Barefoot in the Head Read online

  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.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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