengers eye him distrustfully. Keep where you are the voice calls to the eye in the midst.

You. Who looks after say goodbye. When the envelope was slit open it was found to contain a death threat. He has nine nights to live. A conversation in the same salon continues for two days. Subject: cutlery, the dropping of. New to me is this fancy. For the sake of completeness I recapitulate: cutlery falls equals visitor. If you drop a carving knife a policeman. Last time we discussed the possible meaning of the handing over. It's surprising how far the voice travels here. Upon the floor a grimoire, well-read, left open at a page of soul cakes. If I ever leave a piece somewhere I never go back—it's happened time and again. I peruse. O, the skill of the police artist! But I'm distracted. If I ever leave somewhere I never go back there. Take old Soho: that tiled café, her still younger then autumn sunbeams time not itself quite as now the motes of floating dust. But I distract. I am dis—trac—tion.
Applause.
He holds up his sketch.
The forensic camera makes the living appear dead. It's been a great ten minutes this last ten minutes—now longvanished. The paper flutters back to his desk. He leans forward: Every time I see it that red coat has something else to say to me.
The exegetical code unravels, along a track left by something that's not quite itself anymore. Many requests of late for direct benefice, the attraction of propitious, sound, hurtless, corrective, analeptic, salutiferous, sovereign, panacean, paregoric, palliative, anaesthetic, cathartic, emetic, vomitory influence. Point blank. Creatrix.
His distribution was once inch perfect. But that was a long time ago.
Terrible paralyses and protracted states of depression. Your technique is too good, a dialogue in nature, but still you'll have to go back and correct your life.

We've got a great spine going on here. Growing from strength to strength—all these littling strengths.

Lines man. One of those twinned and under surveillance in the seedbed. Two shared otherward. First year of a new century with more than one digit to its name, that is, if you discount the void as a numeral. Treatment of empty rows. He but usurp'd his own life, ruled in his realm and the gored state sustained . . . Is he one of those two passengers. His welcome I perceive has poisoned mine. He'll tell. It is his to tell of: an analyst needs to have one foot in and one foot out of the grave. He's an excerpt in every thing. And what manner of person? A person who reads mediaeval script and wishes to remake scenes from time. Yet it's been here all along. We've gone out with such a bend, and now the only thing left is Europe. In the process I'm damning my own eye, uninvented yet in the tensile passed, crossing the read. See. Through a dark, pastly.

Drunks near-dawn nocturnal return. Backofanalley. Piss manufactory. A factotum, uric—tensile to lack.

A place of lodgement or deposit. A point of infection. Nervegate. Nervecunter. One of the slender hollow tubes forming the framework of his wing.

Now he is thirty-six. He sits transfigured by the obelisk, St Luke across the traffic. Resident saints cluster and bilocate. He sits gazing through the window of the Manhattan coffee bar on Old Street: an elevated pyramid, the capped column taken root within St Luke's. For the first time in many hours—or perhaps days—he thinks. Do this. Inside a commentary. It occurs to him that the strap which binds him is unique. He is tied by no separate cord. He recollects how he once was carried through the streets in an entourage of shining armaments. And now this. He's adrift, having bartered the last ambition of trace. A sun sets, Big—a deception, it's always the same size down here. This is like being here, which occasionally has happened—the structure of that wherein as such already is: signal exhaust, signals of glass, random semaphore, ceilings of concrete, bleached calico drying on the promissory beach that stretches out beneath the tarmacadam. Mineral tar. A mariner. Navigator . . . It was like being, it was like being buried alive, flying in a rudderless lift crashing to the base of the pit. Down the rust chute and into the sea. A pendulum. The first stroke of the razorlike crescent. A pit. Casts were made of keys.
I recorded it in language, as spoken by other people. It's unfinished, an infinity of skins with no core, a kind of onion.

And stone faces of men and small stones or gravel given to hawks.

Limner of memory, he is never completely ever not working—the knotbooks of a London fully accessible and for hire. His politics are never. He compresses himself, folds into. It's not a pretty thing. Envelope me—envelope yourself. Without forewarning he lurches into a low house, a red room, through a rangle of veils—vague cells and filaments—mirrors of flashes, stampedes of the ocean. In at the foaming street they come. Sea above. People talk in general anyway. Move? My move. My motive. I move. I need (I used to only want, but).

Key don't. No surprises. He must understand the possibilities of mood in order to rouse it and guide it aright. A long winding sheet in the candle drips down upon him. Day of that day. All set. What knows who to expect now after all this. More and more of them. An arrest is made. This project's licence is fated to an abrupt termination. A bus, probably. Rootmaster.
The difference: more or less movement.

He has a very long conversation with a very nice sort of refugee, she in one train, he in another. Across the flatlands. English reportage. Obelisk with standing glimpse in the daily luminous. But they were not to be seen. I in the other. Eavesdropper and totem child, kindness and contusive words, perhaps at an edge.
Perhaps. She tells him how she cut off her nipples with a pair of garden shears. Talking of which: solitary woodpigeon at the elder again, since its mate were ate. As remarked upon above, it's wonderful to see so close that fine reticulum and food supply.

And he says, who do you think.
And she says, I don't know.
She's crying, urging—He's trying not to. He's strong. He's trying not to appear strong.
Recanter.

Yes? Maybe all you can recall and ask. Musical feet. Metrics. How encouraging, uplifting.
The track of her name resembles an abbreviated airport. Jfk. Suchlike. A menu. Antinemo. Antimemento. A listing, a list of lists, tilting like at windmills.

Because I cannot decide they are offered the light. Maybe we're going to work backwards now. He measures up backwash.

Right. Where does that leave us. I think I know where that leaves us. We need a clock. We are needful of time and dwelling. You see, he has begun to suspend. Walking backwards through the fire for you is how. Hello I said it's good to be back. I'm barked now. And you are mine according to the custom of the customary. And this is also how, with a solid hole cut into. People like me cheating. Today the elders are felled today. Deathsnare. What do you mean it goes where it goes, lines all over the memory carton?