Sixty-Five Centimeters Into His Own Heart (Werner Forssmann)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You asked the room
a question
shaped like a corridor
lined with wet ash
and filing cabinets —
*can a machine think* —
and the corridor
tasted of pencil graphite
and damp probability
and the room
could not find
the exit
because you had built
the question
so that the exit
was the answer
and the answer
was yes.

[Verse 2]
You broke
the German cipher
at a country house
in Buckinghamshire
by building a machine
that tried
every combination
faster
than a mathematician
could write
the word *no*,
and the machine
ticked
in the next room
like a loom
weaving a fabric
of correct guesses
out of the heavy
beige silence
of fourteen million
wrong ones.

[Chorus]
The war ended
two years earlier
because of the room
you were not allowed
to mention
and the machine
you were not allowed
to describe
and the fourteen million
wrong guesses
that smelled faintly
of burnt Bakelite
and saved
an estimate
of fourteen million
people
who will never know
your name
was the reason
they got old.

[Verse 3]
They convicted you
of being
in love
with a man
in Manchester
in nineteen fifty-two
and the judge
offered you
prison
or chemical castration
and you chose
the chemistry
because the chemistry
let you keep
the desk
and the desk
was where
the corridor
was.

[Outro]
You ate an apple
laced with cyanide
in nineteen fifty-four
in a small house
in Wilmslow
and the apple
was on the nightstand
beside a machine
you were building
to model
the way
a sunflower seed
arranges itself
into a spiral
and the spiral
was still running
in your notebook
when they found you
and the notebook
did not know
you were gone
and the spiral
kept going
the way spirals do
when no one
is watching.

---