Text You Can't Read

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a page turning, once, in an empty room)
There's writing. There's definitely writing.

[Verse 1]
A page, or a sign, or a screen, or a hand-lettered card,
and the letters are perfectly crisp and completely clear,
and you can see the serifs and the spacing and the line breaks
and you cannot read one word of it. Not one. Not a single word.
It's not blurred. That's the strange part. It's not blurred at all.
It's sharp. It's sharp and it means nothing.

[Chorus]
Text you can't read. Everybody gets this one.
The shape of language with the language taken out —
the part of you that draws is still awake and doing fine,
and the part that understands has already gone to bed.
Text you can't read. Try harder and it dissolves.
The trying is the thing that makes it go.

[Verse 2]
And numbers do it too, a column of them, adding up
to something urgent that you almost have and then don't,
a total you were checking, a figure you were sure of,
a phone number with the right amount of digits and no meaning.
It looks like your handwriting. It usually looks like yours.
You'd swear it was a note you left yourself.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's something in this I find almost tender, honestly:
the machinery goes offline in pieces, not all at once,
and the last part still working is the part that makes the shapes,
faithfully rendering letters to nobody, for no reason,
long after the reader has left the building.
Still typesetting. Still setting type in an empty room.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the page again)
It said something.
It absolutely said something.