I do love the poetry, but I’ve been hard at work on this piano piece in the background. This belongs to the collection I wrote with the last chapbook, The woods. It is used for the audio track Untitled and A problem with communication .

I think I instinctively knew it wasn’t finished, so put it away for awhile . Occasionally I would play it and eventually we ended up here.

I’m thinking of adding a little but to the track, maybe a small vocal line at the end and some ambient noise, but this is the bare bones piano piece.

A couple of things about the manuscript. Really, don’t take the manuscript literally. It’s for you to do with whatever you want. But the d section gets progressively more improvisational. To that end I learned some new MuseScore tricks. (MuseScore is an open source, free software, that lets you write a score. I love it, but am still learning it). So to that end I put some notation toward the end that suggest pitches to target in your playing but don’t suggest exact rhythmn . It looks like below. This is your explicit invitation to mess around. You’ve heard the melody a few times, and should be able to just play around with the ideas. The bass clef rythmn can also be kept loose.

I’m going to try to make a one take video for you tube, but at 6 minutes it is a little challenging. There are some abrupt tempo shifts. It’s been fun working on this though. One thing about any type of recording is the playback does not lie (at least not initially). It will take a bit of practice for me to get it smoothly to do a one take. This recording is long sections stitched together to make a cohesive track.

And yes, my piano is out of tune, particularly the C above middle C. I still love it and don’t care. Use what you got. And if it happens to be a somewhat problematic piano, so be it.