Skald's Debt

Intro

Lamp oil burning low in a room where collectors don't come

Thirty names in my throat and I owe every one

Verse

Mine caved in on a Tuesday, dust turned the sun to a bruise

I was the one they dug out, still don't know why I chose to lose

Twelve men under the timber, I heard the beams start to sing

Crawled through the black on my elbows, tasted the coal like a ring

Foreman said keep it quiet, company paid for the hush

I took the check for a week then I threw it back in the rush

Started writing their surnames on the back of a grocery list

Turned it to verse by November, turned the verse to a fist

Nobody crowned me a bard, nobody asked for the job

But silence costs more than paper, paper's the only guard

I sing at the tavern for coin now, sing at the wake for free

Every stanza's a coffin nail, every rhyme is a key

They call me the skald of the hollow, say I owe them my breath

I say the debt runs the other way, they bought back my death

Traded their own for mine so I carry the names like a skin

Every scar on this paper is proof of the men who let me win

Chorus

I sing so the ash don't own the story

I sing so the dark don't get the glory

Every name that I carry costs me sleep and it's worth it

Still paying the skald's debt, one verse at a time

Verse

Twenty years since the collapse and my hands still shake on the pen

Young ones ask how I made it, I tell them I didn't, not then

Part of me stayed in that shaft where the lantern light couldn't reach

I just carry him with me, let him borrow my speech

Wife used to say put it down, the dead don't need any more ink

I told her the living forget faster than the well runs dry from a drink

Wrote a song for the widow, she cried but she asked me for one more

Said her husband was funnier than the verse let on before

So I fixed it, I always fix it, the record's never quite done

Every version's a payment, every edit's a debt to someone

Town wants a statue now, wants my name on a plaque by the gate

Told them put their names instead, I'm just the one still awake

Held the mic like a shovel, dug the same hole in reverse

Brought the buried back level, one syllable, one hearse

They say a skald sings for glory, I say glory's a currency spent

On the nights when the twelve men visit and ask what the silence meant

Chorus