Brian Aldiss

The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s


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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      On the runways the markings are no longer valid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

      No