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