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