Today you supplicate Odysseus

That was the nature of reputations.
The way they beat on tiny lungs
with no intention to surrender.
I watched the way your soul slipped
in sand, how your scales tipped to
your father’s sighs. I saw you yield
to this labyrinth of lies. I couldn’t
breathe. I still can’t / don’t know
how to / promise to be of any use.
Mostly I want to be hieroglyphs,
mostly I want to crawl around the
curve of your mouth again. Mostly,
I want to brutalize your breaths,
I wish to exist as your bruise.
If you remember these lines —
syllabic, razor-edged, swollen —
you’d kiss away all the perforations,
right? [ ] Think of yourself as a
symptom of sickness, a diagnosis for
soreness. The treatment is reputations,
then nature, and mostly: your silence.
I’ll mourn every scrape of this
rainstorm. I swear to you – I swear
at you – that this indigo ache exists
in the inorganic, too. It exists in
kindness. Nevermind that I starved
just to find you already swallowed.
Think of me again when you forget
to /blink/ and I’ll hold your
alphabet of inflammations between
my ribs.