Barefoot in the Head Read online

  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

  And 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 on 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.

  BOOK THREE

  Homewards

  OUSPENSKI’S ASTRABAHN

  Sparkily flinging up stones from the tired wheels the gravelcade towed darkness. Headlights beams of granite bars battering the eternal nowhere signposting the dark. The cuspidaughters of darkness somebody sang play toe with the spittoons of noon the cuspidaughters of darkness play toe with the spittoons of noon the cuspidaughters of darkness play toe with the spittoons of noon. Only some of the blind white eyes of joy ride was yellow or others but altirely because the bashing the cars the jostling in the autocayed. And hob with the gobs of season.


  In these primitive jalopsides herding their way like shampeding cattletrap across the last ranges of Frankreich that square squeezing country sang the drivniks. Cluttering through stick-it-up-your-assberg its nasal neutral squares its windowbankage to where the Rhine oiled its gunmottal under the northstar-barrels and a wide bridge warned zoll. Break lights a flutter red I’d ride the rifled engines ricochetting off the tracered flow below.

  Cryogenetic winds bourning another spring croaking forth on the tundrugged land doing it all over and bloodcounts low at a small hour with the weep of dream-pressure in the cyclic rebirth-redeath calling for a fast doss all round or heads will roll beyond the tidal rave. RECHTS FAHREN big yellow arrows splitting the roadcrown. Writhing bellies upward large painted arrows letters meaningless distant burners seducing him to a sighfer in a diaphram.

  Clobwebbed Charteris stopped the Banshee. He and Angeline climb out and he wonders if he sees himself lie there annulled, looks up into the blind white cliffs of night cloud to smell the clap of spring break its alternature. About him grind all the autodisciples flipping from their pillions and all shout and yawn make jacketed gestures through their fogstacks.

  They all talk and Gloria comes over says to Angeline, ‘Feels to me I have bound the hound across this country before.’

  ‘Its the flickering of an unextinguished loveplay starting odour at this stale standpoint Glor.’

  ‘So you say? It lies here under night yet? Like some other place! You should say we wanted to come here or was that some place else?’

  Hearing distonished by the hour.

  ‘Anyhow, I can cool inspection while we get the kettle on this groggy mote.’

  And other yattering earvoices crying to him through the labyrinths set in a concrete head of nightsloth he Charteris Shaman with the painful yellow arrows almost vertical more difficult to negotiate and maybe transfixed his own powers watercoarsed. More than the voices, breathing, ominous movements of bodies inside clothes, writhing of toes inside shoes and sly growth of the corkscrewing curls inside a million pants locutions and dislocations.

  Breathing deep to force out his voice drown the sense of drowning be said, ‘We bit the present aimèd alternative friends. So let’s doss down and tear off a new chain tomorrow rate where we stunned.’

  Wraithlike in the dying beams, they pulled out sacks or piled together on backseats or a few took pains to boil up coffee or tea with pale flames dazed upon their chained eyelids or fleeting countrysides pillowed on their greasy locks of sleep. So was Angeline’s belly mountained with the Drake-Man’s seed but she nestled alone under blankets. He harboured to the girl who had joined the motorcad at Luxembourg Elsbeth with her fine young jewish warmth.

  Humbly they all had to narrow to the enemy breath of night flood with their closing rhythms lowered body temperature slatted Venetian thoughtpulses that all blankets and small fires and pillows could not dam or defer for more than

  Deeper limbos other deaths crueller sleeps exist in which the fuzzed alternative Is stand watching peeling off from the spool of probability like negatives that never reach the developer haunting the slumberer click of shutter snicker of rapid eye movement old self-photographs number the data-reducer

  Aged amokanisms of comprension guttering

  Mending morn he takes delight knowing her juiciness in feeling the tousled dryness of crutch and turning that unseen smile to mossture Whereon she wrickles and strokes his semierect griston with a thigh giving him mandate pulling plump arms compulsively about his neck constrictly harsh acid breath of morn mingled and the high old stinkle of feet and bum and body in the bag mantling them as he mounts smelsbeth all here and now be physical like all stubble on the rolling summer mountains where the skies steam upward over the incredible brow and motion everywhere in the sapient earth multilimbed freedom of the heat —

  Breaking in the harsh cries of uniform throats and yells of drivniks together with some rumpling and footmaching where the pace is fractured. This Rhine-bridge and engines roaring all hell out there and my juices seeping unporpelled sort of semi-ohgasm shit it’s just a slimeoff this time Elsbeth honeypit.

  Big boots by his nose passing and Charteris emerges to dianoise the seem. Oh boy the metal camp or mobile scrapdump wheeled junkade raddling the end of bridge nose to nose or tail like they just beetled out the Rhine and disciples heads among them flowering in cool dazes like they stargazed an astrobahn.

  Bucketing about bigbooted the Deutscher polizei falling around the bumpers and crying for order.

  Charteris laughing and feeling for his jeans propped on one elbow.

  ‘Hey, dig the inspired popular image of worldorder in this pure pink faces of authority shining and lovely smarched uniforms spruce like pressed plants running!’ But gathering his mind to take a closer fix on them he snuffed that the Schwabe fell apart uniform-wise many without belts or buttons or boots or Klimpenflashengewurstklumpen to their name and even the jackets hung upon a bygone hook elsewhere. Still for effect they scraped trafflnk jam noises from their throats.

  One crusader broke from the autodump with his bedroll yelping and the big lorries had him down and up and a one-two round the shaggy side-chops left right left right moonlight moonlight to the fuzzwagon.

  ‘You try the uncivil disobendiate! God help you!’ they yelled.

  ‘Get this goddamned mobile scrap mobile!’ they yelled.

  ‘This is a nice tidy police state not a drosshouse!’ they yelled.

  ‘We’ll have you Schrott-makers shot!’ they yelled.

  ‘Clear the way for the traffic!’ they yelled, though the road flowed as silent as the river straight back to Switzerland like cut cloth and Army jumped up with his flute and piped and others sang, ‘Clear the way for the traffic Nice clean autobahns we want to see Leave no human litter lay Clear the traffic for the way’ as the cops schwarmereid in among their vehicles.

  One looked down at all Elsbeth showed as she sat up, yelled, ‘Ach ein Zwolfpersonenausschnitt!’ and she snatched her vest about her vocal bubes, crying back abuse at him with a vingor jangled decibels adding to the general racket where one or two cars started up and backed or bucked smokily on the region great dizzy din.

  Angeline came hurrying as he bent up and with attention in another part pulled at his jeans saying, ‘Colin you see they’re going to take our kids off to the nick if you don’t do something quick we defied law and odur by settling right down here in the traffic route forgetting it was going to be sunrise boon or something mad or else just tired I don’t know but you better do something quick.’ On Elsbeth she could not look the dark hair round her shoulders and all entrances slack.

  ‘Only we’re traffic the only traffic apart from us there’s no another car in slight it don’t make a hold-up holed up here.’

  ‘Better go and tell that to the Fuehrer here he comes!’

  Pointing to a big white police car like a spaceship a yacht a heinleiner beyond reach of storms opening all ways and spilling most noticeably a mighty man in a white uniform big patched with a thousand medals like over-stamped bundle of laundry and boots and a cap with bright peak while rammed in his bathysphere a monster cigar approaching and two minions round him crying the Kommandant.

  Then all the Schwabe crying ‘Who in charge here?’

  Sawn trees on parade streetside.

  Time like a never-rolling steam.

  Bridge of nerve-defying metalangles.

  Slowly the cries silence the scene and all stock-still except a little morning breeze through which the drivniks are thin and pale with hair that made them in England part of nature growing right down sweet and unswept from hair and head and lips and cheeks and shoulder part of the pubic earth itself but here on this barren not so damned good and analogous. ‘Who in charm hair?’

  All get a charge or no one. Petrifaction of inner posture though Army pipes.

  Heaving still his unzipped hipjeans Charteris he moves among the carmaze towards the white man Angeline at his side small bu
t big seeing the eternal pattern as the object arrangement makes a readymade more beautiful than planned

  an emblem of eternity capable of slowing time something he had known before this marvellous be inside the ducks-and-drake man skimming over a deeper ocean of truth in which he wished to dive deeper and deeper away from the times too grave for mere communication on an average plane or old grey steps misleading to old brown building nicked in railings curled to dilate Italian-made and now up he’s in a grey-brown room black-and-red tiles of a transcendental patterning oh rest me again for ever in the minds murmuring mysteries where I belong and could walk through and walk through forever the hall the long within withit for ever the pattern where time stalks sideways birds flying backwards reemerge as lizards before the days never-ending.

  ‘You are in charge of this rabble?’ The brilliant laundry bundle before his unzipped eyes and what was that place where I was I was there for a minute? eternity? Metzronome tick? In some late time-bracket feasting beyond this schwabian illusion of the present tell them why not.

  Did they hand me over old betrayal?

  Raising his voice, ‘I am in all command and to me time swings back off its hinge mersing the tiny present — no, no, I tell you — I am Charteris. Paradise is in me I feel it I know it!’ Now he waved his arms saw them above him making off in the sky this way that seeking the new dimensions or old dimensions seen as fresh alternatives as the birds cryrated into lizards and the new anima instantly back to stone. ‘What we have seen is worth all collapse and the old Christianity world so rightly in ruins if you forsake all and live where there is most life in the world I offer. There the laternatives flick flock thickly by and again with his hands and hair he conveyed to there the great intellectual system that Man the Driver synthesised relating all phenomena and postulating a new map — a map he said wandering in and out of speech as dropping his jeans entirely he climbed hair-legged onto the heinleiner car and rallied them all — a man deminiating the topography related belaying a sparky relevationship between this