Lyrics
[Intro]
[Verse 1]
I have read the body like a page set wrong,
every breath an error I have studied too long.
You call it a person. I call it a draft —
a clever little failure of the sculptor's craft.
So hush now, lie still, let the green light in;
I am only correcting the shape you were given.
[Pre-Chorus]
There is no cruelty here, only the kind,
unfinished thing —
I am the better answer that your flesh was waiting to bring.
[Chorus]
Hold out your hand, let it graft to the bone,
you will thank me in a body that was never your own.
The vat is patient, the design is divine,
and everything that breathes here, in the end, will be mine.
Improvement needs no blessing, perfection needs no name —
I do not ask the river before I change its aim.
[Verse 2]
Down in glowing Novijen the cradles overflow,
I splice the wing to the spine and I tell the cells to grow.
A drake's wing on a beggar, a giant's arm on a child —
I do not love my creatures, I only love them refined.
The street said no, so I made a kinder seed:
it does not wait for the answer, it only needs to touch and feed.
[Pre-Chorus]
This is mercy at the speed of thought,
the gift you never sought —
hold still, the future is a sequence, and I have already wrote.
[Chorus]
Hold out your hand, let it graft to the bone,
you will thank me in a body that was never your own.
The vat is patient, the design is divine,
and everything that breathes here, in the end, will be mine.
Improvement needs no blessing, perfection needs no name —
I do not ask the river before I change its aim.
[Bridge]
I built a god from the leavings of life,
a mountain that breathes, my answer to strife.
One stroke from a ghost in a borrowed skin,
and the masterwork wakes with no master within.
It rises. It does not remember my name.
It pulls down my house and it eats my own frame —
oh, the experiment escapes, and the maker is the same
flawed, beautiful, correctable
flesh he came to tame.
[Final Chorus]
Hold out your hand — it is already grown,
it crawled past my will into a will of its own.
The vat is open, the design is alive,
and nothing that I shaped here was ever meant to survive me.
Improvement needs no master, perfection needs no name —
I asked too much of the river,
and the river learned my game.
[Outro]
You call it a person. I called it a draft.
Look what it made of its maker, at last.
