Fragment Parade from Hourglass Rhyme by Ciphera

# About This Track: Fragment Parade

Broken pieces tell stories more honest than anything whole. "Fragment Parade" emerged during a session where Tag knocked over an entire crate of flash cards, sending hundreds of half-understood concepts scattering across the Forge floor. Rather than picking them up in order, we started arranging them randomly, finding unexpected connections between unrelated ideas.

The detuned piano that opens the track? That's literally Rook's cousin's neglected upright we found in a classroom storage closet. Notes slightly warped from years of humidity, just like memories get twisted with time. We recorded actual Scholar Crews trying to recite lessons while we deliberately interrupted them, capturing that beautiful struggle of knowledge fighting to stay intact.

Sonically, we built this one backwards—starting with the crowd recordings of students helping each other remember test answers, then constructing the beat around their natural rhythms. Those recorder melodies that float in and out? Tag taught them to actual third-graders who couldn't quite get the fingering right. We kept all the missed notes.

Most personal track on the album for me. During recording, I kept thinking about my grandmother with memory loss, how she'd string together fragments of stories that somehow made perfect sense in their incompleteness. The parade metaphor came from watching her arrange photo albums—not chronologically, but by colors and shapes only she understood.

The structure deliberately lacks traditional verses—everything's a snippet, a vignette, a passing thought. When the chorus hits with "March what's left," it's an anthem for everyone who's ever felt their knowledge slipping away but keeps moving forward anyway.

Listen for the moment at 2:35 when all the instruments drop except shuffling paper and whispered mnemonics. That pause creates the space where understanding happens—not in the noise, but in the gaps between.

Tracklist

7.	Fragment Parade	2:59

Lyrics

Fragments march in crooked lines, eyes on the Tableaux edge
Ciphera collars half-rhymes, hands tracing threads
Thoughts flick, mosaic-kind, parade of what’s unsaid

Lore hums a snagged equation, thumb ghosts the slate
Answer stutters in the air—no Scholar translating fate

Tag’s pocket scraps, scribbled, curve in the backpack seam
Shared rhyme—threadbare, still we patch the lesson between

March what’s left—let the fragments parade
Patchwork steps, every Scholar unpaid
We trade half-sung notes for a place on the page
Stitch what we catch—let the fragments parade

—Remember ‘pivot’? No, wait—recite it again—
—Can’t recall the second line—just say it with them—
—What rhymed with ciphered? We fill it in—
Scratch it, scribble it, repeat—never ends—

A mnemonic knotted at lunch, bitter with chalk-stained hands
Palms settled on drifted facts—knuckles print what withstands

Scholar Crew’s jotted riddles spill, overlapping stray
Half-an-answer glints, everyone’s sketch in sway

Cipherboard littered, rhyme tiles long rearranged
Meaning grows between, not in—what remains

March what’s left—let the fragments parade
Patchwork steps, every Scholar unpaid
We trade half-sung notes for a place on the page
Stitch what we catch—let the fragments parade

In scraps we gather, shaping what we can’t claim
Fragments we parade—together, we remain

Credits

from Hourglass Rhyme, released July 10, 2025

License