Tension Member

[Verse 1]
The Dettol smell still ghosting the pine of the kitchen table,
where I’d map out netball plays, keep the back line stable.
Now it’s polymer twenties stacked in unsteady towers,
counting up the hours, dividing them by contractual powers.
Same grain of wood beneath my nail where I carved a compass point north,
used to calculate the angles, now I calculate the worth.
Every crisp new note's a blueprint for a wall I have to build,
a load-bearing column for a promise unfulfilled.

[Chorus]
Same four legs, same surface, different kind of sum.
Used to be quadratics, now it’s where the money’s from.
This the new scaffolding, the framework for the numb,
the kitchen table axiom till the morning comes.

[Verse 2]
My dad at this same corner, 6PM, cuppa tea gone cold,
left a ring-stain on the paper telling stories to be sold.
Smell of rain and steel on his coat, he’d say “Check your footings, Woz,
the foundation’s everything,” and I still hear him just because.
My own foundation’s got a stress fracture, hairline, deep inside the bone,
a quiet bit of subsidence I have to brace alone.
So I run the numbers twice, this is torsion, this is shear,
the physics of just staying here, year after grinding year.

[Chorus]
Same four legs, same surface, different kind of sum.
Used to be quadratics, now it’s where the money’s from.
This the new scaffolding, the framework for the numb,
the kitchen table axiom till the morning comes.

[Bridge]
Tuesday, 3AM, the hum from the fridge is a G-sharp drone.
The patella tendon strap I used to wear, the dial tone
of the physio’s office, the squeak of the Asics on the court—
a catalogue of frequencies I was told to cut short.

[Outro]
Same grain.
Different math.