Twenty-Four-Year Contract (Doctor Faustus)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your hands reached into the dark of wanting,
traded the slow climb for the lightning strike—
synaptic plasticity rewriting every hunger,
your neural pathways blazing a new route
toward the thing forbidden, the thing that glowed.
You knew the cost. You signed anyway.

[Chorus]
Your appetite rewired the whole cathedral,
long-term potentiation burning deeper grooves,
each desire etched so sharp it couldn't fade.
You drank the knowledge, burned through every boundary,
and you *smiled* while the contracts filled your palms.

[Verse 2]
The cortical remapping started early—
your mirror neurons firing at the taste of power,
not theirs, *yours*, each synapse reaching further
than the tutors promised, than the books allowed.
Your predictive coding built a map of more:
more light, more time, more self beneath the skin.

[Chorus]
Your appetite rewired the whole cathedral,
long-term potentiation burning deeper grooves,
each desire etched so sharp it couldn't fade.
You drank the knowledge, burned through every boundary,
and you *smiled* while the contracts filled your palms.

[Bridge]
No whispered regret lives in your hippocampus—
your memory consolidates this joy, this hunger
as the truest thing you ever held.
The myelination of ambition wrapped your every choice
in speed and certainty. You were *alive*.

[Chorus]
Your appetite rewired the whole cathedral,
long-term potentiation burning deeper grooves,
each desire etched so sharp it couldn't fade.
You drank the knowledge, burned through every boundary,
and you *smiled* while the contracts filled your palms.

[Outro]
The ink still glows beneath your signature,
twenty-four years burning forward without brake,
your hand still open, still reaching, still *asking*
for one more moment, one more breath, one more—