4 page Digipak with 8 page booklet insert.
The booklet has the complete set of poems printed in full glory.
The text of each poem can be viewed as lyrics online and are included any download
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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Perhaps even his reluctance to leave Algeria
had been about the piano.
But he had left, hadn’t he?
Every step of the way, the weeks of walking
into his own sleep,
aching across his shoulders
with the utter concentration of
keeping his money safe.
The padding in his breast pocket,
tapped eight times a day,
nine times a night for four months.
Normandy was enough, no need to step further.
Pascal’s three small rooms and a toilet,
freely offered and freely taken had seemed
like a gift from gods he did not believe in.
Malika, making him those cinnamon pastries
that first evening he arrived.
Another act of kindness
he felt inadequate to repay.
In truth Pascal and Malika Léandre had given
him a second chance, a second chance
which he now realised he’d been seeking
ever since he left Algiers.
But he had left, hadn’t he?
Now he kept returning to the gite.
Not being able to leave this refuge.
Each morning the excuse,
maybe his bag from the boulangerie,
the baguette and cheese, or his keys
to the old citroën dyane he’d bought
in order to exert drive and discipline
into his plans for a new ordered way
of life. This is what he spoke into
the front of his brain, but there,
lurking right at the back was the fact
that this was really
all about the piano.
Within two full days of settling
into Pascal and Malika’s blessed pile
of rooms he had found another piano
similar to the one he’d left behind
in South Sudan.
The French one was fully varnished,
yet tonally they shared a dark ‘fat’ warmth,
the kind of resonance that builds up inside
quality pianos when smothered with a patina
of playing. It stood inside a chapel
six kilometres away.
He could sit with it whenever he wished,
other than the first Sunday of the month.
On this definite day the dwindling congregation
used it like a bell practising La Belle Époque
for their own funeral cast in echo.
And he couldn’t get passed it and he couldn’t
get round it, couldn’t confound it, wasn’t able
to dismiss the machine; the taunt wire, the little
felt hammers and those two damn, slightly
squeaking pedals. Couldn’t cradle his left hand
through the fingers of his right.
Stalks growing from his wrist joints bent over
into a melody as if they were the nib of his
grandfather’s fountain pen scratching
at manuscript.
But he’d walked out of Algeria, hadn’t he?
Come to France to start again only to find
what was left behind three thousand
kilometres down the road was here,
leaving him leave to leave to grace
the keys and sit long enough to open
up the passage of his heart
and cry with his hands.
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