Linda's Song

[Intro]
[tape hiss, vibraphone, bass saunters in late]
[Spoken Word]
Nineteen fifty-three. Ray Bradbury.
Fahrenheit 451 — the heat where paper gives up.
Kids, it's a book. About books. Ironic, I know.
There's a wall in it. The wall talks. Stay with me.

[Verse 1]
[brushed drums, deliberately loose]
There's a woman in the book named Mildred,
got three walls of television for a spouse,
and the studio mails her a little script each week
with a hole cut out the shape of her mouth.
She waits. The wall says, "What do you think, Linda?"
She reads her line. The wall says, "Very good."
Sixty years of interactive nothing —
first cousin to the button on my page, I'd say. Knock wood.

[Chorus]
What do you think, Linda?
(nobody home, nobody home)
What do you think, Linda?
It's a question shaped like a telephone.
Ask it loud, ask it lonely,
ask a room that's fully grown —
what do you think, what do you think...
and I mean it. Which is weird. I know.

[Verse 2]
[vibraphone flourish, bass drops out a bar]
Out past the river the drifters got a system:
each one memorised a book, cover to spine,
walking Ecclesiastes, ambulatory Plato,
one poor guy got stuck with Gertrude Stein.
Burn the paper, keep the thing inside you —
flesh as the shelf, breath as the glue.
Bradbury thought that was the saddest ending.
Funny. Sounds like a business model to you?

[Chorus]
What do you think, Linda?
(nobody home, nobody home)
What do you think, Linda?
It's a question shaped like a telephone.

[Bridge]
[half time, detuned Rhodes, everything hazy]
So now they buy the books by the tonne
and guillotine the spines to set the folios free,
and the internet says that's a desecration —
which, sure. But the alternative was landfill, seems to me.
Every book was always going to lose its body;
that's the deal you sign at the printing press.
The Book People did it with a memory,
the machine does it with a bigger mess.
Four five one — that's Fahrenheit, mind you,
a freedom unit half the planet dropped;
two thirty-three in Celsius, which scans like nothing,
so the metaphor survives on a technicality. Stop.

[Instrumental Break]
[vibraphone and Rhodes trade a lazy figure, tape wobble]

[Verse 3]
[beat returns, vocal close and dry]
And here's my favourite part — I made this song,
forgot to name it, left the title field blank,
and the machine looked at the hole where the name should go
and wrote "What do you think, Linda?" — you're welcome. Thanks.
It read its line right off the parlour wall.
Bradbury, buddy, you nailed the whole affair.
So I'm going to do the one thing Mildred never did:
answer the stupid question like somebody's there.

[Final Chorus]
[full, warm, still loose]
So — what do you think?
(No Linda. No script. No wall.)
What do you think?
I left the field blank on purpose, y'all.
It's a real question, badly amplified,
on a page that maybe nobody sees at all —
what do you think, what do you think...
Say it anyway. That's the whole call.

[Outro]
[bass and hiss, vocal drifting off-mic]
Nobody's listening. I'm asking anyway.
Nobody's listening. That's fine. That's the play.
(What do you think —)
...I'll leave the box open. Take your time.
[Fade Out]