Fool's Gold (Reprise)

Lyrics

I still have it.
On the old pine windowsill, where the afternoon light can find it.
A small, heavy secret from a childhood pocket.

I remember the weight of it in my small palm.
A perfect, brassy cube, born from the dark earth.
Cold and sharp at the edges.
A little sun you could hold.
I showed it to you once, remember?
You said it looked like a tiny, frozen star.
I loved it for what it was, not what it wasn't.
For the sheer, unapologetic fact of its glitter.

They call it fool's gold.
And I used to just hear 'gold'.
A beautiful word.
A promise of warmth, of worth.
Now I only hear 'fool'.
A whisper in the shine.

The same light that catches its face...
it shone in Ponzi's eye in 1920.
It glittered on the pixelated charts of FTX.
The same fever dream that sold a swamp in Louisiana as an empire.
The promise whispered on the seventeenth floor of the Lipstick Building.
A perfect, logical shape, holding nothing of value inside.
Just a story we agreed to believe for a while.

They call it fool's gold.
And I used to just hear 'gold'.
A beautiful word.
A promise of warmth, of worth.
Now I only hear 'fool'.
A whisper in the shine.

But the stone... it never lied.
It is only what it is: iron, sulfur, a lattice of crystal.
A simple law of physics.
It never pretended.
The hope was the forgery.
The belief was the counterfeit.
I polished the lie onto its face with my own wanting.
Was I the fool for seeing the beauty?
Or for needing the beauty to be a currency?

It sits there still.
A little lesson in mineral form.
My small, beautiful warning.
That all that glitters...
is just a reason to look closer.
To weigh the promise in your own hand.
Before you give your heart away.