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1. |
Rags and Questions
04:36
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Quite unexpectedly here I stand among the last thousand left on earth
So far removed from the illusion we were born into
In all the dissonance will we understand
That a record of our footsteps is something we should hold onto?
And would we search for every scrap of what we once discarded?
Build a salvage-library to keep our fading knowledge safely guarded
But it’s all gone quiet
Though there’s no solace in the mud
We have to try it
Now all our systems and our crimes
Are lying scattered by the flood
There are paths to our survival in the new and the archival
A misjudgement in their balance a risk of nothing left
But a sun-scorched song of sorrow in a moment as we wander Through the puzzles of the free and bereft
If we could realign the shards of what we used to think
They’ll be bound for annotation in the Institute of Things We Must Not Do
And in that mausoleum in the quiet dark
Illuminate our errors and our shame to inform the new
But for now all take a hold of every rag and every question that we find
So much truth to excavate and so many wounds to bind
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2. |
The Two Before the Five
03:42
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Welcome to the Mandelbrot treadmill
Welcome to the never-setting sun
Welcome to the ever-round-the-corner moon
That lays an even light on everyone
Welcome to the circuits in our fingers
Welcome to my eyes across the street
Welcome to the cadence in our tendons
Welcome to the shifting plates beneath our feet
Hold that
Right there
While we do we stay alive inside a song
Hurts like honey on your tongue
Keep this
Right here
Keeping our balance in the vortex
On the two before the five before the...
...One of these days we’ll find something
To hold us in between the ways to fall
One of these ways we might germinate
Instead of making deserts of us all
Melting back to circles in our plastic
Changing in our loops to keep us new
Seems some wheels could use some reinventing
Turns out we have quite a lot to do
And now round about the edges of the water we too could slip pentacular
There are strange velvet gravities and beckonings tentacular
But there are calculations and slingshots
To harness tension, harvest momentum in redirected flow
And old delicious cold black hole oblivion is the not the only way that this could go...
...to all your liminal parties
And dance among the other grains of sand
Ask the question differently and sideways
I will answer once I understand
Come with me along the furthest tree branch
Maybe we can visualise the wood
Here’s the only way this could have been
Except for all the other ways it could
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3. |
Invisible Threads
03:48
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In the years since we scattered
So much has been shattered
And where have we all been?
And now for some reason or other we fell back together
And we huddle like goats turned out on the bright cold green
We’re scuffed and we’re battered
The winter’s been hard
But here looking up at our knees against the blue
Hold tight to each other’s words a bit more than we used to
Here’s a length of one my invisible threads for each of you
Go and wind it round trees and trainlines and don’t let go
It will stretch round the back of the moon that hangs in the garden if you need it to
I’ve stopped looking for beginnings and endings
Amidst all our messes of tangled up yarn
There’s no rolling us neat and new all back in our packets now
And how I love unravelling into your arms
And through the summer we drew patterns in the sand
Fleeting microcosms of joy in this collapsing fading land
I want to go back to the sea
Summer opens and closes like a shell
I want to go back to the sea
Did you keep a hold of the end of the line for me?
Hold it tight against the swell
If we could be
The ways we can see
Beyond what we’re defaulting to
If we could change before the changes reach us
And the wave takes all we ever want to do
You are the ones I’d choose
To hold and to build with
But here with the feel of our backs against the ground
All we can do is search for broken strands
And re-thread the loops that come unwound
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4. |
Jackdaw
03:54
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Coalface jackdaw on my chimney
What do you know?
Where will you go
As we keep hacking and burning?
No capacity for why
Nowhere left to fly
Would you drop out of the sky
All blackening and turning?
And the earth is riven
But the rivets are forgiven
In the name of disposable days
Do you pick the quickthorn berries from the dust
And ache for us to end our ways?
But feathers can't fight diggers
Nowhere left to fly
So here you stay and all the air turns grey
Coalface jackdaw on my chimney
How can it be
That we can’t see?
It’s not so hard to stop, is it?
On command of just a few
The system shackles all we do
Each day; it mines the people
We stay helplessly complicit
And the earth is riven
But the rivets are forgiven
In the name of disposable days
Do you pick the quickthorn berries from the dust
And ache for us to end our ways?
How many feathers would it take to fight a digger?
Is this the way we’ll stay
As all the air turns grey?
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5. |
Constellation
02:27
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So you and I have both agreed
Not to use the telescope again
We slipped behind the door
And shifted the focus through the rain
But that new constellation
In all its magnificence
Is best left dusted and muted
At a distance
Like the way I should have maybe stayed
But I forgot to
Like the way I’m saying this
In the way you taught me not to
I’m pretending I’m not squinting at the sky
Where somewhere far it’s bright
As when it seemed close enough to touch
But you know how I always remember
And I remember
It was so silver
It made me tremble so much
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6. |
Crow Alley
01:04
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7. |
Dataphage
04:12
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We’re dropping feathers everywhere now
We’re dropping leaves and seeds and scales
This biome is itching with parasites
And we’re scratching
And they’re harvesting whatever we leave on the trails
There are darker places we could be
Under different trees
And I think we could breathe there
Without the spores that fill our lungs
Without the nanobots nipping our fingernails
We’re harder to see there
How will we know what the rules will have been tomorrow
When they make a new one about yesterday?
The lines we leave are all indelible but the context is eroded
Innocent actions are maliciously encoded
But this has gone beyond escaping now
There is no uninfected ground
The symptoms are not always obvious
Unknowing carriers
Recording every sight and every sound
And we don’t see who stands behind
The edge of our minds
Can’t feel them enfold us
Can’t separate our roots from theirs
Don’t know till we try to turn around
How closely they hold us
They’re creeping in, they’re creeping in, they’re creeping into everything
**Note: I wrote this in November 2019. Imagery reminisecent of the COVID-19 pandemic is therefore somewhat eerily coincidental, rather than awkwardly intentional.
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8. |
Easier to Write
03:34
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It should’ve been too cold to lie on the ground
But we did anyway
Would’ve been too awkward to say the things we didn’t
But I think we will one day
I like the way you pull me out into the world from in my head
I like it too when there’s nothing but big blank blue
and you come out of yours instead
And we slow down now, all the day birds are asleep now
The hawthorn hasn’t flowered yet, Mars is just about to set
There was an owl, and how we loved it
And now its absence has two bats flitting above it
And below them a wide space for all the words to explore
And I don’t mind how they find whatever they think they’re looking for
Slow down now, slow down, slow down now
Strange how the blackbirds always seem so alarmed
By the arrival of dusk
I think the gentle unfolding of the night
Might be quite like us
I don’t know why, but it kind of reminds me of the way
Some things are easier to write than they ever could be to say
And now we know it all by way of late night letters
We haven’t got to talking yet, but I think it will be better
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9. |
Come Down and See
04:02
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You went to live on a cold moon
And I missed you more than I missed anything in my life before
I built a house with a warm wide wood kitchen
That was empty except for me (though I latched the door)
We still murmur to each other across the static
You know better than just to let me be
I say I’ll pull the mattress out of the attic
If you want to come down and see
But you always say
‘This is where we all are now’
You’ll send a shuttle down to fetch me
Fetching me to your cold moon
All your silicate vistas in blue and white
I almost agree to it
On the quietest nights
But this year I have grown potatoes
I’ve been healing this spoiled soil that was abandoned to me
You should see them, all rounded and oven-brown
You could taste them, if only you’d come down
Come down and see
I used to live on the cold moon
And I used to sleep in a white box with a hard blue floor
And you on a screen with the options and menus
To select our activities if we wanted more
And they let me go freely back to land
But they were terribly disappointed in me
They say you’ll miss my preferences and patterns
As if that was all we could be
But now in the dust there are a few more of us
More of us starting to see
When did you stop searching?
When did you exchange the pull of the surf
For waiting for the trickles off the sugar mountain
Pushed back in a cold cage beyond the earth?
But this year there are new connections
A diaspora of knowledge carried among us quite free
You could read it, all open and unbound
You could learn it, if only you’d come down
Come down and see
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10. |
Hymn of the Orbital
03:51
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There are some hopes inhabiting the widest orbits
And the only way is to reel them in and swallow them like a pill
To keep them from tearing us limb from heart from mind from body from ground
Contained in ever-shrinking circles, let them be stabilised and still
It’s not the same as letting them shatter
It’s not as much as letting them go
But it stops the feeling of ever-ripping pages
Of summer-thunder rages
Reduces wildfire to a glow
And I still miss the way we were so hungry
And I will grieve for the versions of us who had to die
I sometimes wonder what their ghosts get up to
Chasing round the dark ellipses of the sky
Now the hills and valleys enfold you closer
Now I can rhyme with rocks and tessellate with trees
And I am unlearning and learning you, just as you are with me
As we brush away the scales of winter, find something gleaming green
And gravity is not a liar
See how eccentric we’ve each become
And our orbits’ intersection
Moves us in the same direction
But now I know we circle different suns
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11. |
Split
00:58
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12. |
Long Low Light
04:03
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Long low light
Song of the last leaves
It’s the old slow fight between the green and the white
And you pray there might be green shoots
Still furling under the tundra
There might be one more spring
We might be going under
Up high in this hemisphere
The ice-age dread runs in the family
Centuries of observation
Don’t shift genetic memory
My hand may write on the calendar
‘Wake up and smell the chlorophyll – 5th of April’
Still my bones fear the ice may take me
The seas will grow
We have terra-deformed
Faster than our genes will ever know
Fine bright ice
Song of the last floes
It’s the old slow fight between the stone and the tide
And you say ‘It’s just a bad year’
And stare back into the fire
And out below the storm
The water inches higher
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13. |
Horsetail
03:32
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Away from the floodlight and over the line
We saw it all, tenderly, but far more bright and raw this time
And once again, we must end where we begin
And once again, we will be continuing
In this same valley in a million years
Two other aching creatures will see the horsetail growing here
In a yet unspoken language they will say
‘That’s the one that used to grow in dinosaur days’
And horsetail won’t be its name any more
And this time we will be the dinosaurs
And they will wrap themselves around each other so tight
In heavy wanting, in protection from the changing of the light
And a part of each of them will hold strong
And a part of each of them will breathe long
And a part of each of them will be shaking
As the quiet air around them keeps folding and quaking
Away from the floodlight and over the line
We saw it all, tenderly, and far more bright and raw this time
And once again, we must end where we begin
And once again, we will be continuing
And a part of each of us might be shaking
As the quiet air around us keeps folding and quaking
And still a part of each of us might be shaking
As the quiet air around us keeps folding and quaking
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14. |
Vignette No. 2
03:34
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Last week we said we’d meet for a sandwich and thermos of tea
By the river, but I don’t recall – was it you, was it me?
Said ‘I cannot come out cos I’m strapped to a deadline
And wracked by the constant dystopian headlines’
Then news came in late that the plague had mutated again
So it wasn’t to be
So we stayed in our holes while all context collapsed
Reality’s cancelled you know: re-draw all the maps!
And there are a few hoarding gold-plated plastic
With their hourly disposable highs
While the dreams and ideals of the possible
Are crushed flat by the market’s designs
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Helen Bell UK
Prog/folk/pop singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist specialising in viola and keyboard instruments.
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