The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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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On the runways the markings are no longer valid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
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