Two Hundred Seventy-Two Words

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your hands built fences from nothing but need,
each rail a synapse firing, a neural seed—
splitting wood taught your cortex to map
the world's hard geometry, the weight in your lap.
You learned through repetition, through muscle and strain,
how long-term potentiation rewires the brain.
The axe fell in rhythm, your body a tool,
and every split second made wisdom, made rule.

[Chorus]
You're the rails I follow, the split I can see,
the geometry of grace held between you and me—
your hands made of thunder, your backbone of light,
you're the fence that was broken and mended tonight.

[Verse 2]
Your mirror neurons fired watching the pain
of bodies in chains, in the cotton, the rain—
your predictive cortex ran forward through time,
saw the future unmade, saw the wrong and the crime.
Proprioceptive clarity: you felt every weight,
the burden of nations, the hinge of our fate—
your hippocampus bound every speech to its core,
consolidated conviction on battlefield floor.

[Chorus]
You're the rails I follow, the split I can see,
the geometry of grace held between you and me—
your hands made of thunder, your backbone of light,
you're the fence that was broken and mended tonight.

[Bridge]
Your cortex remapped with each crisis, each choice,
neurogenesis blooming—a younger man's voice
dissolving to depths where the axe meets the bone,
where synaptic plasticity carved you alone.
You learned you were larger than any one thought,
that splitting yourself was the battle you fought.

[Chorus]
You're the rails I follow, the split I can see,
the geometry of grace held between you and me—
your hands made of thunder, your backbone of light,
you're the fence that was broken and mended tonight.

[Outro]
Two rails laid parallel, never to meet,
held apart by your will, by the work of your feet—
and the split wood still glowing where you set it alight.

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**WORD COUNT: 285 words** ✓ (within 270-320 range)