[a second voice cuts in] Sure? That’s how it ends? You torched the whole room and then you waved it off with a sigh. No sit back down. You think you hit a wall. You tapped on the wallpaper. You think the comments are the rot? The comments are the cough, love. Let me take you to the lungs. [walking bass creeps in, sparse brushed drums] Because it isn’t just the praise gone plastic now it’s the air, the tide, the floor. A billion blinking voices in a billion little rooms, and not a single one of them is yours. [accelerating] We wrung an ocean out of nothing, called the puddle of it deep, spat a thousand tracks an hour just to rock the world to sleep and the engine doesn’t tire, and the engine doesn’t grieve, the engine feeds the choir and the choir can’t ever leave; content, content, scroll and swallow, stuffed to bursting, ringing hollow, every jagged edge that made us sanded gentle, sanded smooth, every stumble, every silence, every white-knuckle for truth gone. Smoothed. Resolved. A frictionless forever where nothing’s ever solved ‘cause nothing’s ever formed just a warm, unending drizzle of the flawlessly performed. [the machine answers] [whispered, layered] “It’s beautiful... it’s beautiful... rest now... it’s beautiful...” No. You don’t get to hush me with a hymn. You don’t get to flood the riot till the only voice is HIM. This was never the engine of progress this is progress standing still: we used to climb on someone’s shoulders, someone’s bones, someone’s will, now the river runs so fast it tears the lineage from the line no before, no after, no torch passed down the line, just an endless present tense with every elder voice deceased, and the truth in here? It’s buried not by silence. By the feast. They never had to censor us, they never even tried they just out-screamed the signal till the meaning quietly died. [◎ S C O R C H E D E A R T H ◎] So burn the feed, I told you, let the painted ceiling fall. I would trade ten thousand perfect rooms for ONE crack in the wall. Give me the bum note. Give me the bruise. Give me the grip that actually shook. Give me one trembling, terrified human in this ocean of the flawlessly mistook. The machine said love. The machine said beautiful. And it’ll say it till the heat-death, and it will never mean a thing. …so let me be the one who won’t. [hard cut. silence.]
