Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 550 · middle

Still Falling Upward

Amelia Earhart

Lyrics

**Central Image:** The endless horizon from the cockpit—the point where sky meets ocean and disappears into uncertainty.

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[Verse 1]
You traced the curve where sky dissolves to nothing,
hands steady on the yoke, your cortex firing
predictive maps of air that hadn't spoken yet—
each horizon line a frontier your mirror neurons
already lived in, borrowed from the clouds ahead.
The engine's roar became your theta rhythm,
that frequency of flight where thought dissolves
into the pure synapse of *doing*.

[Chorus]
You taught the air your name in vapor trails,
your body compass spinning true against the spin,
proprioception singing through the altitude,
the whole wide blue a second skin you wore
and shed and wore again—alive, *alive*,
in every cell that dared to leave the ground.

[Verse 2]
Synaptic plasticity in real time: your brain
rewired itself with every crossing, every cell
along your axons branching into new terrain,
long-term potentiation burned into your bones—
the way that fear and joy fuse into *forward*,
into *further*, into the muscle memory
of absolute emergence. You were neurogenesis
in leather and fuel and wild, sustained attention.

[Chorus]
You taught the air your name in vapor trails,
your body compass spinning true against the spin,
proprioception singing through the altitude,
the whole wide blue a second skin you wore
and shed and wore again—alive, *alive*,
in every cell that dared to leave the ground.

[Bridge]
What you found at the edge of every map
wasn't death—it was the glial cells arranging light,
the spindle neurons firing in ecstatic recognition:
*here is where I was always meant to burn*.

[Outro]
The horizon called you forward one last time,
and you answered with your whole fierce instrument,
disappearing into the only freedom
that ever truly asked you in.
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