Heat Turns It Black

Lyrics

Just a roll of cool, white paper.
The smell of plastic and something sharp.
Waiting.

You were born in a mill in Wisconsin.
Coated with a secret.
Crystal violet lactone, sleeping next to the acid.
All the words are already inside you, just waiting for the trigger.
A promise made in a patent, 1965.
A million miles of silence, spooled up tight.

A bar of heat at two hundred degrees.
A line of contact, five milliseconds long.
And the color blooms from nothing.
The matrix melts, the dye and the developer kiss.
One touch is all it takes.
Heat turns it black.

Three hundred millimeters every second.
The list scrolls out.
Ground coffee, two bananas, a pregnancy test, a bottle of cheap gin.
August fourteenth, 2017.
Nine thirty-two P.M.
A permanent record of a temporary state.
Your whole life lived in a single pass under the thermal head.

A bar of heat at two hundred degrees.
A line of contact, five milliseconds long.
And the color blooms from nothing.
The matrix melts, the dye and the developer kiss.
One touch is all it takes.
Heat turns it black.

I left you on the dashboard of the Honda.
The sun hit sixty degrees Celsius through the glass.
And you started to talk in your sleep.
Ghost images rising in the heat haze.
The black turning to a soft grey smudge.
The words you held so tight just letting go.
Fading back into the bisphenol quiet.

Now you're just a curl of yellow paper in a box.
The lines are gone.
The coffee, the gin, the answer.
It's all just a whisper of what the heat said.
It's all just white again.