What the Voltage Pulled from Lye (Humphry Davy)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were an apothecary's apprentice in Cornwall
no degree, no permission
just a voltaic pile and a question
that kept answering itself with more questions
The GABA receptors didn't have a name yet
but you found their switch —
nitrous oxide, inhaled from a silk bag
in a room full of poets who came to watch you think

[Verse 2]
Coleridge laughed until he wept
Southey said he felt like the sound of a bell
You stood in the corner taking notes
on what the prefrontal cortex does
when the inhibition dissolves —
you just didn't have that sentence yet
The gas made the serious men gentle
the gentle men reckless
and you inhaled more than anyone
because the experiment always starts
with the body you can afford to lose

[Chorus]
You ran the voltage through the lye
and the lye gave up its silver secret —
a metal so reactive it burned on water
so new it didn't have a syllable
You danced around the laboratory
when the periodic table got wider because of you
Potassium, sodium, calcium, barium —
pulled from compounds like names from a census
of things that had always been there
pretending to be something else

[Verse 3]
The Davy lamp saved miners in the dark —
wire gauze around the flame
so the methane couldn't touch it
You understood combustion the way
the anterior cingulate understands conflict:
barrier thin enough for light
strong enough to keep the explosion theoretical

[Bridge]
You nearly killed yourself six times
inhaling things that had no business
inside a mammalian lung —
carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide,
the fumes of heated wax in a sealed jar
Each time you wrote it down before you passed out
the handwriting getting wider
as the room got smaller

[Outro]
You mentored Faraday, who outgrew you —
that is the drawer you kept locked
the apprentice who became the master
while you were still dancing
But the sodium still burns on water
the poets are still laughing
and every element you named
is a door the world walks through
without knowing who opened it