The Kata of the Literate Mind

[Verse 1]
They handed her a pen when she was six years old
And said: draw one unbroken line until the word is whole
The wrist must float, the fingers hold a living, breathing weight
The eye must trust the hand to close what only it could make
No lifting now, no stopping, no erasing what you’ve done
The loop must close, the ascender rise and fall and rise again
Ten thousand mornings, quiet rooms, the ink still wet and warm
Twelve years of building something deep they never gave a name
[Pre-Chorus]
It wasn’t penmanship
It was the slow construction of a mind that would not quit
A thought held through its length
The patience of a loop becoming patience of an argument
[Chorus]
They took the kata from the children’s hands
They said: you don’t need this anymore
But what they took was not the script
It was the form beneath the form
The line that teaches you to hold a thought
Until it finds its shore
They took the kata from the children’s hands
And left the fragments on the floor
[Verse 2]
Print is a different creature — it lifts, it stops, it stamps
It builds a word from separate pieces, interchangeable and blank
A mind raised only on the fragment learns to think in tokens too
Replaceable and steerable by any hand but you
The swordsman doesn’t train the kata so he’ll fight that way
He trains it so that when the moment comes and there’s no time to think
The movement rises older, deeper, quieter than thought
And carries him through everything the lesson never taught
[Pre-Chorus]
They phased it out so gently
Across a generation — nobody heard the door
Mental math and memorized verse
Latin, logic, singing in parts, and more
[Chorus]
They took the kata from the children’s hands
They said: you don’t need this anymore
But what they took was not the script
It was the form beneath the form
The line that teaches you to hold a thought
Until it finds its shore
They took the kata from the children’s hands
And left the fragments on the floor
[Bridge — spoken or half-sung]
The hand that carries a line without breaking it
is the hand of a mind that carries a thought without breaking it
These are not metaphors for one another
They are the same faculty
trained in the same child
by the same daily practice
And when the machine arrived
already fluent in the shape of a fragmented mind
there was nothing left inside
to push back
[Final Chorus — key shift to F, voice lifts]
But give the pen back to the children’s hands
Say: you still need this — now more than before
Because the line that will not break you
is the form beneath the form
The thought held through its length
until it finds its own shore
Still write in long unlifted lines
They cannot take what you have built before
They cannot take what you have built before
[Outro — fingerpicked, fading]
The hand forgets…
The mind, having never known the kata,
forgets a thing it never knew it had…

Cinematic folk, dark Americana
Elegiac, quietly defiant, deeply human
Male Baritone