Barefoot in the Head (9 page)

It beats the living daylight

Out of one-time lifetime

Spill my living daylights down my shirt-front

Chase my living nightmares round my shirt-tail

All my trite cares

They’re just rag and bob-tail

So I’ve got circadian rhythm

You’ve got circadian rhythm

We’ve got circadian rhythm

So we ain’t going home no more

THE DEAD SEA SOUND

The First and Future Paradise

We all know it —

There was primordial epoch

In which everything was decided

An exemplar for future ages.

Let’s say it again —

You glimpse it sometimes behind bedroom

Curtains — a paradise and then

Catastrophe! They constitute the present.

Meaning what we do now is an end trajectory

Trajectory.

When I love you love

There’s nothing personal in it.

The decisive deed took place before us

Essential preceeding actual.

We must confront mythic ancestors

Unless we wish for ever

To be driven by our whirlwinds

To live in their old nostalgias.

Paradise is lingering legend in our day

The world’s smiles are few and wintry.

And the mountains no longer shore the sky.

But one may be a mountain even now —

It’s not too late! — if you pursue your self

If you can make cosmic journeys

Be a shaman not a sham man.

Dangers lie in the self, serpents

Lurk but there are new animals

And auxiliaries and tongues

To help psychopomps and singers

(Listen to birds and the throat of the cockatoo!)

Friendship with the animals who are

Beyond broken time, and schizophrenics:

Bliss of other bodies: the paradisiac

Journeys beyond life and

Death: pushing of utterance into

Mystery of myth: these are the four known ways

Fall About Laughing

When we tell them that we’re in love

Men’ll fall about laughing

When the lion gets around to lying down with the dove

Men’ll fall about laughing

When they try to work the machines

Men’ll fall about laughing

Ride a bike or open a can of sardines

Men’ll fall about laughing

What happened to the old straight line

Is no affair of yours or mine

Or the guys who run the place

It’s such an awful disaster

When the mind’s not the master

You can’t even keep a straight face

When we say that the wild days are back

Men’ll fall about laughing

When they find out that we’re sharing a sack

Men’ll fall about laughing

Men’ll fall about laughing

THE DEAD SEA SOUND

Formal Topolatry of Aspiring Forms

Love’s Nocturnal Entry into Bombed

Topography of an Unrealised Affair

An Anagrammatical Small Square Palinaromic Vision

MULTI-VALUE MOTORWAY

She too was obsessed with pelting images. Phil Brasher, her husband, was growing more and more violent with Charteris, as if he knew the power was passing from him to the foreigner. Charteris had the certainty Phil lacked, the gestalt. Certainty, youth, handsome. He was himself. Also, perhaps, a saint. Also other people. But clearly a bit hipped, a heppo. Two weeks here, and he had spoken and the drugged Loughborough crowds had listened to him in a way they never did to her husband. She could not understand his message, but then she had not been sprayed. She understood his power.

The pelting images caught him sometimes naked.

Nerves on edge. Army Burton, played lead guitar, passed through her mind, saying, ‘We are going to have a crusade.’ Lamp posts flickered by, long trees, a prison gate, furry organs. She could not listen to the two men. As they walked over the withdrawn meaning of the wet and broken pavement, the hurtling traffic almost tore at their elbows. That other vision, too, held her near screaming pitch; she kept hearing the squeal of lorry wheels as it crashed into her husband’s body, could see it so clear she knew by its nameboards it was travelling from Glasgow down to Naples. Over and over again it hit him and he fell backwards, disintegrating, quite washing away his discussion, savage discussion of multi-value logic, with Charteris. Also, she was troubled because she thought she saw a dog scuttle by wearing a red and black tie. Bombardment of images. They stood in a web of alternatives.

Phil Brasher said, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’ Charteris was eating up his possible future at an enormous pace. Brasher saw himself spent, like that little rat Robbins, who had stood as saint and had not been elected. This new man, whom he had at first welcomed as a disciple, was as powerful as the rising sun, blanking Brasher’s mind. He no longer got the good images from the future. Sliced bread cold oven. It was dead, there was a dead area, all he saw was that damned Christmas cactus which he loathed for its meaninglessness, like flowers on a grave. So generated hate and said powerfully and confusedly to Charteris, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’

‘Wait, first wait,’ said Colin Charteris, in his own English, brain cold and acid. ‘Think of Ouspenski’s personality photographs. There’s a high gloss. You have many alternatives. We are all rich in alternatives.’ He had been saying that all afternoon, during this confused walk, as he knew. Ahead a big blind wall. The damp smudged crowded city, matured to the brown nearest black, gave off this rich aura of possibilities, which Brasher clearly was not getting. Charteris had glimpsed the world-plan, the tides of the future, carried with them sailor-fashion, was not so much superior to as remote from the dogged Brasher and Brasher’s pale-thighed wife, Angelina, flocking on a parallel tide-race. Many alternatives; that was what he would say when next he addressed the crowds. Power was growing in him; he stood back modest and amazed to see it and recognise its sanctity like his father had. Brasher grabbed his wet coat and waved a fist in his face, an empty violent man saying ‘I ought to kill you!’ Traffic roared by them, vehicles driven by drivers seeing visions, on something called Inner Relief Road.