Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 277 · middle

The Eight and a Half Films

Federico Fellini

Lyrics

**[Verse 1]**
Your camera swallows the whole parade—
the fat clowns, the silk-rope walkers, the women with eyes like neon prayers.
You've mapped the carnival inside the skull,
where memory and longing crash their bumper cars.
Every frame a mirror neuron firing,
your gaze teaching our faces how to want.

**[Chorus]**
You dreamed the streets alive—
made them sing back their own hunger.
The circus tent is living in your cortex now,
and we walk through it wide-eyed, believers.
Your obsession became our synaptic groove,
worn smooth and glowing from the weight of looking.

**[Verse 2]**
You knew the brain remaps itself through repetition—
how the ring-master's bark, the accordion's wheeze,
carve new neural highways every time we witness them.
Your theta waves synced to the clowns' pratfalls,
long-term potentiation burning those images permanent.
You didn't just film the grotesque and gorgeous—
you taught our neurons to *crave* the beautiful strangeness,
the bloated, the sacred, the ashamed made glittering.

**[Chorus]**
You dreamed the streets alive—
made them sing back their own hunger.
The circus tent is living in your cortex now,
and we walk through it wide-eyed, believers.
Your obsession became our synaptic groove,
worn smooth and glowing from the weight of looking.

**[Bridge]**
The axons branch and branch again—
no frame ever leaves us.
You taught us interoception: *feel the strangeness in your own chest.*
The ringmaster bows. The audience gasps.
Your synapses and ours, pulsing the same frequency.

**[Chorus]**

**[Outro]**
The big top dissolves but never vanishes—
it's painted on every retina now,
myelinated, permanent, ours.
Your circus lives in the firing.

---

**WORD COUNT: 287**
Pick a song