Blue Jay Language

Blue jay language is aluminum hollow vibrato, 
silver in sheen, 
glinting on angles of the tongue, 
blinding under midday sun, 
a double helix of chain link with sharpened barbs that scratch and pierce at the atmosphere’s tunneled walls, 
infinite in spiral, 
reabsorbing into itself, 
before reaching an angora soft demise in wisps of radiated November earthen warmth, 
one jay heaves gold, 
fluid falls of gilded thread running the length of a towering sycamore, 
such hue to a language fleeting, 
as flames extinguished under heavy black boots concealing a light foot, 
my mouth vacant of words, 
welcomes the misdirection of a lady beetle, 
the red of her armor green on my tongue as I taste her flight…

E.A. O'Connell

...

Our bodies linear
limbless and righteous 
amongst the thorns of infantile black locusts 
your eyes of mesonoxian dew
fix as vacant moons
bloodlet atop the sunset 
graves of lilacs
hatchet dismemberment
our earthen anguine forms
my head upon yours
I still
the future withers before me
dead on the vines
never again shall we sip of God’s wine
our cold blood
our venomous love
our thrive and will
undressing 
every memory of renewal
I will not leave your side
I will swallow you whole
make mobile my heart
chimera our souls
I will keep you
memento mori
I will bite, I will writhe
I will keep wild 
ever and a day
lest we cease to exist
of matter or of myth 
My love, Our immortality
come to me
upon the back of Death 
ride forth 
bring with you
a seed of universal knowledge
clasped within your teeth
to plant upon my tongue
with our final kiss

E.A. O'Connell

The Devil's Darning Needle

A dark abyss, 
upon which the offering of petals pale, 
ripple the mirror

The Devil’s darning needle, 
propelled by soulful sighs, 
winds boughs, 
shaking loose a gravitational spiral, 
where He hovers in shallow graves, 
unearthing hair and bones with archaeological precision, 
soot-tipped wings stirring aging sediment phantoms, 
His body lifting earthbound cyclones, 
driving debris through psychomanteum stone

Dusted arachnid filament, 
long threaded within the cypress eye, 
where the darkness bites, 
the hell-tongue pull 
spinning ghost wires, 
unhinging a cabinet of curious perfumes: 
a heart of sutured leather hide, 
a mandible of corvid cadence, 
a vow fashioned from river polished bone

Oh, messenger of afterbreath, 
where the water witch conjures 
upon the air of moony weather

Her: a death meal praying 
a tinny voice of triangular overlapping chimes

His hot breath panting 
the reverse of the pane, 
the chilled glass etching His baritone howl, 
His curse pleading of
fingers, fabric, flesh, 
and as He harnesses Death’s patience, 
tapping out Her headstone epithet, 
syllables of disbelief and spatial frustration, 
the ground below Him ignites, 
Her candle extinguishing, 
Her countenance surrendering a smile, 
as the pricking of Her finger draws pomegranate seeds…

{We’re going home}

E.A. O'Connell

The Garden

There’s gold on the thistle
pulling from her breast a mother’s milk
soft silk with tortoise shell pins in the hem
that she furiously casts to the wind
violin throats absorbing
reimagining the cadence of release
bronze hollowed bones summoning
the humidity of cicada manifestation
a gilded phantom presence
a giant of folklore who’s exhalations cloud with wings and blood thirsty proboscises
the black knight’s perfume
a chasm that unapologetically consumes 
clock working blooms vine the sky
and trumpet Goddesses
where a chaos of leaded glass panes
reflecting dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight
distort storm clouds breaching the horizon
a child’s footsteps halt with the awakening to vibrations of earth tremors that shook a millennia ago

E.A. O'Connell

Strange Beings

Wind blows forcibly: the leaves scratch and pierce the crowning night / their underbellies a thousand infantile faces: in fear, in scream, in disbelief

Funeral in a matchbox: burying a body / leaded glass wings : and the burning gas / a star’s inferno mirrored in flightless wings

Sail: bare feet atop broken glass / green muddy hills / punctured flesh and blood: running, speed, grappling earth with each slip: the horizon and spreading arms out wide: rising, soaring, linen ghosts singing: a gossamer bed of cello strings and breathless lips that hover the cold kiss of stone lips

Funeral rites: risen in the moonlight: sacrificed / an offering to clock-working eyes: naked, burning, forging / the blood runs down my legs: a stag’s eight points shatter, gore my pelvis / death is morning glories vining, unwinding, wringing

Resurrection: maggots, earthworms dismantling ruins: pollinators seeding pheromones: soaking rain, arid sun: the birds that eat of their flesh: sing my essence: pollinators to petaled heads: bees brew honey that taste of me: trees fruit a nectar of me / trickling down your chin with every insatiable bite: your tongue painting for your hands, for your mind’s eye: what my soul looks like

E.A. O'Connell

Morning Senses

Morning sky: storm cloud splendor and eyes of blue / Summer’s in no hurry today: humidity’s low and hours are cool / Morning dew on garden beds: my fingers run along waist high sunflowers and cosmos green fringe / Bells softly ring, prayer flags whisper: flutter and settle / Sipping hot coffee / My hands smell of fresh cilantro

E.A. O'Connell

Evening Senses

The evening is sueded: dusky pink clouds: mountainous vessels slowly sailing behind gilded topped maples and sycamores. A rib cage hollow percussion from the lanterns in sway, bending the prisms hanging crystals throw. A father minstrel with ukulele in hand, strums through the alleys: a melodious stream of breezes and corvid laughter. A cardinal flies overhead, its belly never as red as when the sun sets upon it: I brush the hair from my eye with the back of my hand: ripe with the scent of afternoon rain on tomato vines…twine…sun bleached bamboo. It’s the very same feeling that comes over me: the peace of standing on the balcony looking out on Point Lobos: waves and silhouettes and a fire crackling in the living room: He standing behind me, watching me breathe. East or West: my soul knows beauty: be it grand, be it simple: I’m aware of how alive my senses are: tangled as they be: and that in itself: beauty

E.A. O'Connell

I. Soundtrack to Daily Life: Wicked Games

French doors span a wall, open and welcoming the landscape of evening {shadow catches my peripheral attention} / lazy summer breeze spreads slow honey glaze {I step over the threshold} / behind me garlic sautéing a low flame nebula on cast iron heirloom {second nature as my hand takes hold} / rifle loaded - finger on the trigger - focus clear - aim straight —dead on {and a smile blooms from my eyes to my lips}

-Wicked Games-

E.A. O'Connell

...

They, the Angels with soot coated wings, feathers broken and still burning…pulled me from my boots, a hit and run impact so fierce that it leaves the socks still warm and foot full within shoes that bounce and roll as dice under casino fluorescent lights…They dragged me by my wrists along July burnt asphalt, shards of distempered broken windshield / stripped me of my clothes and pressed me naked between pristine white sheets, the dye of my flesh staining an imprint of my death…the peeling of me, ice tearing from lips, the methodical ripping of me quickly, intentionally…and then the wake up call, the stubbing of tobacco cherry ash and fire pocking my body, the stripping of my fingerprints and a blunt force to fell, scalpels and bone saws to dissect…DNA…seeking, waiting, seething…and no pain registering….like children with a magnifying glass, shards of slate, and a violent curiosity / worms and bees and the resurrection at the feet of a phantom Christ…gutted, disemboweled, exsanguinated…and from the abyss of my soul’s tomb, the forked tongue of a Gorgon sister, slithering my esophagus, flicking flint sparks at molar facades, extending for the fruit of the sins they stripped of me, the sweet of rabid canines trickling a stream of profanities down chin, neck, breast…a failure at dismentaling me, dismantling the bomb planted in my head at three, the defiance and the will that sees me through, like the pistol in my toddler grip as I hit every target as my weapon specialist father directed…So I find it nothing more than child’s play to annihilate Death / intentions, desires, reign / and cannibalize the very Life they stole and placed in vials and scales beside me…walking from the surgical lights towards the very street that stole me away that night…and all the cameras, security and otherwise, capture the anomaly of a song in physicality, the phenomena of stellular conception

E.A. O'Connell

Vertigo

Vertigo slips discs, baby on my hip, my body leaning towards sunrise, the soles of my feet trying to grip the bowing and rolling of earth, and uprooted nails in hardwood floors 

Bluejay scratching at the cloud over head, laundry line ghosts escape a flutter of life, a gasp of bleach and sex, my hair suns a perfume of wood sage and sea salt, the sunlight plays theatrics with my eyelids, blood screen and the spinning of my head 

Deaf on my left, tunneled on my right, I melt and fade, I’m streaked with paint and surrealist chords, notes addressed to dreams and a pillow cell-dyed by leaking gray matter 

I try webbing sentences, words ballooning on silk, gaining distance and silence, until only I know the destination met 

I’m behind the wheel, blind in the dark, baby directing green means go red means stop, and the headlights are a funnel cloud of a child’s interpretation of God, and the head-on collision with the eyes in the rear view mirror, something’s made a home in the abyss of my pupil, it siren songs my heart 

Fingers and dimes and magnolia pink nights, porcupine quills holding my hair in a knot 

Screech owl nocturne and a vixen in heat, my eyes adjusting to new vertices, all and more, I learned myself as a baby, are things that terrify and write a devil’s sonnet to beauty

E.A. O'Connell

Collywobbles

figure 8
slow serpentine
in sunlight
bedding down

moss and lichen

butterfly scales
feathered aerodynamics
iridescent emerald
iris reflective

sea and anemone

aged summer maple
psithurism
in a thunderstruck nightshade
double-winged samaras spinning

gravity and grass

E.A. O'Connell

...

…and everything felt raw burnt hexed…umber sienna sepia …oil paint in auto-script…sable brush strokes…further in we unleashed…powder-coated moth wings…sueded gothic window panes…unlatching breezes…frame upon frame upon frame…and a decimation of aerial formations…minutiae in pulsating atoms…spirographing outwards inwards straying to a mandala climax…

E.A. O'Connell

Pan

I laid the cold petals to your throat, sueded soft infancy in their rose red, you rose not, still and simple, you were sun bleached linen never worn on a wedding day
My fingertip pushed the petals over intermittent raindrops, sailing them into sigils that wreathed your neck, sheltering the scar, punctured the day I gave you breath through a Never bird bone: the wind blew through you and a child gasped, cried “I want to go home”
“To go home to my mother’s womb, to a warm embrace of embryonic fluid, rib cage clamor, and the intrinsic knowledge that I’ll never know my own soul as well as when I was in utero, building my physical self”
“To a home on the opposite side of laughter, where devils are born at the last syllable struggled from the tongue of a dying grown one, where the merriment births sin of rhythms, sin of tastes”
I placed a final kiss in the palm of your hand, the crown scratched with a flower of life, and where a finger’s warmth would flood, I tucked added thyme
I bent to your ear, a worn acorn button brushing against you, as I whispered, “Time forever favors the young”
I set you free, free of Earth and Never days and nights, free from the pull of stars and tomorrows
I closed my eyes, as happy thoughts seemed few and far between, as water rung bells sounded your welcome

E.A. O'Connell

...

Cannibal, as your shadow devours me, and you menace at the nape of my neck, do I thread golden? a bloodstained carpet veined with state lines, headlights extinguishing an asphalt moon aura, there are limbs lacerated by a God cutting them off ankle-deep in a baptismal wash, his breath disfiguring as he ignites the question “Why does no one ask who I pray to as all I created is decimated?” Always questioned…fellow? father of foul play? friend or fiend? But my death is cemented and His disappointment erected, as a sampler of my tattooed back framed above a Davenport in a house of worshipping lost, and my bastard soul their whipping boy, their incantation, steel bristles scrubbing radioactive flesh, at the pitch of a mortician’s bone saw…and so I write upon the air in glyphs I once scrolled in ash of my placenta, birth rites and rituals of name…my shadow, winter bones of lichened bark masquerading as a cypress from within a mid morning fog…You swallowed my silhouette in the abyss of your pupils, tears of my DNA streamed to the earth, and under the weight of your footprint I grew…nothing astounding or out of the ordinary, just a pharmaceutical resistant bacteria, a criminal in every light cast upon me

E.A. O'Connell

...

Resurrected souls in a fragmented December sky                                          
—particled light —                                                                                              
where motes of childhood nearly materialize in a memory                              
{A near miss  | I still miss what I can’t remember}

For every degree in seasonal descent,                                                              
a fathom of cardiac blue reverberates                                                      
Lungs that stutter to a stolen gasp                                                                
—resuscitate—                                                                                            
their rasp scratching another hash-mark through a long-standing DOA

Each spike in temperature,                                                                                
a new flirtation with death,                                                                            
but who knows my body better                                                                    
than an eye always studying its art

Peripheral existence,                                                                                        
is framed by gilded leaves of mapled fringe,                                        
sounding a stepped applause                                                                      
with the ascension of a concrete sky                                                        

Where blue jays scrawl their pitch in the magnetic pulse of a compass upset,
And Life gives laughter complete with an umbra

Magnolia velveteen                                                                                              
Lilac green                                                                                                    
Daffodil and crocus                                                                                              
Shots fired

Widowed roses of a blue point fuchsia,                                                                
A type O negative red

Tempered frost,                                                                                                  
Shouldered fog

And Sakura soprano scales the puddles still

As caterpillars in 8mm reverse inch                                                                
—larvae | dispense with reality | unbirth—                                                  

A Monarch’s cyclone,
heralding a head-on collision
—cranial windshield spiderweb implosion—

Winter in His pitch wool peacoat,
presses the opaque buttons flush,
surveying all to be leveled by His reaping

Primavera in Her embryonic dementia,
Her watercolors bleeding beyond fractal outlines,
beneath helicopter vibrations
—rupture hallucinations—

That fell trees,
scattering the funeral lace capped caws of obliteration

An apology of instrumental longing
{bold cello parentheses}

It’s only blood | A butcher’s apron

Cardinal flecked midday snow

E.A. O'Connell

Pitch and Tongue

On my back...flat…cumulus contractions build, concave spine lit in umbilical conduit shade.  Every breath I lose, the sky takes and makes greater use of what my body couldn’t sustain.  I want to be coal, to be ash, to be carbon…a pigment you cast in parallel with a cinnabar horizon.  The sun will set in hours you let slip in architectural thoughts…strings of fraying ornamental rugs…folding over backwards…grief as aged wallpaper and chipped lead paint…your brain will blueprint an abandoned home to mask the true loss of space.  The molten land your mortal feet can never touch, is a fire I will dance within…ever fierce, ancestral strength.  I will be filaments of life malleable in that wondrous phase of night.  Each breath I held in practice…stole green from leaves and fronds, their flesh burnt curves in wither, veins in drought.  Every breath I savoured…the plump life of lungs, gave green back in the rise, in the rushing, in the sculpting of sediment shallows and rock.  The corn snake silence subdues the light, slight earth rubbed vibrations shifting my face, my eyes in filtered shadow, to better seek the mars dusted feathers beneath which I pick up and fly…the crash of rubied cornstalks against my shoulders, weathered fingers brushing through my hair.  The ghost tree, storm wrecked and pregnant with mathematical life, is where I bury my burden: root straight deep.  Where devils will make delicacy between their teeth.  Where empty hands can overflow with wonder at a memory of womb pulse and song.  Where they gave embryonic kick and laughter and hiccups…lengths of formulaic waves moulded to my organs of welcomed purpose.  The ash of me lifts in breeze, pressing beneath evergreen needles, cones of seed.  And Death herself can’t help but double and flatline at the misread and the mistold concepts in fine print: permanence & impermanence: a design to undefine: a great many flaws: disfigured & countless: unfurling dreams in pitch and tongue.

E.A. O'Connell

The Undying Cold {March 2015)

The creek is frozen over, all but for the barely visible trickle of white water flowing through the roots of the fallen tree that bridges the banks.  My eyes are struck in awe by the frost etched ice that holds a green hue amongst the winter bare bark and skeletal branches set against an unclean sky of ever phasing blue.  I have to wonder if the creek is nothing more than haunting summer memories projected from the dreaming hibernators, and if I were to kneel into the unforgiving mud, cracking the ice with my fist, plunging my hand through the sting…if my palm would catch July warmth and a thriving ecobreath to carry me through to the first splitting bud of spring.

E.A. O'Connell

Woman Crying Beneath Falling Leaves

She stood there: about her feet: copper amber lead
~colors in a flutter, in a cyclone, in the midst of death~
Her face wrenched with grief: for the loss of time, loss of light, loss of green
All around her autumnal jubilee, where hollow sockets of knotted branches curved a smiling eye
And I, alive in a season of transition and reflection, felt the weight of existence in the locked out breath I couldn’t invite
Her pain: the unrelenting ache of dark that dragged before her
Winter cold shakes not a corpse, but inters fear in souls bound~unfound

E.A. O'Connell

{A Universe of} Impermanence

Impermanence 
and from annihilation rises a breath
a seedling of thought
an inkling of life
{chain link fascination / keyhole division}
We may very well be lost
{a cause/a mind/love letters written to a prism voiced void}
We may already be dead
{a sea/a star/leaves of correspondence collected in a concrete garden}
Death
impermanence of an end:
sacred
{a geometry/a synapse}
the deconstruction
and
the decomposition
The decibels of silence 
{scratching the surface/crowning/first breath}
Impermanence of the essential and final
{everlasting rhythm/ever-casting spell}
Who’s to define the very essence of our souls:
where they ring a crystal howl commence 
and
where they hammer an iron growl transfiguration
…a spiraling cataclysmic detonation…
…The End…
…end…
…Again…
…and again…

E.A. O'Connell

September Thoughts

Isosceles murmuration kaleidoscopes to cyclone to spider young scattering
Curling gray locks: fire alive in the filament
Driftwood shaved sails where a heron makes pale a twilit hour
Reticulated vines of trompette noir, tentacled reach towards vapor dense void: bottle green vision distorted and clean
Stamen shaken supernova pollen: gilded sex in exit wound abstract
Softly shifted rain favors a solstice burn
An earth rust after-trace hints decay upon days leading towards the equinox

E.A. O'Connell