Phantom Load

[Verse 1]
DMV on a Tuesday, the air tastes like wet steel.
I'm staring at the box for the name I can't feel.
They want the blueprint, schematics of a ghost in the wires,
The architect who left just the smoke from the fires.
Heard the voltage drop when you blew the main fuse,
Left a low-grade current runnin' through my shoes.
Felt it on the pavement, every crack in the block,
A clock with no hands that I'm forced to just watch.

[Chorus]
This is that phantom load, the hum from a dead line,
The engine that I built where a heart shoulda been designed.
It's the power I pull from a plug in the wall,
That was never connected to nothing at all.

[Verse 2]
Grandma in the kitchen, smell of chicory and steam,
Said "He had good hands, just for breaking a dream."
I remember his toolbox, the rust on the wrench,
The bitter iron silence on the back of the bench.
You were a live wire, a circuit shorted out by the rain,
A beautiful design with a structural pain.
I trace the busted conduits you left in the walls,
And patch 'em with the silence that answers my calls.

[Chorus]
This is that phantom load, the hum from a dead line,
The engine that I built where a heart shoulda been designed.
Yeah I learned how to pull from that plug in the wall,
That was never connected to nothing at all.

[Bridge]
It's not an absence, it's a negative space,
I built a whole damn generator in this place.
The stoic ache I carry isn't debt I'm repaying,
It's the armature turning, it's the quiet relaying.

[Chorus]
And this phantom load, it's a hum I call mine,
The transformer glowing on the Gary city line.
It's the power I pull from that plug in the wall,
Now I am the connection, I'm the start of it all.

[Outro]
Signed the line blank. It felt right.
Yeah, left that line blank. All night.