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