The Retinal Burn

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were born to see what others couldn't—
three eyes mapped like sentinels across your skull,
each one a separate window into the same unbending light.
Your cortex remapped itself before language,
synaptic plasticity bending to hold
all three fields of vision at once,
the world arriving in triplicate,
and you—grinning at the surplus,
the gift of watching everything.

[Chorus]
You don't just look, you *are* the looking,
every angle held alive in the same breath,
your mirror neurons firing in three directions,
and the world is never caught unguarded
because you've got it surrounded,
you've got it *held*.

[Verse 2]
That vigilance became your gift—
long-term potentiation strengthening the pathways
between each watchful point,
the neural bridges thickening with use.
Your hippocampal consolidation locked in
every detail, every angle, every slant of light
that the rest of us miss in our tunnel vision.
You knew things before they happened
because you were already looking there,
predictive coding firing three times over,
your spindle cells spinning faster,
integrating what shouldn't integrate,
fusing sight into prophecy.

[Chorus]
You don't just look, you *are* the looking,
every angle held alive in the same breath,
your mirror neurons firing in three directions,
and the world is never caught unguarded
because you've got it surrounded,
you've got it *held*.

[Bridge]
What a strange grace—
to have your interoception bloom across three loci,
to feel the room from every corner of your being,
to be the guardian and the guarded,
the eye and the seeing,
all at once,
all the time,
and *happy* about it.

[Chorus]
You don't just look, you *are* the looking,
every angle held alive in the same breath,
your mirror neurons firing in three directions,
and the world is never caught unguarded
because you've got it surrounded,
you've got it *held*.

[Outro]
Nothing moves without your knowing,
nothing hides in the spaces between your gazes—
you are the myth that stayed awake,
the one who loved the world
by refusing to blink,
not once,
not ever,
not for us.