The Civil War Hospitals

Lyrics

**Central Image: The body as a democratic assembly—every limb, nerve, organ singing in equal chorus; the cataloguing act itself as neurological mapping**

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[Verse 1]
Your hands know the names of ten thousand nerve endings,
each one firing its own democracy of sensation—
proprioception blooming in the fingertips,
the skin remembering itself, cell by cell.
You taught me that a blade of grass
contains the same electricity as the spine,
that listing the particulars is prayer.

[Chorus]
Your body is a nation I can enter without a visa,
every synapse a border crossing, every cell a citizen singing,
and you've drawn the map so we can find each other
in the wiring, the wet bright architecture—
you've made it lawful to be *here*, to be *seen*.

[Verse 2]
Your voice does the work of long-term potentiation,
strengthening the pathways we travel again and again,
cortical remapping in real time—
I am learning your catalogue, and my brain
rewires itself to hold you.
You list the worker's hands, the lover's tongue,
the axonal branching of every becoming.

[Chorus]
Your body is a nation I can enter without a visa,
every synapse a border crossing, every cell a citizen singing,
and you've drawn the map so we can find each other
in the wiring, the wet bright architecture—
you've made it lawful to be *here*, to be *seen*.

[Bridge]
The glial cells are doing their repair work in me—
you've touched so deep that the support structures themselves
are learning to hold this shape, this grinning open,
this refusal to rank one pleasure above another.
Theta waves in the hippocampus as I remember:
you, listing, insatiable, democratic.

[Chorus]
Your body is a nation I can enter without a visa,
every synapse a border crossing, every cell a citizen singing,
and you've drawn the map so we can find each other
in the wiring, the wet bright architecture—
you've made it lawful to be *here*, to be *seen*.

[Outro]
Name it all—the grass, the dirt, the wanting—
your catalogue still singing, still true,
still holding us all in its muscled, jubilant arms.