Allotment
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Listen/download here
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The new Happy Band of Japan album. Recorded between June 2007 and June 2008 in Barcelona. Bremen and Cornwall.
ALLOTMENT
Subterranean channels
where the bombed used to live.
Where nuclear nightmares reside.
Where the monks went for peace and the crazed went for war,
where the foxes sleep, where the shit flows.
Where the newspaper drift, where the dead don't go.
Where the drilling sounds loud, where the lost get loster,
where the found flounder and the seekers are sought.
Where the piss turns the water into just pissy water,
where price of a thing is what can't be bought.
Where the smells slowly seep into your peaceful sleep
and keeps you from dreaming of that thing what you seek.
Where the allotments are laid out like rugs in the sun
and the plans you were sewing slowly come undone.
(...You catch a glimpse of her bathing alone and at night.
In a second you're shocked from just seeing the light.
She saw you looking and raised the alarm.
Now there's a searchlight and now there is harm...)
So deeper you crawl 'long the damp covered walls
where the Moonrakers hide and the sun never falls.
You follow them up to the Rise on the hill,
where the rich still reside in those satanic mills,
or deeper you go to the flats in the Dips,
where the people forget they're alive and they sip
on a cup of cold tea that they'll drown in one day,
you forget to fall down and you forget to pray
for mercy when you're wrong or for thanks when you right;
Well, who knows the difference in this blackest of nights?
So you follow the sound of the burrowing drills
that offer you hope like hope was a pill
you swallow right down (to make you feel glad
you're not one of the mad ones
who see the bombs dropping and carry on shopping)
but that's all behind you and as you follow the noise,
hear the holes opening up for the boys
who thought all hope was gone until underground
their radios tuned to that subterranean sound:
The underground channels, the city's raw bones,
the tiny antennae in the prefab homes.
They'll knock 'em all down soon as spit on the ground
so the joggers can run and the rich can have sons
away from that music that tinkles beneath
the pavements and concreted spray-painted reefs.
These allotments of space and of sound are our own;
as you follow them deeper, you follow them home.
For home is a place that you built long ago
when you were only a child and your holes weren't that deep.
When she saw you looking but didn't turn away,
where the waters all met and the sky wasn't grey.
Now home is emerging from the rock like a face
that you might recognise but you just can't place.
Still they drill almost everything out of the ground
now the sunlight is beckoned and the daylight is found
in tiny glass cases built into the trees
where the grass tries to grow and it nearly succeeds.
You think to yourself, "Is this all that I need?"
and you're not wrong, you're not wrong.
Allotments spread out as far as you can see
(which is pretty far now you cured the disease.)
You wipe the mud from your knees and the grog from your eyes
and you see her in wellies and a trenchcoat, disguised
as the gardener, the warden or maybe a ghost
(but you know that the truth is what most people want to believe.)
Still the subterranean channels sing up from the deep,
"Don't believe in a thing less it's a thing you can keep.
What's the use in a life that just runs right away
and you have to keep running just to keep it to stay?"
So wash of your hands and fetch up your spade
for right here is the house, the home that you made.
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