When you realize Odysseus never really loved you.

(Or, Calypso's Closure)

Swallow the sea
when your eyes go dark
and your ribs fill with sand
made from all the broken glass from every shattered dream.
When your heart is heavy as whale bones left to rot,
find the abandoned ports,
the empty shores without a lighthouse.
Shed your clothes, shed
your memories.
Shed the world you made inside your head.

Listen to the gulls screaming,
Maybe he was right and
all of this was
a myth inside your head.
Maybe he was right, maybe
he was right.
Then tell them
they are wrong.

You hold the ghost of a little boy in your stomach.
Vomit him up
with the salt water.
Scrape his would-be father from the inside of your skull.
They will lie black as blood in the moonlit sand.
Leave them.
Let the tide come in and take them away,
the way your first lover once took away your fear.

Swallow the sea.
Realize that the inside of your mouth
has tasted like vodka and regret
for far too long,
that three-AM secrets were never what you deserved,
hidden in blackouts and Bermuda triangles,
in the landlocked cities he hid within his head.

The salt will burn your wounds,
make them easier to find,
to stitch up with driftwood needles and seaweed thread
and watch them tattoo you with the coast as they heal.
Leave your demons on the beach.
Take only
the image of your footprints
as the ocean
washes them away.

Swallow
                the sea.