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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