[Verse 1]
In the pelvis curve a verdict waits,
Wide and shallow calls her, narrow calls him,
Check the skull, the brow, the jaw's debate,
Sex gets written there, faint but firm.
Growth plates open wide, you're still a kid,
Seal them shut and the decades creep in,
The pubic symphysis, rough then it won't,
Tracks the years like rings in a tree.
Stretch the femur out, measure it fair,
Multiply the length, your height is there.
[Chorus]
Pelvis for gender, skull for the same,
Growth plates and symphysis counting your age,
Femur for stature, stretched out and true,
Every bone's a chapter, telling on you.
Read the skeleton, page after page,
It's an osteobiography — a life story locked in a cage,
A cage of calcium, holding your days.
[Verse 2]
A healed-over fracture, a pin or a plate,
A hip replaced back in eighty-eight,
Old rickets bowing, arthritis carved deep,
These scars in the bone are secrets to keep.
No name on the stone, no face to recall,
But titanium screws tell the whole tale,
Detectives of calcium, reading each scar,
Matching the quiet to who they are.
[Chorus]
Pelvis for gender, skull for the same,
Growth plates and symphysis counting your age,
Femur for stature, stretched out and true,
Every bone's a chapter, telling on you.
[Verse 3]
Ethiopia, nineteen seventy-four,
A gully gave up bones from the floor,
Forty percent of a lady so small,
They called her Lucy, pieced wall to wall.
Her pelvis sits wide, her knee angles in,
Proof that she walked where the acacias thin,
Three-point-two million years in the ground,
Standing on two feet before words had sound.
[Verse 4]
A car park in Leicester, two thousand twelve,
A spade struck a king beneath the shelf,
His spine curved sideways, a scoliosis sign,
Proof of the hunch that the portraits maligned.
His skull cracked open, the battle wounds wide,
Bosworth Field's ending etched in his side,
Five hundred years silent under the tar,
Richard rose up from a parking-lot scar.
[Bridge]
Every skeleton's a palimpsest, scraped clean and written again,
Diet in the molars, labor in the spine, sorrow and strain,
Layers of a lifetime pressed into lime,
Bones don't lie — they just wait on their time.
[Chorus]
Pelvis for gender, skull for the same,
Growth plates and symphysis counting your age,
Femur for stature, stretched out and true,
Every bone's a chapter, telling on you.
Osteobiography, written in white,
The calcium diary gets the last word right.
[Outro]
Pelvis, skull, symphysis, femur too,
The skeleton's singing the story of you.
Hush now and listen, the marrow knows,
Every old bone has a tale it can show.