L'Aura

Lyrics

It starts small.
Just there.
A fleck of broken glass in the air
that isn't there.

The rim of the coffee cup
starts to ripple.
The straight lines of the kitchen tiles
begin to breathe.
A tiny C-shape, a crack in the light,
born in the center of things.
It’s not a blindness, not yet.
It’s an addition.
Something drawn on top of the world
with an invisible pen.

Hello, my fortification spectrum.
My beautiful, unwanted architecture.
Hubert Airy, in 1870,
he drew you on paper for the Royal Society.
He gave you a name.
But you are just the sensory snow.
The elegant pattern
that promises the pain.

The shimmer grows, it pushes outward.
A crescent of zig-zagging light,
eating the edges of the room.
I feel like Karl Lashley,
staring through his cold binoculars,
trying to map the invader.
Trying to measure the blind spot
as it eats the wall.
I just close my eyes.
But it’s still there, of course.
It's not in the world. It’s in the seeing.

Hello, my fortification spectrum.
My beautiful, unwanted architecture.
Hubert Airy, in 1870,
he drew you on paper for the Royal Society.
He gave you a name.
But you are just the sensory snow.
The elegant pattern
that promises the pain.

Twenty minutes.
That’s the contract.
Twenty minutes of this silent, geometric storm.
This kaleidoscope fracturing the day.
It's the herald.
The quiet announcement.
The curtain rising on a different kind of war.
The world goes quiet, holds its breath.
Waiting.

And now it shifts.
To the periphery.
The center of my vision clears.
The cup is just a cup again.
The storm is passing over the horizon.
Leaving this terrible clarity.
This perfect, ringing silence.
Before.