The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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      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.

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