How to Be Nobody, Loudly

Panoptika One is my debut album — she’s been scouring playlists, breaking the internet, and apparently The Tonight Show is on my tail like it’s in heat. Podcasters won’t stop calling. I can’t even buy soy milk without someone asking for a quote about “my process.”

…Then I wake up. And I’ve got maybe two dozen listeners.

Here’s the ugly-sweet truth: I keep thinking I’ve got something profound to say, and then I end up… keeping time with myself, alone in the dark, touching my own beat like it’s going to save me. When the song ends, all that’s left is a handful of fingerprints and the smug tick of a metronome. I arrived at the synthwave party twenty years late, dragging a thrift-store keyboard and an ego dressed in sequins. Everyone else left with careers; I’m sweeping up glitter, insisting, “No, really, this mess is meaningful.” It’s not, most days. It’s just me, emotional custodian of my own debris.

I want to be profound; I land somewhere between diary entry and dial tone. I want to be a cathedral; I end up a vending machine that eats your coin. Ridiculous, really — if the algorithm had eyebrows, it would raise both and text a friend. So do the decent thing: listen purely to make fun of me. Point, giggle, tell your group chat. Roast me like a marshmallow over a VHS fire. And if, by some glitch in the Matrix, a line hits home—don’t tell me. Let me keep believing the joke is on me. It usually is.

But if you’ve ever loved my words, here’s my voice — unpolished, unreliable, and weirdly sincere. This is how I make poetry hum, twitch, and occasionally self-destruct on beat. Put headphones on. Pretend we’re famous. I’ll meet you in the reverb.

1. Paging Almighty – A dial tone to the divine. Theories about the measure of god and divinity. I’m crying at the doorstep of a possibly vacant deity, begging for Wi-Fi in heaven. Static becomes sacrament; prayer is customer service on hold.
2. You Were Never Here – The tragedy of global nomadism, the erosion of identity. Rooms full of furniture, accents that change mid-sentence, no one really home. The anthem of modern dislocation, sung from a duty-free lounge.
3. The Skirt Keeps Slipping – And everyone knows what a mess I am with my sexuality, but they’re so polite, especially my own wife. It’s part confession, part farce. Hedonism keeps tripping the beat; shame just holds her drink.
4. Universal Constants – When life brings me down, the constants keep the line. Gravity, light, love — the few equations that refuse to abandon you, even when you’ve lost your calculator.
5. Mirror Maze – Aging while trapped in a funhouse of reflections that won’t let you out. Do you ever feel crazy? The synths sure do. Every echo is another version of me, slightly more unhinged, slightly better dressed.
6. Crack in the Corner – About the crack in my bedroom wall that speaks volumes about my mental fragility. Do you relate? She does. We talk nightly about collapse and weather patterns.
7. It Takes – No names given, just the fuckup. The rhythm hides the crime scene. You can dance to it; you probably shouldn’t.
8. Peekaboo – You run into the parents of your daughter’s childcare friend, and now you have to be friends because your kids ate crayons together. It’s small talk on loop, the sociological horror of polite adulthood.
9. I Am Not Asleep – Things happen in the world, and we want to believe everything’s fine. We sleepwalk through disasters, dreaming of normalcy. But the dream is the illusion — the insomnia’s the truth.
10. Prawn Cracker – A spittle of my love for humanity. Light, salty, vanishing on the tongue, but at least it’s offered freely. Snack-based sincerity as a worldview.

Play it loud. Pretend we’re famous. Mock me if you must. I’ll bring the reverb; you bring the audacity.