The Osmotic Gradient (Polybotes)

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Polybotes, your limbs stretched across the Aegean in 1921's echo,
when Frazer translated Apollodorus's lines,
that trident scar from Poseidon still fresh under Nisyros's weight.
I whisper to you through the volcanic rock,
this osmotic pull in my skull,
ions dragging water across membranes like your giant frame hauled by the tide.

[Chorus]
The gradient builds, salt on one side, fresh on the other,
Nisyros pressing down since the 1st century CE,
your rage a tremor in 1890's folklore logs,
crushing the balance, forcing equilibrium in my neurons.
Feel it, the swell and shrink,
like Gaia's son trapped, breathing sulfur into my thoughts.

[Verse 2]
In the dim dawn light over the Dodecanese,
that briny tang mixes with heat from Enceladus's kin,
Polybotes, I address you as my own cell wall,
thinning under pressure, potassium leaking out,
sodium rushing in, just as you fled across waves to Kos.
Pausanias noted your flight in his 2nd century scroll,
but the humans on Nisyros, their voices drowned,
like synaptic whispers lost in the gradient's roar.

[Bridge]
What if the island lifts just once,
releases the giant's breath,
lets the ions equalize without force?
But no, the rock holds, as in Stewart's 1890 account,
trembling with your unrest,
mirroring my brain's quiet fight for homeostasis.

[Verse 3]
Addressing the trident now, cold metal from Poseidon's grip,
forged in myth but felt in every axonal fire,
the temperature clash—chilling depths to searing lava—
burns in my receptors, a signal diffused.
Polybotes, your defeat under that 37-square-kilometer stone,
a metaphor for my mind's forced peace.

[Outro]
Nisyros, hold him still,
hold the gradient steady,
in this neural sea.