The Constellation (Pareidolia)

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
In the control room at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
July 25, 1976, the image arrives.
Grainy black-and-white pixels, static humming like a distant heartbeat.
You emerge, mesa in Cydonia, eyes carved by wind at 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Carl Sagan would say, we are the cosmos knowing itself,
but here, in this eroded hill, I see your face staring back.

[Chorus]
Pareidolia, my old friend, whispering patterns where none exist.
Vilayanur Ramachandran in his UC San Diego lab, 2000,
fMRI coils at 3 Tesla, mapping the spark in my temporal lobe.
You trick me into meaning, this Martian ghost,
a survival glitch gone haywire.

[Verse 2]
Addressing you, the Face on Mars, photographed by Viking 1 orbiter.
No alien chisel, just wind and shadow at 9 PM in the Nevada desert chill.
Percival Lowell's canals from 1895, through his brass telescope at Mount Wilson,
oil lamps flickering, he saw what he needed to see.
Like burnt toast at 7 AM, acrid smell lingering,
a holy visage in the char.

[Bridge]

In the sterile lab, 68 degrees, antiseptic tang,
I lie in the scanner, thudding rhythm like my pulse.
Abstract shapes bloom into eyes, a mouth, your gaze.
Evolutionary debt, this urge to connect dots,
from star clusters to neural noise.

[Verse 3]
Carl, born November 9, 1934, you spoke of cosmos in 1980 PBS lights.
Vilayanur, August 10, 1951, your book in 1998 unwraps the phantom.
I address you both, through this constellation of error,
the brain's quiet joke on itself.

[Outro]

The improbable glow of meaning in the void.
Pareidolia, my intimate deceiver.