Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 234 · middle

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your fingers find the narrow gate where breath becomes a thing alive,
where every note's a synapse firing, branching, reaching deeper in.
The soprano screams its ribbon-blue, and you're already gone—
wrapped in sheets of overtone, each harmonic a new migration path,
your embouchure remapped, your neurons blooming in the dark,
trading safety for the frequency that only you can hear.

[Chorus]
You bend the air until it knows your name,
stack the chords until they shimmer, fold and stretch and glow,
each phrase a long-term potentiation burning bright inside the body's memory,
and we're all standing here, transformed.

[Verse 2]
Those theta waves are threading through your hippocampus now—
the chant, the modal spiral, every scale a new cortical remapping,
your axons branching wild, each solo a neurogenesis of sound.
You don't resolve. You *reach*. You stack the tenths until the air splits open.
The band dissolves. There's only you and the myelinated paths
of every breath you've practiced into muscle, into meaning, into prayer.

[Chorus]
You bend the air until it knows your name,
stack the chords until they shimmer, fold and stretch and glow,
each phrase a long-term potentiation burning bright inside the body's memory,
and we're all standing here, transformed.

[Bridge]
Your spindle cells are firing recognition—
you hear what hasn't been played yet, predictive coding in the flesh,
the future waiting in your lungs. The bell of your horn becomes a mirror neuron,
and every listener's body learns to breathe the way you breathe.

[Chorus]
You bend the air until it knows your name,
stack the chords until they shimmer, fold and stretch and glow,
each phrase a long-term potentiation burning bright inside the body's memory,
and we're all standing here, transformed.

[Outro]
One more sheet unfolds—soprano climbing, climbing still—
your voice and the instrument now one muscle, one intention, one open bloom.

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**Word count (lyric content only): 283**
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