Twelfth Mutual Exchange (Alexander Bogdanov)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your veins became the text you read—
synaptic plasticity humming in the dark,
two bodies linked by tubing, long-term potentiation
firing across the threshold where
one nervous system learns the other's rhythm.
You believed the phantom limb could feel
what belonged to younger flesh,
that cortical remapping blooms
when marrow trades its secrets,
when your own axonal branching
tangles with another's blueprint.
The needle slides; your hippocampal consolidation
anchors this: we are not sealed.
Your interoception sang—the body knows
what it receives, what it becomes.

[Chorus]
You poured yourself through crimson tubes,
the grinning architect of merger,
teaching synapses to tango
with a stranger's blood—
you wrote the body's grammar
in exchange, in synthesis, in fever-bright
refusal to stay singular.

[Verse 2]
Your mirror neurons fired in rapture:
*I feel what flows through you, therefore I am less alone.*
Myelination of the boldest thought—
that neurogenesis isn't locked in youth,
that two bloods mingling remake the substrate,
that predictive coding learns a different species
when you've tasted its oxygen.
Your own theta waves slowed, deepened,
proprioception dizzy with the gift:
your cells knew they were borrowing,
knew they were *becoming*.

[Chorus]
You poured yourself through crimson tubes,
the grinning architect of merger,
teaching synapses to tango
with a stranger's blood—
you wrote the body's grammar
in exchange, in synthesis, in fever-bright
refusal to stay singular.

[Bridge]
The world called it science; you knew it was love—
the most textured, most phantom,
most propulsive proof: *I transfuse you*
means *I trust the architecture of your cells.*

[Chorus]
You poured yourself through crimson tubes,
the grinning architect of merger,
teaching synapses to tango
with a stranger's blood—
you wrote the body's grammar
in exchange, in synthesis, in fever-bright
refusal to stay singular.

[Outro]
The tubing empties. Your blood carries theirs now—
synaptic memory, cellular anthem.
You grinned at the fusion, the ata kak pulse
of two nervous systems, finally speaking.