Experimental Bill Boethius
These days I'm Swamp [with Augenmerk, vocal]

Augenmerk has generously allowed an open collaboration on her great spoken poem ‘These Days’.
soundcloud.com/augenmerk/these-days_d

I noticed how many who had already taken up the challenge to collaborate this time often took a minimalist position, accompanying or dueting with Karin, using just one or a few instruments, always letting the words and voice sound with their full weight.

Likewise I used a single guitar to accompany, and at times counterpart - or countermand, the words; my whole intention being to make the poem - and Karin's voice - central.

The poem reminds me of the Nietzschean warning to those who want to be ‘at one’ with Nature.
A Nature that is cruel, inhuman, fickle, inequitable and terrifying ...
... so you want to be ‘at one’ with that?

1
These days I am swamp, I’m mountain and dale.
I’m deep, I’m steep, I’m dumb and deaf,
my word gets lost on me.
Landslide is, the year of power passed.
Screens of fog run through me
till blind and dark I touch the ground,
still resisting.
2
How may my shield break away
without pervading sun,
without meadows floating me green
and water that allays?
Who climbs free, once my vision has gone
and my strength has turned?
Where to tears me the war?
3
Scarce years at the bottom of breath -
I’m clouds, I’m abyss and sea.
Demons and angels rise
My light fades and glints
Years run through me
Caught in a circle I surround me
The world’s beauty mere sensing
Busy life far away.
4
Has the wall penetrated me,
leaning me bare against the cleft?
I’m falling not knowing the end.
But in the thick of it you cannot get out.
At times the world reaches hands to me,
at times a river flows through,
sometimes voices.
My inner eyes still weighty with tears.
5
You filled me full, life, glass from which I drink,
Now I’m the mountain that I ascend.
I’m the canyon into which I jump.
My own dance has changed and emptied me.
Silence yet.
6
Are you quiet, world?
Another door is opening, another view.
Accordance now
between soles and the ground,
Confine myself to one step, in which I’m whole.
And within me one wakes up,
whose dance is not exhausted yet,
but innocent and loud.
7
Here, this bird is mine and his tone am I.
I extend these wings, I paint him colourful.
I throw him the flight.
I raise him out of flames, out of calm waiting.

8
Behind the dark horizon there is the sun.
The sun-hour clears and the nightbark lands.
The silent sea sets me free
into a new measure of time.
My step has got other tracks.

Augenmerk, vocals, words;

Bill Boethius; guitar, production.

[illustration by Bill Boethius]