scything it allover
and the bloodcurrencies down
stunted figures anneal in the blasts
inner postures unrelented
to known corporeal gestures
stubble growing on man mire cloud
all linked by nanoseconds
loud with the permafogs
of marching equinox
the paradox of kernels blackly
sprouting sour green wicks
in the small northern hour
reptile hearts crawl slackly
lymphatic tensions twist
necks of old lithite parrots
chuckling through engrammatic
viscions
the braincage
under the screw of dreamneed
rejects lost alltermatives
anagrits of maters stream
in cyclic slumberth crawling
for a far stossal round
orrey edswill rold
be yon tigal rave
THE MIRACULOUS BY NUMBERS
Recurrence 250-1
Reflexes 113 114
Reincarnation 31 40
Relativity applied to art 73
applied to being
applied to knowledge
applied to language
applied to man
applied to religions
applied to worlds
laws of
principle of
of substances to planes of universe
Religion 229-304
Liturgy
and man
origin of Christian Church
prayer
a relative concept
‘schools of repetition’
Repetition exercise of 260
Rites 303 314
Roles limited repertoire of 239-40
SINGING JAIL BLUES
Something’s familiar about singing in a jail
It’s one of those situations you
Hit racial memories of
Singing in a jail
When freedom is compulsory sitting on a hill
You’ll sometimes find you’re wishing you
Could smell the can again
Singing in a jail
You sing your heart out
Or let a fart out
Everything’s a cock-up
The only time you’re
Free from crime you’re
Sitting in the lock-up
Don’t want remission or justice or bail
Down at the bottom it’s just like
The top when you’re
Singing in a jail
ANGELINE DISCONSOLATE
Somewhere along the unwinding road of chance
My feline lover slunk into another bed
Somewhere along the unbending read of hand
He palmed himself off on another breach
With life-lines double-crossed in semi-trance
He took maiden voyage to another beach
And I am left disconsolate
Somewhere an unsubtle effleurage of cat
In the uncertain jungledom of If
Seduced him Auto-breasted fur-lined she
Somehow all anti-flowered stole him
For his massage means more than meaning
More than buts poor purr-loined lover he
And I am left disconsolate
Where was the will involved in this affray
Somewhere along the all-winding road of chance
Where the decisions unlocked from careful chests
Somewhere And if the minor keys of guilt
Are played no more then how is happiness
More than an organ-peeling dance
And I am left disconsolate
Always in the bad old world guilt-lines
Somewhere would trip us along the road of chance
But unlined now we spring-healed harm
Ourselves response without respons-
Ibility The fountain only plays
A tinkering simple that effects no balm
And I am left disconsolate
LIVING: BEING: HAVING
An epic in Haiku
I
On the Rhine’s chill banks
Somebody in a raincoat
Nobody walking
Or a river bird
Trying hard to memorise
The brown nearest black
This is a tidy
Nation even its madnesses
Go uniformed
We place our faith in
Bigger and better messiahs
Or Hydrogen 12
Richer than God his
Son. No wonder we nailed on
The Cross Croesus Christ
I spat in the ditch
It’s time we got the taste of
Nails out of our mouths
II
Every day smoulders
In the ashes of burnt-out
Possibilities
Not thinking of death
And well-combed I came across
A blank sheet of paper
The leaden birds hope
That time’s pulses flow past them
And we conversely
In their plush armchair
Of blood our lusts sit waiting
For dawn or lights-out
Irrelevance
In the darkness toothache while
Digging the happenings
Bad experiences
And the deaths of old countries
Make a raree-show
III
Let’s get personal
Or is the thigh on my thigh
Just its own meaning
Together we dreamed
Freedom was compulsory
And both woke screaming
One raised fingertip
Her red lips moving smiling
Cells multiplying
Stroking your slim breasts
And slender flutes flattering
A jumped-up penis
Tired dreams of action
Flowers in an empty bowl
A wooden rain falls
World and mind two or
One? Funny how the simplest
Question blows your mind!
HIS PROWED COURSE
Galaxy-crushing light alight on the pane
Flatters into velvet
Stands stockstill while the early motes dance
And gloom nestles deeper down a flight
Of steps. Beyond the flowering window
The scene of all disaster is awash
Would you believe a crucifixion?
The icebaus eddy on a washed-out sound
Music of the luted galaxies
All the cold vigils of the nightshift
Have robed me for my dilemma
Beyond the flowering windowpains
That input-output lends my daynight flights
THE DATA-REDUCED LOAF
Put it this way The multidimensional stimuli
Suggest that the body lying on the eurobed
Is in some way ‘mine’ The body that in some way’s
‘Hers’ enters bearing a wooden famine bowl
Empty of all but sunlight which she sets
I go too fast Five lines are not
By any means n photographs The bowl
Her skirt the lines the changing light
The retina that’s self-abused with sight
Shuffles the negatives into
The million-year-old data-reducer
Behind It’s a time exposure really
The changing light her legs the legs the lines
Caught in my ancient processor
Why should I trust it?
Supposing I am a chimera?
Put it this way Perhaps a multitude
Of interconnecting cells were so arranged
About a wooden bowl
In self-interest of course
That some progression could be made
Dimensionally The bowl the ta
ble
Its legs her legs my legs the light
Swarming between her and the deep-set panes
All without meaning
Until the heartbreaking isinglass
Of time seeps in to give to stimuli
Relationship and passage
And permanence
Did some of the fluid jelly-up
The data-reducer? Light
That holds universes spellbound
With its speed Instant light
Inexorable star-extinguishing light
Towering dark-proof light
Kindly light velvet on my knuckles
Beyond anachronism spaceshipping
Light light recordbreaking speedier Than computer-thought
Light do you fall
And grovel and crawl with million year sloth
Up the sludgy both-canal between retina
And data-reducer?
Does the old optic nerve
Slow you to child’s pace?
Should these archaic forms
Of calf and floor and leg and bowl assume
Uptodate angles and distortions
Should a new geometry inter
Their degrees inside my skull Should
In my presbyopia
There have been a new circuitry
To sort out time’s passages and sight’s
Should I still be a victim of
Old neolithic close-work that
Excludes me now from possibilities?
Put it this way Suppose that what I take
For ‘me’ is lying on this mattress
When what I take for ‘her’ arrives
Bowl in hand appears to arrive
Achieves in time and dimension
A presence verifiable
In my old time-machining eye
The greatest novelist
Of our space/time wrote his novel
Five million words about an unnamed girl
Arising one morning from her bed
Going across the room to open
Her casement window Of course he had
The tactical sense to leave it all unfinished
But he oversimplified
Has anyone ever opened
Or finished opening
The multidimensional stimuli
But time is a multitude and to
‘My’ mattress what we chose to think
Is ‘her’
The repetitive event of sex
Comes in eternal recurrence
Only the old data-reducers cut
The exposures down reducing all
To unity Put it this way
That ‘she’ is multitudinously among
The motes and lines and famine bowls and beds
Which punctuate that single node of time
For me and say that single node
Replicates
Endlessly to the last progressions Of a universal web
If there were roses or daylight in the bowl
If there was someone in the middle-distance
If the faint sounds that came to ‘me’
If I was there prepared to love
If we see anything but photographs
Torn from a neolithic eye
Put it this way
Time is a multitude
And ‘she’ far more than one
TOPHET
(‘Tophet: an ancient place of human sacrifice near Jerusalem; later a place of refuse disposal.’ Diet.)
I was prepared to sacrifice
Myself — or all else but myself.
Too harsh. I almost sacrificed
Myself. I would have done. One has
To be much surer time allows
Such liberty of gesture or
That the gesture is not just
In essence someone else’s. I
Saved myself to do some further good
I say some further good. The tide of faith
Dawdled. What did I do unto myself?
Acidhead mind and flesh corrode. Too harsh.
I am the refuse tip of all I was.
Boot of Revelations
Letting their origins down
with mooed music
The cattle milled and sledded
in the clapped out square
Boddihair buttressed
limbs rebuddied
Metamorphic sleep-awake-asleep
perception flickers
As he disintegrates
himself
into their programmed
Brainclumps with unbuckled words
Bending the ticked time-factory
Each circadian partment stuffed
with old writs
As words begin disimigrate
upripe postures fold
into a sea of herdivores
under the diss o’ loot ness
words began
What they heard they herded
churned through mass orifices
fossils mouth-vented
EIGHTY
Under the scoured thatch
Locked beams bar our disorder
Once maybe I had religion
Suffering had a future
Now I need only a shawl
I’m a crab’s claw
A broken wing blunted instrument
Won’t work or play
His veins are dried string
Not even knotted
His thoughts keep kicking
Every day further to the well
This place will never be home
Problems keep their old address
Now I’m just an old householder
And the house holds me.
TWENTY
The days burn like a hairdryer Rattle
Out loud as Friday’s money
Suddenly see problems like opening twots
Needing my thrust
Events make tyres strike concrete
Slicing me forward every direction
Negotiable Nights are jackpots
Giving back and front
Style does it all style
The city’s open to the nomad
Everywhere’s home and clear eyes
Never questioned
Friends wink like traffic lights
I can do more than yesterday
Motorcameleon-like
I’m change itself
DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER
Oh, no, he went well at last — more his old self,
And yet as if sure at last... Perhaps the Way smoothes
For the Gooduns... Cryptic as ever his last words were —
Surprised — ‘So
Soon
Sooth
Soothes...’
CHARTERIS
He was a self-imagined man
Old when still young
But there’s always
Time and everywhere
Recurrently eternally
A hive of selves
He left in the air
Skeleton structures
Of thought
And thoughtlessness
To some of us
They are unfinished
Palaces to some
Slums of nothingness
An ambiguity
Haunted him haunts
All men clarity
Has animal traits
The bombs were only
In his head
On his memorial tree
A joker wrote
KEEP THE VIOLENCE IN THE MIND
WHERE IT BELONGS
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesse
s, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This novel of the sixties appeared — differently fashioned — in chunks in New Worlds over two years, thanks to the encouragement of its editor, Michael Moorcock; although the original chunk, ‘Just Passing Through’, appeared in Impulse for February 1967, edited by Harry Harrison.
Copyright © 1969 by Brian Aldiss
ISBN 978-1-4976-0803-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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Barefoot in the Head Page 23
