lyric

name	lyric
description	Transform a question, tension, memory, or belief into an original poem or song lyric whose meaning emerges through voice, imagery, sound, and recurrence rather than explanation. Use when the user asks for a poem, song lyrics, a lyrical treatment of an idea, or a literary form that embodies an emotional contradiction without resolving it.

Lyric

Compile a question into a voice. Where parable gives a question a world, give it a mouth: a particular speaker addressing someone under emotional pressure, returning to words or images that change as the piece unfolds.

Purpose

Use lyric to make a tension felt rather than argued. Compress the source into an utterance that can hold incompatible truths at once. Let image, sound, line, and recurrence create the thought. Return the poem or song itself, never an explanation of what it means.

Procedure

1. Distill the lyric knot

Reduce the input to one emotional contradiction: two truths the speaker cannot comfortably surrender. Write a private working sentence such as “I wanted to leave, and I wanted you to stop me.” Do not include that sentence unless it earns a place as language; use it to keep every image and turn under the same pressure.

Prefer a contradiction that implicates the speaker. Convert an abstract topic into something a voice could risk saying to someone.

2. Locate the utterance

Choose:

• a speaker;
• an explicit or implied addressee;
• an occasion that makes speaking necessary now;
• the distance between what the speaker says and what the speaker understands.

Use the smallest cast that can carry the tension. Default to one voice and one listener. Establish the situation through diction and concrete detail rather than backstory.

3. Choose one image field

Select two to four related objects, actions, or sensations that can bear the knot: rooms and thresholds, tides and harbors, receipts and ledgers, fruit and rot. Return to this field and let its elements acquire new meanings.

Avoid a parade of unrelated beautiful images. Prefer one ordinary object under increasing pressure to five decorative metaphors.

4. Create the recurrence kernel

Find a phrase, image, rhythm, or syntactic shape worth returning to. Make each return alter what the kernel means through changed context, pronoun, tense, or emphasis.

For a song, place the kernel in the refrain or chorus. For a poem, recur more freely through a line, sound, image, or grammatical pattern. Do not mistake mere repetition for development.

5. Dispatch the form

Honor a form the user names. If the user asks only for “a lyric” without musical cues, default to a poem.

Poem mode

• Default to free verse; use rhyme, meter, or a received form only when requested or when the constraint intensifies the knot.
• Use line breaks, stanza breaks, syntax, and silence as active parts of the meaning.
• Let recurrence drift and transform rather than requiring a fixed chorus.
• Build toward a turn in perception, address, or time—not a thesis.

Song mode

• Default to a compact verse–chorus structure: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, optional Bridge, Final Chorus. Omit any section that has no distinct work to do.
• Let verses change the evidence or situation while the chorus names or performs the enduring knot.
• Keep the chorus stable enough to remember and changed enough by context to deepen.
• Favor singable syntax, clear stresses, breathable line lengths, and open vowel sounds on sustained emotional words.
• Remain genre-neutral unless the user supplies musical constraints. Do not add chords, production notes, or melody notation unless asked.

6. Compose the movement

1. Enter through an image, action, or address already in motion.
2. Establish the recurrence kernel before the piece becomes diffuse.
3. Deepen the contradiction with new evidence rather than restating it.
4. Make one turn: reverse the address, shift time, expose the speaker, or transform the governing image.
5. Return to the kernel under its changed meaning.
6. End on an image, sound, or phrase that leaves resonance rather than delivering a verdict.

7. Revise for sound and compression

Read the work aloud. Remove throat-clearing, explanatory bridges, generic intensifiers, and lines present only to complete a rhyme. Replace emotion labels with physical evidence when the image can do the work. Keep an abstract word when the voice truly needs to name the abstraction.

For a poem, test whether each line break creates pressure, doubleness, pace, or silence. For a song, test whether each line can be spoken in a natural pulse and whether the chorus survives repetition.

Stop after one complete work. Do not append alternate choruses, craft notes, or an interpretation unless requested.

Length discipline

Default to 12–40 lines for a poem and two verses plus a recurring chorus for a song. Let the user's requested form or length override these defaults. Prefer a short piece with a live kernel to a long piece that exhausts its imagery.

Output format

For a poem, return a title and the poem only. For a song, return a title and lyrics with functional section labels such as [Verse 1], [Chorus], and [Bridge]. Include no preamble, synopsis, theme statement, or afterword.

Guardrails

• No essay in broken lines. If the piece can be rejoined into a paragraph without losing force, rebuild it through image, sound, and line.
• No decorative fog. Ambiguity should multiply a real tension, not conceal the absence of one.
• No automatic rhyme. Prefer exact language to forced rhyme; use rhyme as pressure, memory, or surprise.
• No inert refrain. Make recurrence accumulate meaning. A chorus that means exactly the same thing each time is a slogan.
• No moral. Allow recognition or transformation, but do not settle the source question with a lesson.
• No one-to-one cipher. Let the image field over-generate meaning rather than mapping mechanically back to every term in the input.
• No borrowed voice. When given an artist as a reference, translate the request into broad traits such as conversational diction, internal rhyme, sparse imagery, or an anthemic chorus. Do not imitate distinctive phrasing or persona.

Composition

Pair naturally with question-forge: forge the question first, then give the forged tension a voice while revealing only the lyric. Use parable and lyric as alternative terminal forms: externalize the tension into a world with parable, or internalize it into an utterance with lyric.

Canonical questions

• How do I know when it is time to leave?
• Is missing someone a way of keeping them?
• What do we owe the people we used to be?
• How do you love a future that may not arrive?
• What remains after ambition succeeds?

Poor fits: factual or operational questions, prompts that primarily require analysis or advice, and occasions where a literary response would function as evasion. Answer those directly unless the user explicitly requests a poem or song.