Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

In a superficial public way he tries to find out Why:

And he’d hate to think he ever told a lie.

Poor A! Poor A! He is no longer young!

He said so much I think and was uncouth

To guard against an awful chance

To listen to the truth –

He led himself a merry dance –

He hid his head in circumstance –

To fight against the truth!

Disciples : Poor us! Poor us! We really felt his tongue!

He drank Khagetia and chattered without ruth

To guard against his only chance

To hear G give out truth –

He led us all a merry dance –

He leads himself a dreary prance –

To smite against the truth!

To fight against the truth!

The Unaimed Deadman Theme

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forgotten forbidden

Suicide’s revelation its sunnyside hidden

Death’s black-and-white checker is down on the table

Fugitive fustian funebral infinite formidable

Far down the runway the black sheds are standing

My love talks to me with a delicate air

I am the victim the assassin the wounder

Her face looks no larger as I stand close than

It simultaneously does in my telescope sights

But pleasant is walking where elmtrees paint shadow

If I fire I might as well hit me

I walked with her once where her elms brought their shadows

The dogrose dies now while the invalid car

Barks vainly and I the assassin the wounder

On the runways the markings are no longer valid

Hieroglyphs of a system now long obsolete

No this button first love yes that’s the idea

If I fire I might as well hit me

Foreign familiar filthy fastidious forbidden forgotten

I sprinted a dozen times over where rotten

Things grew and she cried for a sweet-flavoured minute

Fugitive fustian funebral formidable infinite

Lament Of The Representatives Of The Old Order

(A silent dummy dirge)

We kept up our facade

The unworld showed the third world how

And prized its pretty inhibitions

They undressed us

And possessed us

And now that times are hard

The unworld holds its outward show

Too late for us to change positions

They have dressed us

And confessed us

The Shuttered Street Girl

(Love song for flutes)

Her face showed like a shuttered street

Under the mauve and maureen flash

From which iguanas might crawl

Golden gullets wide

She stood there in a wet shift breathing

And just a mental block away

A lane lay in old summer green

Behind her pregnant eyes

Where a young barefoot girl might drive

Her would-be-swans all day

Or night for night and day are both

They don’t apply

There’s always summer in the dreaming elms

Till your last shuttered white year

And while the small rain fills

The thoroughfares of love

So her face in blue fermentation

When she crouches seems

Like an ever-visiting miracle

As she pees by old brickheaps

There’s whole sparse countryside

Buckling up from far

Underground as she stoops there

And our small rain raining

The Infrasound Song

Where the goose drinks wait the wildmen

Wait the wildmen watching their reflections

When the damson fruits the wildmen

Wild Neanders dream their speckled sleep

They have their dances ochre-limbed to a stone’s tune

And their heavy hymns for the solstice dawn

Their dead go down into their offices berobed

With ceremony. Their virgins paint

Their cinnamon lips with juice of berry

They owned the world before us

Now their valleys fall echoing our footfall

In their shattered towns the smoke clings still

Down the autobahn arrows in the afternoon

As we drive them convert them or ride them

We are the strangers over the hilltop

Peace on our brows but our dreams are armoured

Fearsome in our feathers brutally flowered

Pushing the trip-time up faster and faster

Pre-psychedelic men know that extinction

Sits on their hilltops all drearily towered

As we cavalry in with the master

Cavalry in with the master

With the master

At The Starve-In

Met this girl at the starve-in

I met this girl at the starve-in

I said I met today’s girl at the starve-in

Protein deficiency’s good for the loins

She said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Yes she said there’s bad news from Deutschland

She lay there and said there’s bad news from Deutschland

Can you hear those little states marching

I raised my self kingly in the stony playsquare

Ground my elbow like a sapling in dirt

Looked through the stilled plantangents of smoke

Proclaimed that even the bad news was good

We’ve marched under banner headlines

Closed down the stone-aged universities

See ally fall upon ally

Oh Prague don’t dismember me please

It was all in the Wesciv work-out

Now we got some other disease

Met my fate in the work-out

Man, I met my fate in the work-out

No denying I met my fate in the work-out

And no one knows what’s clobbered me

Rainbows at starvation corner

There’s rainbows at starvation corner

I keep seeing rainbows at starvation corner

like they’re the spectrums at the feast

Met this girl at the starve-in

Yeah met this girl at the starve-in

Oh yeah I met this pussy at the starve-in

Ana we dreamed that we ruled Germany

We dreamed we ruled all Germany

It’s One of Those Times

It’s sim ply

One of those times

when you’re going to pot

one of those crimes

when you really should rot

one of those times you do not

It’s sim ply

one of those mornings

they’ve all got you taped

one of those dawnings

you hoped you’d escaped

one of those mornings you’re raped

The cities are falling like rain from the skies

The toadthings are leaving the ground as you watch

You’re laughing and dancing with joy and surprise

It helps with that pain in your crotch

So it’s just

one of those rages

that rupture and burn

one of those ages

you get what you earn

one of those pages

you wish you could turn

’Cos its none of your bloody concern

No it’s none of your bloody concern

It knocks you sideways

None of your bloody concern

The Poison that Powered Their Scrutinies

The poison that powered their inner scrutinies

Seeped into beetling baldbright Boreas

So he saw himself tumultaneously

Making the cripple still

Upon the cabbalistic asphalt

Making couch upon a lake of flames

Making love to a dummy vulva

Making Age Old Ina suffer him

His face cracked its banks

China thoughts depiggied

Boreas saw more of his borearsed self

Than he could dare or wish to see

He rocked with unreason on

The staggered balcony of insight

Manifolding in discardment

As his capital lost all loot

The Miraculous In Search Of Me

It could all have turned out differently.

Indeed, to other peeled-off I’s

The difference is an eternal recurrence:

And the stone trees that erupt along

My beaches, roots washed bone-clever

By the tow and rinse of change –

They shade one instance only of me,

For circumstance is more than character.

At this bare fence I once turned left

And became another person: laughed

Where else I cried and now sit lingering

Looking at Japanese prints;

Or in a restaurant decked with pine