The piece “Echoes” is a lyrical spoken‑word monologue that immerses the listener in a late‑night metro scene beneath Paris’s Bastille station. The narrator describes exhausted commuters drifting through underground currents, their faces drawn and isolated, while the city’s noise fades. Suddenly a saxophone begins to play jazz, its warm tones cutting through the fatigue and uniting the strangers on the platform. The speaker urges the audience to relax, smile, and recognize their shared humanity, framing the train ride as a collective journey toward the final stop. The poem blends vivid urban imagery, sensory details, and a gentle call for connection.
Chapters
It's called Echoes. The wind around the city echoes underneath the stairs of Metro Bastille and Sophie Renaud. And late at night, tired civilians float into the underground currents of air to escape the fatigued exhales of the city and catch the last train home. We levitate, almost too tired to sit down on the benches thrown on the ground next to the trenches where the train will soon come and welcome us into its pulsating belly. Our faces are drawn into tight expressions simply out of habit, out of which it is too hard to snap at the moment, especially when we're all alone. No one's here to see our misplaced grimaces or sagging features. No one's looking at anything except something too far off in the distance. Maybe there's also an occasional sideways glance down the tracks, From where the train will come any minute now. Any minute now, and we're too tired to make every minute last. We've tried, but now each minute is cast into the gutters. For the rats, perhaps. These are the only thoughts still sloshing around in our lonely minds tonight, and— and just then you hear a sound. Saxophone. Yes, oh yes, the best time to play jazz is at 11 on a Thursday night when you know, you know you will fill each soul that hears your voice with warm chicken soup or maybe tea with marmalade. And just like that, we're all in the same boat ready to float down the underground currents wherever they may take us, but at the moment we're all warmed by the caressing tones that tickle the bones and heat up the marrow between the eyes too narrow. Relax your face. And realize you are one and the same as she or I, so please don't fight it, just smile. You know you want to. Your shoulders ache too. Smile, my stranger friend, we're all on this train until the last stop. So stop for a minute and let the jazz seduce you. And we're all together in this. Thank you.
