Nothing Before Seventy Mattered (Katsushika Hokusai)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your hands know the grip of brush and block,
friction and resistance, the way each stroke
rewards your fingers with its own small shock—
synaptic pathways firing down through decades,
myelination thickening the neural roads
you've traveled ten thousand times and more.
Your eyes track where the foam will break before it breaks.

[Chorus]
You built a mountain out of every breath,
carved it from the blue that lives inside your chest,
watched the water rise and rise and never rest—
your hands still trembling with what's left.

[Verse 2]
The wave suspends itself in your proprioception,
that deep knowing of your body in the void,
cortical remapping as you aged, your grip still true,
hippocampal consolidation storing every
wet silk sound, every white-knuckle moment
of the brush against the block. Your mirror neurons
firing, firing—understanding the curl of spray
before your hand could speak it into being.

[Chorus]
You built a mountain out of every breath,
carved it from the blue that lives inside your chest,
watched the water rise and rise and never rest—
your hands still trembling with what's left.

[Bridge]
Theta waves dancing through your sleeping mind,
predictive coding—your brain always one breath ahead,
seeing the next frame before it exists,
axonal branches reaching, reaching toward
that impossible moment when wood and pigment
conspire to hold the moment still.

[Chorus]
You built a mountain out of every breath,
carved it from the blue that lives inside your chest,
watched the water rise and rise and never rest—
your hands still trembling with what's left.

[Outro]
The wave still rises in the dark behind your eyes,
will rise for centuries in ten thousand copies,
each one a synapse firing in a stranger's brain.

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**WORD COUNT: 302 words** ✓