The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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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
Cones taste in company
Silver carp and damson tart.
Along the walls
Other I’s went, strangers in word and deed,
Alien photocopies, spooks
Closer than blood-brothers, more alarming
Than haggard face spectral in empty room,
Lonelier than stone age campfires, doppelgangers.
They are my possibilities. Their pasts were once
My past, but in the surging wheels
And cogs become distorted. So, this one –
On a far-distant spoke! – danced
All night and had splendid lovers,
Wrote love letters still kept locked
Treasured in a bureau-drawer, knew girls
The world now knows by name and voice.
But this I chose to wander down
My stony beach, my own rejection.
My past is like a fable. Truly,
Circumstance is more than character.
Whatever other peel-offs saw –
My I was on the stranded alien land,
The restlessness of broken cities,
Mute messages that only after years
Open, the crime of vulnerability,
Patched land of people never known to be
Known or knighted, wild bombed world,
World where I taste the flavour on
The tongue, knowing not if my other eyes
Would call it happiness or doom.
I am, but what I am –
Others may know, others may care. Only
The dear light goes in her hand
Away among the childhood trees.
In the perspectives of my mind
It never dwindles. I always live
With myself; and that’s too much.
I need
The overpowering circumstance
The nostalgia of
That eternal return
As if the unstructured hours
My uninstructed hours
Of day are pulped like
Newspaper
And used on us again
With the odd word
Here and there
Locked
Starting up out of context
Treasured
An old ghost
Haunting another
Discardment.
Indeed it is
Always eternally
Turning out
Different.