Runes in the Rib Cage

Intro

Salt air and iodine, the smell that raised me up

Daddy's ribs like braille, healed wrong but held enough

He'd trace the ridges slow and call it his own tongue

Said every break's a letter for the ones who come

Verse

Forty years on the pier where the cranes don't forgive

Cable snapped one Tuesday, caught him where the ribs live

Doctor set it crooked, said the bone would learn to bend

He said pain's just a language and he's fluent till the end

Called the left side warning, said it clicked before the storm

Called the right side ledger, kept the debts he'd sworn

Wore his shirt unbuttoned so the young boys on the dock

Could read the crooked scripture written in his rib-cage lock

Never took a settlement, never sued the company

Said the mark was worth more than the money they'd guarantee

Taught me how to breathe through a break without a sound

Said the strongest men don't scream, they just go underground

Watched him load a barge with a fever and a limp

Sweat like scripture dripping off a body built on flint

Thirty winters passed before the cough took him below

Left his rib cage open like a book I had to know

Hook

Every scar's a rune carved into the rib

Read the marks right, learn the way the old man lived

Ash on the collarbone, iron in the plate

Some men wear their history, some just count the weight

Verse

Sixteen when the block wrote its first line on my skin

Curb caught my eyebrow, taught me where the fights begin

Kept it stitched with thread I bought from the corner store

Told the nurse I fell, she'd heard that lie before

Nineteen took a graze that clipped me off the shoulder blade

Called it my apprenticeship, the tuition that I paid

Twenty-three the winter that I slept behind the gate

Frost wrote its own rune on my knuckle, called it fate

Started reading bodies like my father read the tide

Every limp a chapter, every squint a thing to hide

Learned to spot the liars by the scars they never earned

Store-bought toughness fades but the real ones stay concerned

Kept his coat, still smells like diesel and the dock

Wear it when it's cold enough to make the old wounds talk

Rib cage is a ledger now, mine's stacking up the same

Different pier, same water, still answer to his name

Hook

Every scar's a rune carved into the rib

Read the marks right, learn the way the old man lived

Ash on the collarbone, iron in the plate

Some men wear their history, some just count the weight

Bridge

Told my son the same thing when he split his lip in June

Said don't cry over ink, boy, you just wrote your first rune

Asked me what it means when the old scars start to itch

Said that's just the weather asking who's the better man

Every generation adds a line to the same page

Rib cage gets more crowded but it never shows its age

Outro

Salt air and iodine still linger where I stand

Rib cage full of runes nobody else can understand

Bury me with the coat on, let the diesel keep it whole

Every mark I'm leaving is a map back to my soul