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
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