Golgotha in the Labcoat Pocket (Dr. William Birkin)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
He earned the doctorate
before his jaw finished growing
Fifteen years old
in a labcoat three sizes too large
and the labcoat
was the most honest thing he wore
because everything else
he would grow into
the labcoat
he would grow out of
the way a larva
outgrows its casing

The corporation
gave him a mentor
and then asked him
to delete the mentor
and he did
because the corporation
rewards the ones
who can subtract a person
from an org chart
without trembling

[Pre-Chorus]
He found the virus
in a girl
who had been absorbing
every pathogen they fed her
since 1967
and the girl's cells
had eaten every experiment
and evolved the answer
into something
he named after the hill
where they killed a god

Golgotha
The place of skulls
The place where miracles
and executions
share a zip code

[Chorus]
And when they came
for the briefcase
he reached into his labcoat pocket
and found the syringe
the way a drowning man
finds the anchor
and calls it a life vest

The needle entered
the only test subject
he had never used —
himself —
and the Golgotha
did what Golgotha does:
it rewrote
everything

The right arm went first
bulging asymmetrical
sprouting a new eye
from the deltoid
an eye that could see
the men who shot him
but could no longer see
his daughter
and the not-seeing
of the daughter
was the first thing
the virus
took from him
and it was not
the last

[Verse 2]
He crawled through the sewers
beneath the city
he had quietly been poisoning
for years
and the crawling
was the promotion
the corporation
never gave him —
from scientist
to specimen
from the one who observes
the mutation
to the mutation
itself

The vials broke
in the drainage system
and the rats
drank the runoff
and the water table
swallowed what the rats
couldn't finish
and an entire municipality
became the control group
for an experiment
that had no hypothesis
left

[Pre-Chorus]
His wife found him
in the corridor
and recognized the labcoat
before she recognized
what was wearing it
and what was wearing it
still had his wedding ring
on the wrong hand
because the right hand
was no longer
a hand

[Chorus]
And the daughter —
the only compatible host
in the whole collapsing city —
he found her
in the way that fathers find daughters
and in the way
that parasites find carriers
and the two impulses
shared the same nerve
and the nerve
could not tell them apart

The prefrontal cortex
dissolved third
after the motor function
after the facial recognition
The judgment went last
which means
for a few terrible minutes
he knew exactly
what he was doing
and could not stop
and the knowing
was worse
than the doing
and the doing
destroyed the city

[Bridge]
The corporation called it
a containment failure
The warhead called it
a sterilization
The daughter survived
because daughters
survive their fathers'
worst work

Somewhere in the limestone
beneath where the city was
the virus
is still evolving
because that is what he built it to do —
evolve without permission
adapt without consensus
become without asking
and the becoming
was always
the point

[Final Chorus]
He named it Golgotha
because he understood
that the hill of skulls
is where you go
to prove
that death is not the end
But he forgot
the second half of that story —
the part where the thing
that comes back
is supposed to be better
not worse

And the thing
that came back
from his labcoat pocket
was not better
It was just
more
More arms
more mass
more hunger
and less
of everything
that knew his daughter's name

The syringe is still in the pocket
of a labcoat
that no longer fits
anything
that was ever
human

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