Song title: "A Man Made of Metrics"
Language: English

[Intro]

[Angular guitar and cello divide eleven beats into unequal, tightening groups.]

[Verse 1]

Count the tickets, count the days.
Count the fixes, count the praise.
Count the hours no one knew
I spent dragging features through.
Hide the mornings without air.
Hide the nights beside the chair.
Place the totals in a row.
That is all they need to know.

[Pre-Chorus]

The scale has boxes one through five.
Which square can prove that I am alive?
Which column holds the cost I paid?
Which graph contains the self I saved?

[Chorus]

I will not be a man made of metrics,
A sum of deliveries, defects and credits.
No rating can carry the weight of a year
Or chart every morning I still made it here.
A man made of metrics would fit in the frame,
But no set of numbers contains who I am.

[Verse 2]

The inner auditor replies:
"Emotion makes the data lie.
Keep it factual, clean and brief.
Never complicate belief."
It wears my voice but not my face.
It calls collapse "a change of pace".
I nearly let it take the pen
And seal the office walls again.

[Chorus]

I will not be a man made of metrics,
A sum of deliveries, defects and credits.
No rating can carry the weight of a year
Or chart every morning I still made it here.
A man made of metrics would fit in the frame,
But no set of numbers contains who I am.

[Breakdown]

[Low guitar and cello repeat the cold system motif while drums strike the first beat of each uneven bar.]

Count. Compare.
Correct. Conceal.
Produce. Perform.
Do not reveal.

[Bridge]

A handwritten sentence fills my head:
"Work is a part, but not the whole."
Three people met me through a song.
No dashboard held what they had known.

[Build-up]

I split the safer page in two.
I keep the sentence that is true.
The cold motif begins to bend.
Warm strings refuse its measured end.

[Final Chorus]

I will not be a man made of metrics
Or trade my condition for clean analytics.
Measure the work where measuring fits,
But never mistake me for columns and ticks.
No dashboard can hold what survived in my name.
I have a life that exceeds every frame.

[Outro]

[The eleven-beat riff resolves into a steady heartbeat on floor tom.]

Not a metric.
Not a grade.
Not the sum of what I made.
