Bones That Learned to Bend (version 2)

Intro

Cap lamp flickers in a twenty-eight inch seam

Grandfather crawled the tunnels chasing a coal-black dream

Spine bent like a comma before it hit the ground

Said the mountain don't break you, it wears you down slow

Verse

Fourteen years old when they handed me the pick

Told me stand up straight and the roof will make you sick

Learned to walk on my knees like the earth was a pew

Prayed to the dark for a seam wide enough to break through

Brother went in whole, come out folded like a letter

Timber cracked at noon, we never got no better

Canary in a cage sang louder than a choir

When the air turned thin we followed its wire

Scrip in my pocket, company store on the hill

Paid for the bread with the coal in my will

Mother kept a candle lit by the kitchen glass

Counted every shift like rosary beads made of ash

I bent so the mountain wouldn't have to break

Learned the shape of survival for my own sake

Twenty years under, my back kept the score

Every scar a rung on a ladder with no floor

Chorus

These are bones that learned to bend, not break

Carried every shift like a debt I had to pay

Low is how you last when the ceiling won't rise

Bent bones built a name that still stands twice my size

Verse

Forty years in, doctor showed me the film

Said my lungs looked like a map of a drowned kiln

Told him I already knew the weather in my