Dead Laces

[Verse 1]
The Asics in the box under the boiler still smell of ozone from the court.
Post-game, Moss Side rain, that specific kind of Mancunian sport.
Traction is shot, the substrate is peeling, a monument built to a failed rapport
with my own scaffolding, the torsion and sheer that my teenage frame couldn't support.
I trace the scuff mark from the final in Wigan, the Tuesday it all went south.
The phantom ache of a stress fracture blooming, a foul taste of metal in my mouth.
You're a blueprint for a building that was half-condemned before the architect got the plans out,
a load-bearing column with a hairline crack that they swore was nothing to worry about.

[Chorus]
I talk to your ghost in the gaff when it's quiet.
Dead laces, dead weight, I deny it.
This body's a blueprint I didn't design, it's a riot.
Yeah, I talk to your ghost and I tell it to be quiet.

[Verse 2]
Remember the waiting rooms? The scent of antiseptic on the vinyl floor?
Flicking through year-old copies of *NME* just to find another locked door.
The physio said, 'Rest is a weapon,' but he didn't say who the weapon was for.
Now I catalogue symptoms like postcodes, a cartographer mapping the core.
This isn't grief, it's a systems analysis, a glitch in the primary code.
A placebo prophecy, a faulty diagnostic, a story I was told
and sold, while the facade of the girl on the court got weathered and brittle and old.
Just a redbrick terrace with subsidence breathing, a structural survey on hold.

[Chorus]
I talk to your ghost in the gaff when it's quiet.
Dead laces, dead weight, I deny it.
This body's a blueprint I didn't design, it's a riot.
Yeah, I talk to your ghost and I tell it to be quiet.

[Bridge]
They told me to brace for the impact.
Instead I built a museum for the artifact.
Kept the receipt like a binding contract.
Every day I decide not to react.

[Outro]
Still in the box. Still tied.
I'm buzzin'. I'm fine.