Chewing on Cellophane

(Verse 1) Swallowed a silver-screen promise from a black-and-white TV, Static angels singing hymns for the chemically free. We were landfill royalty,crown jewels made of bottle-glass, Dancing in the strobe-light rupture of a dying overpass. Your laugh was a switchblade opening in a dark suburban hall, The prettiest apostrophe in a sentence bound to fall. (Pre-Chorus) And the man on the billboard’s got a digitally kind smile, Selling salvation in a ten-second file. We’re the glitch in his perfect,airbrushed design. (Chorus) So we’re chewing on cellophane,the taste of something wrapped too tight, Under sodium suns that bleach the color from the night. Got a head full of cathode rays and a heart like a ransom note, We are the after-image that the advertisers wrote. Yeah,we’re chewing on cellophane, just to feel our teeth. (Verse 2) We kissed in the back of a decommissioned school bus, Our catechism was the buzz of a broken circuit’s plus. You showed me the ghosts in the server farm’s hum, And the poetry in a binary sum:one-zero-one. You traded your father’s watch for a handful of encrypted keys, Said,“The future’s just a rumour that the past won’t let us be.” (Pre-Chorus) And the satellites are whispering in geodesic lines, We’re the static in the signal,the forgotten dollar signs. We’re the question that the algorithm can’t define. (Chorus) So we’re chewing on cellophane,the taste of something wrapped too tight, Under sodium suns that bleach the color from the night. Got a head full of cathode rays and a heart like a ransom note, We are the after-image that the advertisers wrote. Yeah,we’re chewing on cellophane, just to feel our teeth. (Bridge) They built a simulation of a world that’s warm and clean, While we collect the artifacts in the spaces in-between. The whisper of a cassette tape,the flicker of a tube, The sacred,secret frequencies of being young and rude. They’re selling back our longing with a branded,gentle hand, But you can’t commodify the stain where our two shadows stand. (Guitar Solo:) [A frenetic, melodic, slightly unhinged solo—bursts of catchy, singable melody collapsing into atonal squalls of feedback and whammy-bar divebombs. It feels like a system crashing beautifully.] (Outro) So let the broadcast fade… Let the pixels cascade… We are the beautiful mistake that the system couldn’t make. Just chewing…chewing… on the wrappers of the dream. Just to feel…something… real. [Sound of a tape being ejected, a final burst of static, then a single, clean, acoustic guitar chord that rings into silence.]