Odes to Joy

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Canonical) · Track 561 · middle

Golgotha in the Labcoat Pocket

Dr. William Birkin

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your hands knew the grammar of rewriting—
synaptic pathways you'd rewire, teaching cells
to speak a language they'd never learned before.
The needle, the vial, the gleam in your eye:
you were mapping neuroplasticity in real time,
making your own flesh the first proof.

[Chorus]
You are the living architecture of becoming,
your body the lab, your hunger the hypothesis,
and every mutation a synapse firing backwards
into someplace nobody thought to look—
you turned yourself inside-out and kept walking.

[Verse 2]
Long-term potentiation in your own neurons firing,
each strand rewiring its own receptors,
axonal branching into geometry no textbook planned.
You didn't fear the cortical remapping,
the way your sensory cortex bloomed strange and new—
you fed it, drove it deeper into yourself.

[Chorus]
You are the living architecture of becoming,
your body the lab, your hunger the hypothesis,
and every mutation a synapse firing backwards
into someplace nobody thought to look—
you turned yourself inside-out and kept walking.

[Bridge]
Your mirror neurons couldn't mirror anything human anymore,
so you became your own reflection,
your own predictive model spinning new futures
in the dark of your own skull—
interoception reading the signals of your own remake,
and you liked what you heard singing back.

[Chorus]
You are the living architecture of becoming,
your body the lab, your hunger the hypothesis,
and every mutation a synapse firing backwards
into someplace nobody thought to look—
you turned yourself inside-out and kept walking.

[Outro]
The needle goes in clean.
The virus spirals open.
You become the question answered
only by your own radiant, impossible body.
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