Load-Bearing Hymn

[Verse 1]
The joists under the kitchen floor groan a name that isn't mine,
a Polish surname from '49, etched in the grimy subfloor pine.
The whole house smells of damp drywall and the ghost of boiled cabbage;
my inheritance, a catalog of structural damage.
Grandmother said, "A house has bones, you gotta feel it when they ache,"
I feel the pressure shift and give, more than this foundation can take.
It’s a slow collapse in increments, a half-inch every fall,
I'm patching hairline fractures with my back against the wall.

[Chorus]
Oh foundation, hold my name,
wash the new rust with the rain.
Please don't let the silence crack the spackle in the frame.
'Cause if these walls come down, who's gonna know we ever came?

[Verse 2]
It's 4 AM in Delray, Tuesday, before the sun is due,
I watch the new bridge stitch a wound across the river's faded blue.
The air tastes like diesel fumes and a low, electric hum,
got my father's disposition, got his temper in my thumb,
pressing dents into the window sill, a pattern he designed.
He said, "Son, you can't fix nothing that the city leaves behind."
This whole block is a museum, every brick another headstone now,
I'm just the last curator here, trying to figure out just how...

[Bridge]
So I'm talking to the plaster, to the dust motes in the light,
to the ghost of every shift change that ever owned the lonely night.
To the weight of all that silence, to the stillness in the air,
every floorboard creak's an answer to a half-forgotten prayer.

[Outro]
'Cause if these walls come down, who's gonna know we ever came?
(a cappella) The key's under the mat, but you're not coming home again.