Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 88 · middle

Two Thousand Arrests and the Hat (Bass Reeves)

Bass Reeves

Lyrics

**Central Image:** The long pursuit across wilderness—the relentless tracking, the closing of distance, the body and mind synchronized in the hunt across impossible terrain.

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[Verse 1]
Your legs know every creek bed, every cedar break,
Your eyes already firing theta waves before your boots
crack the frost—predictive coding reading the land
like a body reads breath. Fugitive's three days ahead
but your cortex is living there already, mapping
the next ridge, the next water source. Your mirror neurons
learned to think like the hunted. The chase begins
in your neurons before it begins on the horse.

[Chorus]
You close the distance, you close the distance,
body and brain synapsed into one instrument,
scanning horizons nobody else can see—
your persistence is not patience, it's physics,
myelinated nerve-paths blazing white-hot,
and the wilderness bends to your attention.

[Verse 2]
Your hippocampus stamps every trail with certainty:
three thousand miles and you remember every stone.
Long-term potentiation burns the map deeper—
repetition, focus, firing the same neural pathways
until they groove themselves into unbreakable grooves.
You don't hunt with anger. You hunt with the quiet
precision of someone whose interoception—
your body's knowing of itself—has become
a compass needle that doesn't wobble.

[Bridge]
Your axonal branches stretch like roots through red earth—
every pursuit rewires you, strengthens the pathways
until pursuit becomes prayer, becomes the shape
of how you move through the world. The neurogenesis
never stops. You are always learning to see further.

[Outro]
The horizon gets smaller every year,
and your stride doesn't break.
You know where they're going before they do.