A Verbal Fig Leaf · Track 45 · middle
Gooning
Gooning (2020s) — A word for a trance nobody had to name before the feed existed. VOLUME: V. THE ALGORITHM, 2000–2025. THE DODGE THIS ERA: ⭐ THE PAYOFF. The censor is no longer a person, a church or a drawing room — it is a MACHINE that does not laugh, cannot be charmed, and never leaves the room. So the evasions get shorter, dumber and faster: initials, misspellings, emoji. Not because anyone got less filthy — because the filter reads faster than we can be clever. The volume must be genuinely funny and quietly devastating. Sing the AVOIDANCE, never the anatomy.
No audio yet — generation pending.
Lyrics
The router hums. The blue light on the thumb. The scanner sweeps the server at a quarter to three, It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t blink, it’s looking at me. I want to type exactly where my focus has gone, But there's a silicon detective keeping the log. My fingers freeze a millisecond on the glowing glass, The body knows the sentence is a dangerous path. So I pivot to a joke to keep the data stream calm, A cartoon vocabulary in my palm. Call it gooning in the dark, call it playing the fool, A heavy-lidded orbit in a digital pool. The algorithm passes it, it sounds like a jest, A comic-book henchman on a meaningless trek. But it’s a total flatline. It’s a beautiful trap, A little plastic dummy for the censor to catch, While I am miles away. It means the trance. It means the dopamine drip, The silence in the middle of a marathon trip. The battery is hanging by a four-percent thread, And the machine is parsing every word that I left. It reads the silly letters and the warning sign clears, It cannot flag a feeling if it never appears. A stupid little syllable to cover the ache, The only kind of privacy that we can create. Call it gooning in the dark, call it playing the fool, A heavy-lidded orbit in a digital pool. The algorithm passes it, it sounds like a jest, A comic-book henchman on a meaningless trek. But it’s a total flatline. It’s a beautiful trap, A little plastic dummy for the censor to catch, While I am miles away. Three hundred years ago, they’d build a metaphor tall, They’d write a silver sonnet for the way that we fall. But we have got a microsecond till the red line is drawn, We have to drop a dummy word and carry it on. The bouncer isn't human, it can never be charmed, We act a little stupid so we stay in the dark. Just a silly little guy. Just a blank little stare. The machine doesn't care. The loop. Letting the battery die.