Radon

Lyrics

I come up through the slab.
Through the hairline cracks in the concrete your father poured in 1967.
I am the exhalation of the granite shelf.
The ghost of uranium sleeping for a billion years.
I don't have a key.
I don't need a welcome mat.
I move through mortar like a memory.

I am the tenant in the basement.
No lease signed, no rent is paid.
I have no color.
I make no sound.
I cast no shade.
I am the reason for the little plastic kit on the shelf.
And I wait.
I just collect myself, and wait.

Herr Dorn saw my mother shimmer in a jar in Halle, 1900.
Ramsay called me Niton, the shining one.
A private joke I keep.
I am the absence of the light.
The noble gas that asks for nothing.
The quiet in the bottom of the well.

I am the tenant in the basement.
No lease signed, no rent is paid.
I have no color.
I make no sound.
I cast no shade.
I am the reason for the little plastic kit on the shelf.
And I wait.
I just collect myself, and wait.

Ask Stanley Watras.
December 1984.
He left for his shift at the Limerick plant, clean as a whistle.
But the alarms screamed when he tried to go home.
The poison wasn't past the gate.
The poison was in the cellar, back in Boyertown.
Two thousand, seven hundred picocuries.
A number without a face.
A silence with a body count.

I'm still here.
Down with the Christmas ornaments and the forgotten paint cans.
I am the second-leading cause.
The thing you never think to test for.
A daughter of the earth.
Just breathing with you.
In.
And out.