Authors: Brian Aldiss

Brothers of the Head (13 page)

BOOK: Brothers of the Head

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Yet torture them meanwhile.

In this world I'm love's tourist

And take a package tour of solitude

Our love is a forest.

Oh you are all things to me

Victim and vampire,

You keep three lovers happy

A phoenix of their fire.

In this world I'm love's tourist

Another head is dreaming of your beauty

Our love is a forest.

Your loveliness is legend,

A statue I would carve,

You keep three lovers happy

And satisfied to starve.

In this world I'm love's tourist

Our love is a forest.

Bacterial Action

Although the world fills up with men

Their numbers do not match

The numbers of the swarming swarms

Of creatures living in our skin.

They have their nations and domains,

Pleasant jungles, deserts, streams.

They live, beget, and leave no trace

For eye to see or mind to judge.

They've no Byzantium or Rome,

Yet they were there, in smock and gown;

Proud Caesar was their planet too,

In time their old prolific line

Will speed commensally with us

And all unknowing win the stars â

Yes, ultimately win the stars

Unknowing

Star-Time

We â who had survived the journey

To the forty-seventh millennium

Where dark starlight grows on bushes

And eyes house laughing kookaburra birds â

We sat drinking
xwaszha
in a cafÃ©

With boys and beauties whose grandfathers

Were in their cots when we set out.

It was triumph

My happiness took me to loving hearts and couches

Yet we who had survived the journey

Knew that all the while our memory

Stayed with those elegant grey seas

Curling over what was Europe.

Just for a Moment

Just for a moment think about spun glass spinning

Moving in a low December's sun,

Shining above rough dark secret meadows

Lying where the leaf-choked marshes run.

Just for a moment think about a perfect colour

Fading on the margins of the sea,

Lapping against a pallid shingle pathway

Leading to a castle tall and free.

Just for a moment think about pure silence

Shining above a distant mountain peak,

Looking towards the radiant eye of moonlight

Falling upon the contours of your cheek.

Just for a moment visualize time absolute

Dwelling through a planet's unlived years,

Passing over far untravelled tundras

Turning where the long-haired comet steers.

Or just for a moment think about a moment

Let movement colour silence time all flow,

About your lovely waiting head unknowing â

And then you'll know my love's bounds,

Then you'll know.

I was Never Deaf or Blind to Her Music

No, I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura

I breathed more oxygen in her company,

Reached higher speeds and a wider sort of skies

And dredged for her secret salts and alkalis.

It was just that the days closed in,

A new motorway went up between her place and mine.

We couldn't agree on the merits of Stockhausen

There were quarrels about my drinking habits

We stopped going to gigs together

And then there was that trouble with her employer

Never properly explained

I started breeding wire-haired terriers

She said she lost her respect for me when

I couldn't give up smoking.

But no, I was never impervious to her vistas

Plunging into the lake of what she was

She stormed me every day like valiant deeds

And my head was as full of her as poppy seeds.

It was just that the weather changed,

My job took me up Sheffield every week.

I felt a compulsion to join the scientologists

She got mad on Dresden china pieces

We became hooked on television

She suddenly wanted to see the Sierra Nevadas

And dance the true Flamenco

With a bearded Dutchman studying zoology

When I think of her driving round Granada

I long for our time again.

No, I was never deaf or blind to her music,

Time was, her alchemy was all upon me.

She packed every moment like a picnic box

She was air and sea to my hills and rocks.

I was never deaf or blind to your music, Laura.

Footnotes

¹Two-Way Romeo
by Paul Day. Copyright Â© 1981 Bedderwick Walker Entertainments Ltd. All rights reserved.

²âYear By Year the Evil Gains' in
New Writings in SF 27
, edited by Kenneth Bulmer, 1976.

³Colwyn Thomas, âThe Two Shots that were Heard Round the World',
Sunday Times
, 23 May 1982.

About the Author

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book,
The Brightfount Diaries
(1955). His first published science fiction work was the story âCriminal Record', which appeared in
Science Fantasy
in 1954
.
Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

Several of Aldiss' books have been adapted for the cinema; his story âSupertoys Last All Summer Long' was adapted and released as the film
AI
in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine
SF Horizons.

Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.

Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollins

77â85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.thefridayproject.co.uk

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Pierrot Publishing Ltd

This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Source ISBN: 9780007482047

Version 1

FIRST EDITION

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