Photograph © Matthew Dolan

Insane Leonards:

snapshots of delirium from a new magnetic pole #2

by Richard Makin

For MG

                Spoon carp syndicate.
                She never tells me how much I have lost (it depends which side of the body). But I never look down, always stare straight ahead at the unflinching wall; to me, a swimmer is already a drowned man. Therefore I write ‘a drowning man’.

                Ferment of lactic acid, calligraphy scrawled across the mount, flanks corroded by snow—electricity, microwaves, infrared—and the raw fact that he has nobody. The figures are simply unthinkable: what is the difference between a piece of rock et cetera.
                Rupture at ear’s labyrinth, reported.

                She is vertigo, by invitation only, non-transferable. It was funny, in a cartoonish sort of way, that hoof propped against a blanched wall. You don’t have to make it up, just turn your head and come dizzy. (Welcome error, in lieu of interpretation.) And everyone else has shut his eyes. We never wanted to leave that surgery. I kept dreaming of a flooded house, filling up with blue-cobalt water. There’s this distant roar. I have to remind her. Pronounce your words. Suffer for me. It had the webbed fingers on one hand. It shamed forth, into light.
                No one used me. I was expecting back-people turning up. Everyone had a child that died soon after birth. It was that gene. I think it escaped. It was tinny. Yes, I only really knew my mad—one died, another edited: second-hand police, a pair of iron door-stoppers, and so on. Perilous happenstance.
                Then the explosion. Gases expand. They’re not coming. It was a tube of spotless, a 30-Tracker. Then she said, as politely as she could, would you please tell me first which road—
                Which are our alarums? (I suffered a fantastic rain one year.) From far past ten they were playing the tic-tac game. A liaison soldier—a discriminating reader of newspapers—glanced musingly over the board. At times we met people we barely knew, and would never meet again. I think we can call it the standard divination (bibliomancy). Emotional happiness and fulfilment has reached its peak and can proceed no further. He was a walking gulag, an absolutist, constantly kicking people out, until he was the only one left.
                In the shadow under a buttress, you make me despise my whole former life.

                Mouth open. Your.
                I can be alone without my thoughts, bones and tendons of appalling strength. The ranks were still motionless. She imagines she has snared.  
                — Things will change and get better. I just wish the general speed of the clogs was faster. Frustration wins me over, at times. But I’m glad we’re still friends, stillborn.
                — Goatfish is portmanteau, basilisk. We fear little unloved, abandoned times. That’s all. Nothing. Not a word, and when that happens.
Dust is swept from the flagstone floor and neatly enveloped in a page torn of news-sheet.
                —As for myself, I can say I’m indifferent to love, and have always felt a sense of abandonment. (Right into the tender part of his opponent.) By this I mean a sense of self-sufficient exile; there is this great scar drifting across our sphere of vision—we can, after all, dwell anywhere. The right hand rather lacks brilliance, don’t you think?
                —I agree, an atavistic sense of abandon, reversal to ancestral type. (Sorry, I meant ataxia.) I fail on the indifference. Maybe a little, just there. No, there.
                —I meant the need to reflect upon and question; it can be habit, sentiment, a potent degeneracy.
                —On the other hand, it’s proved that ninety-eight percent is co-dependent. Which makes the remaining two sick, the majority normal. Accordingly, friend, I have surrendered my human condition. The plenitude of the object, and of the instant, springs forth in the face of perdition.
                —I’m unintentional. I count myself among the sick. I found this rock, eyes the colour of ashes, amber.
                —Ha! I knew you were going to say that. I need now to sleep, long day in front and behind, and working dreams, tomorrow, tomorrow.

                Nude. White. Still. Cool. Inluxuriant.
                It was as if he himself were a long way off from his body.

                In limine.
                To be sung in a style of (almost) regretful conciseness. He clenches his jaw and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his teeth.
                I don’t see the swimmer, I see a drowning man. A stain on the bed. (I don’t know.) They are not people at all. They are the big infirms. So, all the time, one is being outmanoeuvred by chance, while simultaneously nurtured by it.
                This is not a very good thing to be doing to oneself. There is scant prospect. It’s because I was talking. Because you’re supposed to talk. Well, there was this morning came.
                —As I was saying, I surrendered my human: nightmare and amen. It was the swift celerity of his death that brained my purpose, carrying forgotten curses. I don’t see those awful things that smother you, go up your head and tie you over, knotless.

                It was, he says, the architecture of the arrangement that impressed me, everything neatly perpendicular, full ninety degrees of void, and the nodding of petalled heads, running aground.
                Then she said breakers meaning groyne.

                Today’s task: trawl newspaper for crimes and list (the struggle bedevils here). Inner space is the undersea region regarded as an environment. The author enjoys providing the reader with useless details, of the most precise type.
                Yellow post-it note on inside front door.
                One of a pair of small, mediaeval kettle drums.
                Overmen. Deputies. Shoplifers.
                The vein carrying blood from the lower limbs and abdomen.
                Windmill pivoted on post. The furies, the angel, the sixth circle, the heretics all lived together in the ninth hell.

Insane Leonards Episode One can be read here.
Insane Leonards Episode Three can be read here.

Richard Makin’s novel Dwelling is published by Reality Street
www.realitystreet.co.uk

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