Odes to Joy

A Verbal Fig Leaf · Track 50 · closer

🌮

🌮 (2020s) — ⭐ CLOSER. Not a word at all. A pictogram of a food. We went from 'grope for trout in a peculiar river' to a taco, and the reason is that the trout line would never clear moderation. Sing the collapse without mourning it — the instinct is unchanged, only the censor got faster. 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 glowing glass is cold against the thumb.
The system checks the spelling as I go.

I tried a sentence but the letters wouldn't run,
The automated filter told me no.
It doesn't have a mother, or a blush to try and spare,
It only has a list of what's allowed to happen there.

So I swipe across to the second page
Where the little printed groceries live.
I don't need a metaphor to set the stage,
I just have a single thing to give.
Folded in the middle, looking good enough to eat,
Sending you a picture of a late-night treat.
The scanner reads the data but it hasn't got a clue,
I'm letting the menu do the talking to you.

Four hundred years ago they took an afternoon
To weave a clever riddle for the king.
Now the shadow-ban is sweeping with a broom,
And nobody has the time for everything.
The mind jumps the gap before the sentence even forms,
Swapping out the weather for the icon of a storm.
I backspace the noun, and I feed it a shape,
A thirty-byte visual making the escape.

U plus one F three two E,
Rendered in a yellow pixel shell.
The data doesn't trigger any penalty,
And the moderator bot is sleeping well.
It has no idea what we're having for tea.

So I swipe across to the second page
Where the little printed groceries live.
I don't need a metaphor to set the stage,
I just have a single thing to give.
Folded in the middle, looking good enough to eat,
Sending you a picture of a late-night treat.
The scanner reads the data but it hasn't got a clue,
I'm letting the menu do the talking to you.

Just a grocery list.
Just picking up some dinner in the dark.
The machine ticks over, clearing the remark.
Send.
Delivered.
Read.
Pick a song