finishing your gestures the way a copyist finishes a line the writer walked away from. Your name is a watermark, not a signature. Held to morning light it shows a second spelling you have been answering to in sleep. The “I” that files your days is only a clerk. The author works the night shift and will not share a face. [Chorus] High chance is literacy. The room is a paragraph you have been living inside without ever learning to read. A chair set just so is a comma. A stopped clock is a period that lied. The hallway is a clause that leads to a mouth you thought was yours. [Verse 2] Errata tucked in the spine of a life: page twelve, you were never the one who chose the work; page twenty-nine, the argument you won was planted; page forty-seven, the lucky break was a lot looking back through a hole it had already cut; page sixty, the friend who arrived on time had been written in the margin first. The night committee edits without ink. They wait for the hours when biography goes soft. A talent shows up at breakfast like a smudge and by noon you will frame it as a gift. The soft hours are a margin. Correction lives there. You have been the paper. They have been the hand. [Chorus] High chance is literacy. The room is a paragraph you have been living inside without ever learning to read. A chair set just so is a comma. A stopped clock is a period that lied. The hallway is a clause that leads to a mouth that answers before you speak. [Verse 3] Look at the mirror and wait. It lags. The face that arrives late is not vanity taking its time. It is the working copy. The one that blinks first is the draft they already stamped and sent downstairs for the clerk to wear to work. Mute objects learned the alphabet before you did. The key under the mat was never meant for thieves. It is a tessera: proof you belong to a house that does not use doors the usual way. The stain on the ceiling maps a route you walk every night and mislay by breakfast. Pareidolia is not a fault in the eye. It is first grade. The world taught you to find faces because the world is crowded with them and some of them sit on the night committee and take the minutes of your wanting. [Bridge] You have not been hiding from the work. The work has been using your hiding as a desk. Second sight was never an extra talent pinned to the coat. It was the clerk looking up and seeing the author in the doorway where the author had been standing the entire time. Fuck the tidy file that labels every accident as character and every delay as weather. Awakening is an audit. The books were already open. The numbers already knew your name in that second spelling the watermark keeps. [Verse 4] A life is not what a lot falls on. A life is what a lot wears when it needs to walk the street without alarming the neighbors. You were the garment. You were also the one inside it who thought the fabric was a soul. After the eye opens the week does not become holy. It becomes accurate. Spilled coffee, a missed train, a stranger saying your name in a city that should not have it— they add to one total. The total is not punishment. The total is authorship declining to sign and still insisting the sentence be finished. The committee prefers you literate. An unread sample is wasted travel. They will not applaud. They will only keep editing now that the clerk can see the ink. [Outro] Keep looking until the clerk and the author share one set of hands. Then high chance is no longer climate. It is the sentence you are standing in finally admitting it can be read. Shit, the lag was the lesson. The mug, the watermark, the late face, the errata you called personality— leave the eye open. Walk the rest of the rooms as if the binding showed, because it does, and let the night shift finish the line you kept interrupting with a self that was only ever staff.
