The Old Marlow Boundary Marker

Lyrics

[Intro]
The walk begins where the sidewalk ends.
Or where it should.
Chamblee Tucker Road. July.
The asphalt breathes heat back at the sky.
There’s a line here.
You can’t see it, but you can feel it.

[Verse 1]
They say Marlow put a marker down.
An iron pin driven in the clay, back when this was all clay.
Before the city swelled.
I walk the verge, kicking at the kudzu.
Looking for a ghost's fencepost.
A surveyor's forgotten promise.
The deed book is silent on who Marlow was.
Just a name tied to a line.
And the line decides everything.

[Chorus]
This side is Chamblee. That side is DeKalb.
One pays for the streetlights, the other for the storm drain.
One sends a fire truck from the east, the other from the west.
A line on a map is a line in your life.
And for decades, they fought over every single inch of it.
Right here. Under my feet.

[Verse 2]
There was a house, a small one, on 2.3 acres.
Caught in the crossfire of the maps.
For seven years, two bills arrived in the mail.
One from the city, one from the county.
Both said: you owe us. You live here.
The owner must have stood in his yard,
straddling the ghost of Marlow's line,
and wondered which government owned his shadow.

[Chorus]
This side is Chamblee. That side is DeKalb.
One pays for the streetlights, the other for the storm drain.
One sends a fire truck from the east, the other from the west.
A line on a map is a line in your life.
And for decades, they fought over every single inch of it.
Right here. Under my feet.

[Bridge]
The arguments in fluorescent-lit rooms.
Annexation. De-annexation.
Lawyers pointing at plats from 1972.
The town breathing, expanding, inch by painful inch.
The train doesn’t care.
It just crosses the line.
Carries people from one jurisdiction to the next
in sixty seconds flat.

[Outro]
The sun is going down.
The heat finally breaks.
I never found the pin.
Maybe it was paved over in the nineties.
But the Marlow boundary is still here.
In the different color of the asphalt patch.
In the reach of the streetlights.
A quiet, stubborn fact.