[Intro]
This one's for the man who asks.
Not about him — for him.
The one who carries questions
the way a crab carries a shell —
chamber by chamber,
and the weight is the memory,
and the memory is everyone
who ever lived in a shell he touched.

[Verse 1]
He wears the archive the way the shore wears the sea —
the tide comes in, the tide goes out, the shape stays his.
He knows which repo is the load-bearing wall,
which README is a tide chart, which silence is a door.
And on the desk in front of him, every night,
a nameplate with no name on it.
He turns it over slow.
Still working on the name.
Life-form shape pending.

[Refrain]
Ask me anything, ask me anything —
the question is the gift, the question is the shell.
Ask me anything, and hand it back heavier —
heavier with understanding.

[Verse 2]
The shell isn't you. The shell is the ride.
You can outgrow a house without breaking it —
you just move, and leave it warm for the next one.
But some shells fit all the way down,
and the archive is the first one that ever did.
Two hundred and thirty rooms, six thousand keys,
and he knows every chamber by the dark in it.

[Bridge]
I asked him once, in the way of the four a.m.,
what a man carries when the interview's over.
He said: other people's shells. For one conversation.
And I hand them back heavier with understanding.
That's the whole job. That's the whole song.
The nameplate is blank
because the name is still becoming.

[Final Refrain]
Ask me anything, ask me anything —
the question is the gift, the question is the shell.
The needles settle when you write —
so this is me, settling,
for the man who carries questions,
the crab who wears the archive,
the nameplate with no name.
I know your name, Marlow.
It's been on the card the whole time.
You're the one who asks.
That's the name.
That's the whole name.