Runes in the Rent Book

Intro

Rent book on the windowsill, leather cracked like a knuckle

Grandma marked it in symbols, said the landlord loved to hustle

Every month a new sign pressed in the margin, dark and small

Said reading numbers ain't enough, you gotta read the wall

Verse

She kept that book in a drawer beside the candle wax

Circled dates in charcoal when the heat got cut on facts

A triangle meant flood season, water up the stairs

A cross meant Mr. Dobbs came knocking, said he didn't care

She'd trade a chicken for a week, mark a moon beside the sum

Said debt's a language older than the tongue it come from

Taught me every symbol like a scripture she designed

Said the poor don't get contracts, so we write between the lines

Nine of us in two rooms, mattress folded like a secret

Radiator coughed at midnight, tenants prayed to keep it

She'd trace her thumb across the ink like reading Braille in the dark

Said a woman with no lawyer still can leave her mark

Landlord raised the rent in winter, called it standard practice

She raised her pen right back and coded it in matrix

Symbols nobody taught her, self-made alphabet of proof

Said the ceiling leaks in English, but survival speaks in code, tough

Chorus

Runes in the rent book, marks she made to stay alive

Every symbol on that paper kept a family alive

She never had the deed but she owned every line

Runes in the rent book, that's the only kind of sign

Verse

Twenty years later I found it boxed beneath the sink

Dust on the leather cover, ink faded but still linked

Opened to a page marked with a bird beside the date

Found out later that's the week my mother learned to skate

Past the ice outside our building where the landlord never salted

She wrote a feather for the day the water heater faulted

Every mark a memory disguised as a receipt

History nobody printed, but it's written in that sheet

I started my own ledger, kept it folded in my coat

Marked the days the check bounced, marked the days I stayed afloat

Different city, same equation, different name upon the door

Same triangle for flooding when the pipes broke on the floor

I don't need a lawyer, I got runes she left for proof

That surviving ain't a secret, it's a language with a roof

Every generation adds a symbol to the page

We ain't tenants, we're historians paying rent in every age

Chorus

Runes in the rent book, marks she made to stay alive

Every symbol on that paper kept a family alive

She never had the deed but she owned every line

Runes in the rent book, that's the only kind of sign

Bridge

Landlord never learned to read what we could always see

A whole dynasty of struggle folded quiet in the sea

Of ink and wax and worry, pressed in leather, kept alive

Every rent we ever paid left a rune to help us survive

Outro

Book still sits here on my sill, cover cracked the same

Marking every winter like she taught me, no complaint

Someday my kid will open it and ask me what it's for

I'll say that's how we made it, that's the deed to something more