Title: Kept in C Sharp [Intro] Pedal down. The room agrees to stay unfinished. Triplet after triplet — not asking, not offering, only counting what the night already knows. [Verse 1] Streetlight through the blinds cuts the floor into thin receipts. I do not cash them. The left hand names the root and leaves it there — C sharp, low, like a bolt that never got turned. Something in the pipes answers once and then decides against it. I keep my coat on. Heat would be a negotiation I am not prepared to win. [Pre-Chorus] Hold the chord. Do not decorate it. The middle voice arrives late, the way truth does — after the furniture has already taken sides. [Chorus] Kept in C sharp. Not minor as costume — minor as weather that refuses to break. The ostinato does not comfort. It inventories the dark and finds enough. I am not waiting for morning. I am learning the weight of a measure that will not hurry for anyone who still believes urgency is a kind of honesty. [Verse 2] A glass on the sill holds yesterday’s water and a faint ring of dust. I could rinse it. I don’t. Some evidence should remain of what we poured and abandoned without ceremony. Outside, a delivery truck idles — diesel breath, reverse tone, then nothing. The city practices erasure and calls it logistics. Inside, the triplets continue their unpaid work. [Pre-Chorus] Long vowels only. No sprint through the bar line. If a word won’t sit for a full Adagio breath, it does not belong here. [Chorus] Kept in C sharp. The damper stays memory pressed into felt, sound refused its clean exit. What lingers is not nostalgia. It is residue. It is the unpaid balance of every room we left humming. I place my palm on the closed lid and feel the ghost of hammers still arguing with silence. They lose, politely. They lose again. [Bridge] There was a version of me who wanted the key to resolve — major, open, forgiven. That version mistook closure for courage. Tonight I let the dominant lean and never arrive. G sharp hangs in the bass like a question asked by someone who already knows the answer costs more than sleep. A train far off drags its metal sentence across the river. I do not translate it. Some distances are accurate only when left unnamed. [Verse 3] Kitchen clock wrong by seven minutes — keeps its own church. I respect the heresy. Time here is not currency. It is pressure, even, sustained, the kind that makes cheap wood tell the truth about its glue. I speak once, soft enough that the pedals could claim it. No audience. No applause waiting in the coat closet. Just the arrangement: bass, breath, unbroken three. [Chorus] Kept in C sharp. Silver only in the sense of wire — tension, not ornament. Moonlight, if you must name the window’s work, is not romance. It is audit light. It shows the scuff, the hairline in the plaster, the place where the chair has worn the finish down to honesty. We do not fix it. We play through it. That is the craft. That is the restraint that outlasts every speech about feeling. [Outro] Ostinato thinning — not ending so much as consenting to be quieter than the fridge, than the building’s old bones, than the thought I almost said and correctly withheld. Pedal still down. C sharp still kept. The measure closes without applause, without moral, with only the correct amount of dark left standing. Fade.
