The Boat and the Blindfold (Homer)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your blind eyes held the whole Aegean —
every ship, every scar, every god's
fingerprint on mortal skin.
You didn't need sight; your synapses
blazed new channels, remapping
the dark into *epics* —
long-term potentiation,
each retelling burning deeper grooves,
until the war became a living thing
your listeners could taste.

[Chorus]
Your voice was the synapse firing,
our brains the grateful receivers —
mirror neurons lighting up
when Hector fell, when Odysseus wept.
You didn't describe the pain;
you *became* the pain,
and we became you,
and nobody left unchanged.

[Verse 2]
The blind bard with the mnemonic gift —
theta waves cascading as you sang,
hippocampal consolidation
stitching war into legend,
axonal branching in each listener's skull,
glial cells humming support
beneath every invocation.
Your words didn't fade;
they *myelinated* — wrapped themselves
in fatty sheaths of meaning,
faster, fiercer,
each repetition a promise they'd survive.

[Chorus]
Your voice was the synapse firing,
our brains the grateful receivers —
mirror neurons lighting up
when Hector fell, when Odysseus wept.
You didn't describe the pain;
you *became* the pain,
and we became you,
and nobody left unchanged.

[Bridge]
What you knew, living in that darkness,
is what neuroscience is still proving:
we are not sealed. We are *permeable*.
Your cortex remapped itself
each time you sang a story someone told you —
plasticity not as weakness,
but as the *only* way to hold
what matters most.

[Outro]
And still your voice arrives, unbroken,
wine-dark and radiant,
the blind man's gift
burning in our synapses,
telling us: *you are the ship,
you are the war,
you are the only immortality that works.*