The Mirror That Blinked

Lyrics

[Intro]
Podium feels like cold silver.
The first slide is a picture of this room.
From the perspective of the back wall.
And in the picture, an audience of mirrors is watching a man at a podium.

[Verse 1]
My topic is the theory of infinite regression.
Each mirror holds another, a little smaller, a little colder.
They are not reflecting me. They are reflecting each other's emptiness.
I tap the laser pointer. Click. A red dot swims in a silver sea.
It lands on a mirror in the third row, fourth from the left.
Its name is Wednesday. It has no frame.

[Verse 2]
And then it blinked.
A slow, deliberate lid of silver.
The room began to fold. The projector hummed a new, dissonant key.
I had to spin. One foot anchored to the floor, I spun until the silver walls blurred into a single solid ring.

[Chorus]
And then the sound. Not one pair of hands.
A thousand. A thousand reflections clapping in time.
Synchronized to the drum behind my ribs, the one I am, the one I'm watching.
Every beat, a thousand silver palms meeting in silence.

[Bridge]
I reached for the water glass on the podium to check my hand.
I counted seven fingers and tried again and counted nine.
The glass was not glass, it was a lens.
And through it, the clapping hands were my hands. All of them.
The room was stable, but it was the wrong room.
This wasn't my dream. I was its reflection.

[Verse 3]
The one that blinked is now a perfect duplicate of me at the podium.
He, the one in the glass, continues the presentation for me.
He points at me with the laser.
His topic is the paradox of the observer who is also the observed.
He smiles. I feel the muscles in my face pull into the same shape.
The applause gets louder without making a sound.

[Outro]
One beat. One clap.
Every mirror is a door now.
Every door opens back to this podium, this stage.
The applause is the only thing that's real.
The reflection steps out of the frame and hands me the clicker.
My turn. Again.