I Sang to the Snake

Lyrics

[Intro]
The stage is a silver disc floating in a library of quiet. The microphone is cold steel. No, the microphone is colder than steel. It hums a note before I do.

[Verse 1]
I close my hand around it. The texture shifts. Not chrome, but scale. A thousand perfect overlapping mirrors. The mesh grille over the capsule softens, it breathes, it watches me with the pattern of its holes. The cable unwinds from the base of the stand, thickens, and traces a slow figure-eight on the floor. It has no rattle. It makes no threat. It is simply waiting for the signal.

[Chorus]
So I opened my mouth and I sang. Not for the dark, not for the names I used to be. I sang to the snake. I gave it the first note, the root of the whole thing. And it coiled around the stand, a spine of listening metal, a perfect tightening helix.

[Verse 2]
Then the faces in the crowd went out. Like candles, one by one, then in whole sections. Replaced. An ocean of glowing phones. A grid of blue-white light where a thousand people were. A flat sea of lenses, all recording. They are not an audience. They are an index of the performance. A library of one single moment, copied infinitely. They drink the sound before it can echo.

[Bridge]
I look down at my free hand to check. I count the fingers. There are five, but the thumb is a perfect, silver replica of the microphone stand. I count again. The thumb is gone, and the little finger has split in two. I try to read the setlist I wrote on my skin. The ink pulls itself into a line, a single black thread that slithers over my wrist and disappears. The reality check is the thing that's failing. The snake's scales reflect the ocean of phones, and each phone shows a tiny snake, watching me sing.

[Chorus]
So I closed my eyes and I sang. I sang into the hiss, into the lens, into the recursive glare. I sang to the snake. It absorbed the vibration, the heat from my breath. The crowd is just one recording, of one note, played back to itself forever.

[Outro]
The note hangs in the air. The only note. The phones record the sound of their own recording. The snake swallows the microphone head. The note swallows me whole.