Photo: Matthew Dolan.

Insane Leonards:

snapshots of delirium from a new magnetic pole ♯3

Richard Makin

For that spark, sorry must chaos. Needless, I see you. He covets one eye, as if a band of flesh scratched across, bearing in, closing him up. And a glistening arc of some pearlescent stuff, the book who cracked my vision, cut-up of iris in retina. . . . Tap-tap-tap went the coroner. Where will I venture in the interim.
        Answer. Transfigured, growling big cats cower backward as he pads through, splitting their ranks—until you quit and disappeared from sight, as if dead from some undisclosed act of treason.

Machine. Silent. Disuse in unease. Absurd negation that wills no consequence—but you’ll always need a subject. We had to wait for the things: crumbs of radio commentary, oily spectra, cyanide-laced dye, a plummet of Five-Nines. Let’s see how we’re doing timewise.
        Anima plus one is fourteen. Now depict a more or less inventively achieved erotic dissatisfaction (beautiful of course compared with what a man).

So you’re not dogmatic about process; if it works, you’ll use it. It was as if he had flies in his head.
        The phrase means nothing at all, or sweet void. Origin is tragic. You just guess. Who was ploughed up or sprang from the ground with unseemly wisdom, beyond her years? It’s time you did some talking of your own.
        Somewhiles. The rim of a caldera. Or simply for no specific reason, without further ado: a trace-rope. Should they blind you, fight back. An imaginary perfect is thereunder described, snared inside the body in question. That is perhaps (or probably) your own hand. A device was invented to immobilize the part onto which skin had been grafted. There are still all these little things to do. Outside, every object was bleached grey of salt and ice.
        Volumetric laboratory gaswear is almost a quotation. They were all trapped by their nouns, magnetic field confined to the waterline. If you dream standing up, you’ll fall over.
        The creature ejaculates, excretes and dies. His life had long hung in a balance, a mere byword, but a time and place far removed. Is it not.
        With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost—since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which is left undone. All sweethearts are shandy once was writ.

Storm, drunkenness, wounds. I too was a senseless child: vows of silence, the sacred violence of language—a woman in mourning about whose eye. . . . People flying, levitating, all sorts of counterpoints. Can you not let anyone else in downstairs: thankyou thankyou thankyou.

A soul once repelled, crowned summit to base with emerald springtide roots et cetera. The microphone triggers one and two on the platform back here at the hole. If I must be blind, I am blind. We’re disarming. You have the webbed toes, do you not, the missing thumb? All signs of the male were cauterized. This is an exchange so paradoxical it betrays itself—the land is a land of transhumance. I know of only nine orifices she says.
        Written on skin, I revolt against death. (Are you going to analyse every sheet?) When are we going back to places, resident in situ? There is the river and a row of grey houses opposite, beyond that nothing. And then I say, ‘This is how it was.’

T H E    E N G A G E M E N T

No, she doesn’t. She dances in the lido. It’s a habit: the cordon. Defense of forests. Once more time was spoke, my perpetuity gland. Start writing pain-body of instant and stop.
        Then we exhumed, one by one, the salient patterns and situations—apart from battle itself, which must always wait.

The surviving patients and so on.
        A poster hung in the vestibule, in lieu of an internal associative image: I came here to honour the earth et cetera, an invisible coupling. A weapon swoops through the air. I’m standing at a threshold. Half an hour later she’s eating bread and everything. I meant wild, boisterous, visionary, half-crazy. Void-headed. A terminus.

And they are laborious and tactile, these tiny intellectual gasps; in short, the tower fills me with dread. She allows herself to be used. She allows herself to be read.
        Salt of discs. Say. Make speech and silence, energy and spillness, twin forms of thy play. Seamaws are massing. But we make a great team: your recklessness, my cautious havoc. One stain resembled a finger of iron oxide. Count them is the repost.
        Can they do nitro she murmurs, her mind quite made up.
        See, love dalliance, and he then told out the tale of his begetting.

Three post-mortem portraits and an idea for apotheosis in the lift.
        A thing superfluously and inappropriately added to a finished work, counterfeit or false.
        A sort of confessional monument, meaning piled upon meaning with the precision of a military manoeuvre.
        A candleless feast, gorged in darkness.
        If they could echo this every week as a triumvirate, well. Sometimes you can see matter, working that way.
        The beheaded or lightning-struck means we must start all over again. I know what an eclipse is. Transmit. Twist your body ninety degrees anticlockwise, without moving the soles of your feet. What prompted your nitric enquiry anyway the question asked. No daylight for days it was.
        There’s an inconsistency within the timeline of the book; in the opening pages we’re talking about the heat of high summer, yet a few pages in, the sleet and gales of autumn. What is the loosest star to earth? Now I’m falling apart (one has to be methodical). The malls were crowded that day.
        The stiletto stabs through the temple, penetrates eye socket or base of skull. People have got used to things. He seemed almost right, almost natural.

Insane Leonards Episode 2 can be read here.

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

Also in: Literature