[Verse 1] Victorian music-hall The posters shout in copperplate Where penny dreadful headlines dance with lager foam and dinner plate The comic turns are clockwork; every double-take is down to time Applause arrives on schedule Like the last bell of the pantomime [Chorus] We’re filing our feelings by form and formation A card-catalog heart in strict classification From barrelhouse bounce to the bleak and atonal We’re shelving each genre Both great and banal All Neatly labeled in lyrical rows Every odd little style that the songbook knows [Verse 2] Canzone napoletana Mandolin above the harbor wall A whispered vow in dialect Reflected on the water’s fall The vowels lean on moonlight Consonants in bittersweet delay As laundry streams like banners Slow and silent in the bay [Verse 3] Serialist twelve-tone row The clarinet ascends in jagged grace Each interval a chess move Every pitch constrained to stay in place Romantic urges simmer Yet the matrix keeps them under guard Affection wears a lab coat Scribbling “Schoenberg” in the margin Hard [Verse 4] Chanson réaliste The café glass is cloudy with regret A minor key keeps circling round the cigarette that won’t go out yet Her vowels taste of anise Every r is rolled like broken wheels She names each lost arrondissement the way a gambler counts his deals [Verse 5] Sacred Georgian polyphony Three voices folded into stone They weave in crushed-rose dissonance that somehow feels like going home The overtones hang lanterns in the rafters of a mountain nave Where human breath and granite share a single patient Rising wave [Chorus] [Verse 6] Nordic skaldic epic Half in thunder Half in measured chant The consonants are carved like runes in ice too obstinate to grant A simple happy ending; every kenning hides a winter storm Yet underneath the frostbite sleeps a hearth-fire stubborn Banked and warm [Verse 7] Afrobeat political The bassline walks a spiral through the street The horns declaim manifestos over restless Tireless Ticking feet The slogans taste like pepper Sweet and searing in the midday sun A chorus shouts statistics till the numbers learn to start to run [Bridge] From chapel hush to cabaret From dockside hymn to deejay spray Each style a lens that bends the same white beam Of hunger Grief Conviction Dream [Verse 8] Morricone western-score A whistle skates on parched horizon air A tremolo guitar recalls the face that wasn’t waiting there The harmonica Half hero Half accomplice Folds into the sand While distant toms spell “reckoning” in code the tumbleweeds understand [Verse 9] Bossa nova living-room The chords recline on woven cane and glass Syncopated daylight dripping softly through the hourglass The melody walks barefoot over samba’s gently shifting floor Where every altered ninth suggests “stay just five quiet minutes more” [Chorus] [Verse 10] Viennese salon-ländler Lace and laughter brushed with candle smoke The dancers trade hypotheses with waltz steps Half a flirt Half joke Philosophers attempt a turn But speechless Leave the floor instead Some truths require a triple time to enter comfortably in head [Coda] So here's the meta-medley Calmly catalogued yet breathing still Each niche and nomenclature just a borrowed mask for stubborn will For underneath our labels Files And folders stamped in tidy ink A single Wordless rhythm moves the body quicker than we think
0/500