The Debutante and the Hyena (Leonora Carrington)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your brush wakes the sleeping cortex—
each stroke a long-term potentiation,
synapses firing bright as horses
galloping through the canvas of becoming.
You paint what the rational world locked away,
and your mirror neurons dance with the irrational,
teaching mine to see the wings
folded beneath ordinary skin.
Your hand knows what predictive coding
tries to hide: the surreal is just
the brain's honest language, stripped
of its polite translation.

[Chorus]
You are the threshold where two worlds hinge,
where the winged horse stamps its hoof
and refuses the fence,
where your synapses bloom like gardens
nobody gave permission to grow—
and I follow you there,
into the phantom rooms,
into the wild cortical remapping
of what it means to be alive.

[Verse 2]
Your surreal figures aren't escapes—
they're neurogenesis made visible,
new pathways budding where the old ones
said "impossible" and stopped.
You knew interoception before the word,
felt your body's secret grammar,
painted the theta waves of dreams
waking up in oils and egg tempera.
Your axonal branching spreads across canvas
like mercy, like rebellion, like myelination
teaching every nerve to sing
its most forbidden frequency.

[Chorus]
You are the threshold where two worlds hinge,
where the winged horse stamps its hoof
and refuses the fence,
where your synapses bloom like gardens
nobody gave permission to grow—
and I follow you there,
into the phantom rooms,
into the wild cortical remapping
of what it means to be alive.

[Bridge]
The hippocampus consolidates your visions
into something truer than memory—
a witness that says: yes, this happened,
this impossibility, this gorgeous defiance.

[Chorus]
You are the threshold where two worlds hinge,
where the winged horse stamps its hoof
and refuses the fence,
where your synapses bloom like gardens
nobody gave permission to grow—
and I follow you there,
into the phantom rooms,
into the wild cortical remapping
of what it means to be alive.

[Outro]
Your winged horse still gallops through the canvas—
and I am still learning to see with your eyes,
still reaching for the brush you taught me to hold,
still crossing that threshold you made real.