Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 548 · middle
The Chart Reads Like a Joke the Body Doesn't Get
Adrian Carton de Wiart
Lyrics
**Central Image:** The voluntary amputation of his own left hand—a soldier choosing his own body's breaking point, then walking back into war. --- [Verse 1] You took the saw to your own wrist when the infection bloomed like fever-dream, no anaesthetic but your cortex firing predictive coding—already knowing the phantom limb would ghost your palm before the blade did. You chose the cut. Then you dressed. Then you returned. [Chorus] Your body was a instrument you played until the strings snapped, then you rewired the whole cathedral, and your fingers still remember dancing on a rifle's trigger— synaptic plasticity rewriting every nerve, long-term potentiation burning new pathways through the dark. [Verse 2] They said the eye was next—shrapnel remapping your visual cortex into blindness, but you'd already learned the trick: the brain rewrites itself when flesh won't hold. Your mirror neurons fired for every man who watched you walk back in, one-eyed, one-handed, grinning, and they learned how to break open too. [Chorus] Your body was an instrument you played until the strings snapped, then you rewired the whole cathedral, and your fingers still remember dancing on a rifle's trigger— neurogenesis blooming in the dark, axons branching where the wound was, new strength threading where you bled. [Bridge] You didn't pray for healing. You prayed for *more*. Your proprioception remapped itself— the ghost of your hand still reaching for what needed doing, and doing it. [Outro] One eye. One hand. Ten campaigns. The saw-mark became a signature, and you signed your name in scars the whole world couldn't ignore.