Voyage, Voyage {A Micro Tale}

The world fell asleep last night; insomniacs found a rhythm and syncopated, children phantomed fog cities in the trees, lovers puzzle-fit their bodies and caught their breaths, animals, domesticated and wild alike, nested and denned in the absence of alarm.  As the world slumbered, the oceans inhaled and with every exhale gained fathoms, crested miles, until every suffocated cityscape, each stratospheric mountain peak, and colossal redwood were submerged; leviathans for a fraction of a second.  For a glimpse of time, all of life was reembraced by a caul of intuition, all life reverted to an in utero state of breathing, and every cell of every existence sounded back the beat of The Mother's heart.  Peace; the whale song and doppler pulse of currents, sonogram moonlight, and the momentary silence of an extinction.  By morning the oceans receded, back to lapping their shores, and the world woke to a water stained earth, as if rain secreted in the night.  Everything seemed as it always had, the people fell into their daily routines without a question or suspicion, and the problems that weigh heavy continued to plague.  But the sun radiated a warmth that lit an inkling of the night's truth to all; a faint primordial scent of origins and amniotic dreams, an awakening of sense, that cautioned a nightmare, that keepsaked a hope: the seed of kind planted in a reverie, the premonition of lot in the escalation of real time.

E.A. O'Connell

Meditation of the Morning

The lotus have died, receded to their watery clime of a regenerating sun in mud luck and deciduous fortune. Elsewhere, the renewed spring of greenery and blossoms within the garden borders haven’t fared as well; depressed, in a low slung green of vegetation putrefying under the weight of an unapologetic frost. They return not to a supple hue or texture in the sun, nor do they brown and release their hold in the dipping temperatures of November nights, they just linger in a limbo of being; awaiting, numbing.  On a walk through a churchyard I behold red begonias, winter macerated and pooled upon their sisters; a wax of thinly veiled youth, of blood ties to the mother, of a death and all it has yet to become.  Shadows spin about me, a split second of chill as they black out the sun: vultures.  I rather enjoy watching them wheel and dive on a breezy morning; how warm to the touch their feathers would be: a sun saturated abyss.  Icarus flying too close to the sun, and yet possessing wings incapable of melting.  I think they write poetry in their fluidity, or at the very least lyrics to a song.  They thread words together as their bodies cross and they raise choruses in their heights; percussion and strings and woodwinds.  Some think it odd, inappropriate even, to speak of the beauty of something believed to be ugly, horrid, that monstrosities are just that, monsters.  But who defines a monster?  Who defines beauty?  Who defines purpose?  I took my children to a cemetery and while there I explained to them that it’s not just a final resting place of the deceased, that it’s a garden; of contemplation, of gratitude and surrender, of a terrible beauty and it’s renewal: life.  I study the architecture of the church, the stained glass, and how the crows sit atop the slate roof, cawing out at all who pass; keeping tally or bidding a good day?  God and I made a pact decades ago: we’d believe in the other from within our respective houses of worship.  So when I go to the lotus, when I go to the trees, the mountains, the ocean, when I’m standing in a parking lot or outside of a church, when I’m a spectrum, when I’m faded, when I feel like a ghost to the world, to even myself...I still exist, because somewhere in the immensity of the universe, my mote of self, has someone, something, some energy, believing, knowing, that I am.  I finish my walk, admiring the damage of winter’s encroaching, placing my chilled hands in the pocket of my hoodie, nodding to the crows, as I turn and go with a whispered amen.    

E.A. O'Connell

polterheist of the alpha mind {a rework always in progress}

Chairs, ebony and knocked with wear, stack in Escher fascination…on pointe, the precision they spin, slow and methodical, a hypnotic optical delusion of black and sunlight…static builds in the atmosphere and sounds the descent…a waterfall crash…a tempest seat…piano keys and peddle release…

Serpent winds a derisive halo, atop the head of a woman, her womb a pomegranate ripe, her life solitary and defiant…reptilian underbelly slips beneath her palms, through her thighs, winding a return to her throat…forked tense and elliptical divination…it all equates to infinite constriction of her airways…she charcoals a door upon a wall…knocks & knocks to meet no response…she crashes the threshold…honoring herself…

Arachnid chessmen, cloaked in steel wool, stealth in their maneuvering about the disfigured floor…foregoing strategy for mind play…Shadows of men in child fun, run the stairs to find her eye, plastering themselves statue still, stretching and fading…incinerating in the black wick of a candle in slipped inferno…they terrorize the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, absorbing her screams with monstrous paws…leaving her paralyzed as the iron maiden mouth, clasps about her face…her throat welling & choking on the shit she refuses to swallow…leaving her a permanent power from a temporary slip…

{polterheist of the alpha mind}

E.A. O'Connell

...excerpts of thoughts in story {III}

Somewhere in the eigengrau hour, between the scream of a night terror and the sigh of a post mortem body, the cicadas stilled in a birth— stilled in the desiccation of a wound. In their absence, or rather from it, I took up a hum—my cells regenerating and calling to their familiar. In the Devil’s Hour, I heard a seat being taken, and I rolled to the ghost—I spiraled into the fugue. A slip of the tongue—No—A slip of the blade, beckoned me forth from the vapor state of thought. A kitchen…wood grain…paring knife…stainless steel reflection—I painted my blood across the glyphs and stitched my deeper self shut. The hum still creates—still deteriorates—my liberation. I lose myself on concrete and coffee— a straightaway dead ends with brick and mortar, columns and corners. In the shadows, his cigarette scissor fingers, his disheveled, bloodied apron— a butcher sends up smoke signals. I lower my hood, keeping my eyes on his, hiding neither scar, nor thread that lace my neck and face— I make holy, rites with a ceremony of feral instincts—a berserker—internally I'm at war. A second thought—a second glance—I turn toward, and he’s missed nothing, collecting my tells—my intimacy—all with merely his stance and eyeline. Marigolds bloom from my mouth, ruffled manes of sunlight, a dance of skirts masking my misdeeds, but they don’t fool the butcher—who recites an elegy in soft brogue. You know // Aye  The hum bursts the dam, a full blown commotion, chaos and communication—I’m lightning he’s caught in a bottle—I’m no longer impossible—I’m incredible

E.A. O'Connell

...excerpts of thoughts in story {II}...

“…the Sun.”
“No. I won’t.  I’ve been noctrunal far too long.”
“Shhhh. Close your eyes. Breathe from your center.  Give into your true nature.  Loosen the earthly gravitational pull…forward the soul—it remembers—reconnect with your primal mind.”
{Hands tilt my head back, fingers river flow along my neck, base of skull, forehead—tapping rhythms every few paces—}        
                                                                            {minutes slow—}
“Now, the Sun. How does He speak?”                                                                                                             {My breath catches—my brain silences—and I relinquish control}

... … …Chants…Arias… ...No, a dirge...a wild rite...a language solemn, a depth of prism iridesce and spilt apothecary bottle silence
Cedar split…fractured burns…a warm terracotta belly…and stacked driftwood…
Sin. Sin rich as September coughing seas, and soft as milk thick lightning streaming through an underwater haze…
He tasted me —my flesh as ripe as the snap of rapture—
He let himself lost in my body—my cemetery, a garden of enigmas—he tore from me, a bitter medicinal root, potent—fatal
He percussions me {vertebrae / ribs} — He strings me {hips / clavicle} — He sacreds me {sternum / womb}—He abandons me—cold steel, dissected and raw
He still rises on my taste buds —layer upon layer— tobacco soil, aged oak, wax of prayer candles—He prays to himself
His birthright tears me from inside out—his progenitor mends me and quietly recedes
He enwraps me—a chaos of breeze— the vibration in ricochet {his lips}—a burial shroud... ... ...

{My eyes open—a false reality? a foreshadow of the eye?—gauzy, black wings suspended before the craggy tomb, absorbing light—sunlight emblazons the spire, consuming shadow} 
“Can we?...Do we?... ...Live? Die?... ...We’re... ...a Möbius strip”... ...
“Accept the ride.”

{Return II Origins}

E.A. O'Connell

...Meta...

That blue hour…running water lit in ripened blood…only one tree shivers a feverish eulogy to Summer…morning memories of jays bird boxing…the tin of their screams, serrated & rusted…their flight patterns a star tetrahedron…through which I glimpse the breadth of eagle wings…you omen my divine wheeling, ascent in growth & vision… …from the earth, a mother snake sought the sun…her hatchling lifeless on moon cast stone…earthbound sparrow chatter hushed…cycloned leaves in the kicked up breeze, an energy silenced in a sun-blind collision…cicada camouflage pressed in asphalt flat…wings reduced to dusty, shattered factory windows…screams of youth bullet the holes… …Death keeps me grounded…frees me from all cages & irons…in my memory & at my bedside, we smile at each’s actuality…I thank Him repeatedly…because of our proximity, I expand on life… …Back in that blue hour…water raining over my body, lit in copper-rich blood… …I’m bleeding anew… …ever viable & always in thrive… …I’m meta… …breath & fight…

E.A. O'Connell

...

Lemon and ash skies…porcelain purging…the green of my heart chakra…the hot flashes and nausea…that coil me exoskeleton…a golden mean to an end… …bone dry veins & stick after stick…the gurney breeze & downhill slide…warmth & the dimming of lights…my gratitude speaks as the milk of sleep befalls… …the core of my being…the faces come to mind…smiling…as life caesuras… …where my head goes…unknown…consciousness snaps with thought in full moon tide…the birth of a new star from the void…a laugh… …a hand extended…my hand…to whom…I know not… …laughing…I come…I go…laughing… …one day He’ll come for me…for good…and we’ll make light a heavy life…chimera our humor… …& toll a great many bells…

E.A. O'Connell

The Sins of the Sin Eater

… …to know…who will eat the sins of the sin eater?…a feast for the senses & a pariah menagerie…silence befitting a communion & raucous praise of an orgasm… …to want…cremation…smoke of bones mingling with a gray morn…dawn wedded to the horizon…a gold band & raw minerals…fire to lick at sin stained skin…survival is ugly…a lifetime of evils…lovely & necessary… …want to…burn the house down…to ashes, silken dust…encased in a Celtic box, hand carved…blessings and curses etched into the wood…no ill of deeds, the hands upon her flesh & faculty in the afterlife…a flight & hike…Point Lobos, silver sea mist and fog…scattered…a decimated body in dance, ancient tongue in lilt… …to bear…seasonal symbiosis: winter incubation & spring rattle: germination…earth borne wildling…bidden by blood running a chin & seeds ground by teeth…ravenous, she seeks, she eats…of sins & fears, named & displaced, by mortals on ferals…her fury & resolve, resurrecting chaos & colors…only the sinful can see…only the Gods amongst men know…the cycle never falters…forms alter, transfigure…the soul, a pyrophyte, thrives in strength & reason… chaos …I remember, upon each & every pyre… …want…need…the sins upon which I feed…

E.A. O'Connell

...to the lotus...

…I went to the lotus…to breathe, to realign & recover the silence…my path was lined with prairie dropseed…my fingers mingling with the height…my hand blooming, a coriander perfume… …hummingbirds navigated stalks, darting in and out, a hide and seek game…one slowing, hovering…eye to eye, we considered the other… …and to the azure sky my focus…prehistoric angles & serene lengths, so was built the heron…softly landing atop the evergreen, amongst the tangled knit of summer growth… …tree swallows engaged an aerial dance…a belted kingfisher meditated atop the slate roof of a spring house… …I, nature’s familiar of ancient lot… …I feel people, hear them vibrate…a cartographer of behavior…I read & decode…exhausting & destructive to my rhythm…the wild keeps me centered & grounded… …I go to the lotus for confirmation & absolution…where my sins aren’t catalogued and condemned…rather assimilated as an integral part of my whole…where my evils are instinct & survival…beautiful and holy…bloodlet & moon-tide… …a harbinger…a rise, a stitch… …water moccasin & copperhead…primal & immortal…sensual & shadow…a force of nature…I am who the rabbit foretold… …I go to the lotus to remember…exiles and resurrections…to honor my deaths & circumnavigate existence… …I go to the lotus to exalt my demons & exit the dead…..

E.A. O'Connell

...enough...

…I heard her giggle on the line, it was white, airy, and bell-shaped…and I wanted for a cloche, to encapsulate, to capture the sound of a youth we hadn’t resided in decades, to place it on a sunlit sill and breathe life… …it struck my brain at an angle of return, it hounded a burial, but there was no resurrection… …I sealed her in the garden, my fingers running along the rosemary, capturing the oil in the lines of my palm… …we haunted a yard, long ago, beneath tulip poplar invocation and cicada manifestation…we trespassed a gated estate, sugar cubes in our pockets and bird songs upon our tongues…stepped moss-laden stone walls…leapt milkweed footpaths, trailing stars in our wake…we smiled through screams at the shock of frozen waves, salt air and our bodies looped… …maidens were we, bonded with our sisterhood, declared within a cummings parenthetical rite… …there is a love greater than the romantic, there is a hope greater than the outlived…it was in that laugh, in a simple reaction…I exist in that womb, a bygone bliss I thought extinct…I am a clothed bread rising…and that is enough…

E.A. O'Connell

...excerpts of thoughts in story {I}...

“Where is your voice?” 
The rook stole her cries…sheen of amniotic breath. A gift. A baby in a cradle, day long silence. She moves not an inch. Something must be wrong. With her… 
… “Where are you when your eyes stain black?” 
Death keeps company, it’s there in the touch. Our fingers graze as I walk towards sleep, ‘tomorrow’ the only words escaping our lips…lips…the most full kiss… 
…"When you do speak, your words are of no language. No tongue. Who comprehends?“ 
I can’t get the texture and colors to translate…but the music…the music… …Who speakseasy? The latch is set in its ways… 
…"You frustrate. You distance. You sense and go senseless"… 
…I strange the environs I invade…reptilian blood, in sleep I day. I deja vu. I never truly cross over… I crossroad. He’d sleep upright, finger on the trigger… …They taught me well… 
…"An education in what?” 
…In going to Hell…

E.A. O'Connell

April Entries

…The house warms with sunlight, baking slate floors and honeying the wood. Atop the ebony table, a lone hyacinth, wealthy in her blue, reigns amongst the petite jonquils. In the yard, daffodils hang their linen encased heads, wilted in a stalled bloom, half opened trumpets, sound a solemn earth deep fugue…echoed in the fate of crocus chalices, vessels of violet and orange, dipping under the weight of Winter’s hold….

…Crows snap pollen full branches from impatient trees, flying them overhead, tangling the wood in the dense dreams escaping flues at first light. One crow carries with her cherry blossoms, pink beginnings that endear her silence, soaring to a sycamore’s height. The moon rises against the push of wind and tidal skies…rain is certain to escape in the last few hours…water that sets life in motion…  

…I can feel the frost of Spring snow to come, it numbs between my fingers, humming and lingering like piano strings along my bones, as my steps keep in time with the flashing red lights from a gaping, dark tunnel, underground rails that ghost a thunder and sing within my thighs…a smile peaks with the thought of you…crawling me and the length of stairs, fire and cedar, fog and salt…above us, constellations pregnant with new life…

{April Entries}

E.A. O'Connell

Evening Observations...

…the sun in a set line…casting evergreen shadows…upon a scorched earth…a paced cooling meters within…secreting the scent of water…water in silt in minerals in worm holes and cicada dens…chlorophyll clover and calcium…it ran the length of me…leaving me in shivers…and when it settled in the chaos of my senses…I had a new define for the nineteenth hour…

E.A. O'Connell

Morning Observations...

Roses, 

electrically charged incarnadine, 

hang heavy curves and thorny angles

Rain, 

laying mist orbs that hug leaf margins, 

slowly slipping the verdigris of hosta veins 

Bare feet following a shaded path of weathered flagstone, 

where starling chatter bounces like loose pebbles 

Gray is deceptive to clocks, 

Gray redirects the earth’s magnetism

The muggy atmosphere feels like anticipation on my skin, 

like a thought cupped in my tongue, 

and time running out

From which sage and lavender commune, 

rosemary blues for the bees,

And coriander breezes reduce me to ash

E.A. O'Connell

Open my eyes to the darkness, I see nothing but obsidian walls, their immensity
storm charges, wind and rain fall, the energy heightens

My head hammers and stars swim, silver sheen on phantom koi, I feel the peak of pain
the skull shifts

The fever builds, my thoughts humid, as my body temperature plummets, goose flesh and tremors
I inhale a lung’s full capacity, exhaling an incantation

The hemorrhaging commences

My weakening

Amniotic fluid, and the still, of a soft violet face

The circle doesn’t break, my body withering outside, clasping fingers about a sliver of moon, from the underbelly of a whisper
I cast: my tongue, my heart, the last energy of this life

Ambient noise and voices fade…silence and her infant face my only vision…and a breath opens..stutters to a cry…a crescendo building, pulling me with it

And the blood ceases its run

I’m weak, but she breathes
we sync, and her otherworldly eyes catch mine
gobsmacked

I read it wrong all along:
I’m not what’s new to her
she heralds the dawning of me

E.A. O'Connell

…my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …and the mourning doves grieve above me, nestled amongst black locust thorns… …the blue jays’ throats shriek in time with the vibrations of my tangled thoughts… …the crows bow their heads, lowering their eyes, so as not to see… …my head is screaming…everything is spinning… …the vultures wheeling in eigengrau sky…above my body… …a feral hound, black infinite, submits at my side… …a shallow grave, a vessel collecting rain…scrying…and a deathly baptism… …my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …wind chimes clashing…silver stacking…knives sharpening… …it doesn’t hurt to hear my fear… …and I don’t succumb… …my mouth bleeding… …the street lamp flickers and goes dead… …the shadows that come forward, garden my soul…burning cypress and laurel, moss and lichen…smoldering stone…and ignite…the pitch fly’s home… …Fly Agaric spirit rites… …my head is screaming…the voice is smoking… …you’re not dying…you’re dying…dying… …my pulse…drumming, pounding, sounding music…my head is percussive beats… …the voice is smoking… …you’re surviving…reviving…inviting… …the water rises…swallowing my body, my face…taking me under…silently sinking…golden spiraling… …coming out on the other side…upright and dry… …dusted in dirt and sunlight… …the voice is smoking…this is what bone feels like bleaching, disintegrating…your hair loose in the breeze, length and weight, are willow lashes designing…language in the grasses…you’re not there…you’re not here…you’re not dead…you’re won…and one…

{I wrote this and had been sitting on it days before I read a quote from Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成), House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories…but that is how my life has always been…timing…the things I see and hear within my head, colliding with the outside world…it’s happened so often and for so long, I know it’s not coincidence}

E.A. O'Connell

...

Blood: stop summoning me.
star scrying and shadow silence, 
cease.
beneath my flesh, 
crawling fingertips 
along brick and stone, iron and bronze, seizing my breaths, 
thrumming my bones,
feet hammering pavement, 
my brain screaming: fire, 
coming to in pitch, 
fingers to my lips, 
a language I keep
undisturbed.
clouded and heady, 
frisson in the Devil’s Hour

E.A. O'Connell

Soon the earth and skies about me will vibrate with cicada voice, my heart will hue with serenity and my own vibration will be one of praise

The secreted hatchlings will slither out from under felted lamb’s ears and hosta cover, sunning and coiling…most welcomed guests in my gardens

The porcelain berry has vined its way about the rhododendrons and the Black Knight, perhaps an invasive guest, but their striking berries of violet, fuchsia, denim, and turquoise are a wild I cannot refuse

The dill I seeded strictly for swallowtail caterpillars, has clearly been serving its purpose…fulfillment from the simplest of acts

I sought out the thistle of last year, a drifter that found me, but not everything returns, sometimes underground for a year or more, only to awaken and make mystery once again…I suppose the gold finches will be forgiving of the absence, the sunflowers keeping them sated 

Every summer there’s a new wonder about the gardens and yards…I can feel a build, much like a thought not yet in voice…it hasn’t approached yet…hasn’t made itself known in physicality…nonetheless, I feel it and patiently I wait…

E.A. O'Connell

Felling

Silken saturated, honey hued
A soaking rain tempered bark
Peeling in plates, in sawtoothed armor
I adorn my body, sweat and lichen, built for war
Green sunlit youth, a weighted scent
Withers, steel to flesh
A rhythm in rush, in crash, and the howling of man
The rope wound about my fist
Felling, and the flight of song in maple keys
Death ascends, culling leaves by their wind-form
There's a smell it brings, an assault on the nature green life Springs:
Pitch flies, plump with waste
Their buzz festering in echo against dank sills and minerals
Humid carcass sugars and oily fibers,
A nest of knotted angular legs, and soiled wings,
Self-righteous poseurs of putrefaction, descendants of the mire

E.A. O'Connell

...

I keep finding pencils within the cracks of sidewalks, weeks of this, on a daily basis, shallow graves where the bodies wait, for my fingers, for the touch of thoughts smudged in graphite, leaving a passing word, in porous concrete, breathless leaves that flee in the breeze, from pain I write, it’s the only way I feel free, where my screams can bleed, beneath childhood chalk outlines, and pink petals of life, the only place I can admit, I’m too much like you, too much for my own good, and fuck it all if I can’t age long enough for Death to ask me to cover a few of His shifts…

Why are you there?, in the stone of a chimney, book-ended by lilacs, and sheer curtains, phantoms haunting Spirit silhouettes, ashes of Winters, ashes of You, and my fugitive youth, I always feared the pitted earth, falling in on itself, a tomb behind the greenhouse, where I’d stand and stare, feeling the breath leave my body, too much absence in that land, soil of solemnity, and the voice of the swing, chain and seat, legs kicking and pumping at my back, I guess I’ll always be a haunted house, ghosts peering out from my eyes, unaware they ever died, aware they’ve secreted immortality…

I’m unlike anything he’s ever known, unlike anything he ever knew could exist, it unnerves and disarms him, holding me to his body, his strength a thing to behold, in the dark, asking me what colors I see, breathless and spent, within an arms reach, and in the human space, within the vertices of cartilage and bone, maps of veins and unfathomed depths, I open him to the ugliness, to the feral beast, and he rests, easy and at peace, and with dawn he takes on the world, for me, pen to paper, to dismantle, to resurrect, to be…

Some people find coins, messages from the other side, masquerading monetarily, some spy feathers and wings that whisper, greetings from the deceased, I find pencils, in cracks of sidewalks, and hope they’ve been able to say all that had needed to be said, even if their last words, take shape in the soles of feet, beneath constellations of stories that remain, light years distance, security, under lock and key…

E.A. O'Connell

...

From a gaping second floor ruin

Of axe shrapnel and inferno ash

Against the charcoal shock of loss

Remains a widow’s peak of demolition

With a window of melted distortion

Framing blushed light through fractured firmament:

A cherry blossom inception

Flush with season and second sight

E.A. O'Connell

Vulture House

A death sentence, and no one even really knows why. It’s suspected money’s at the root of such ill intentions. 

Most pass in a blur, peripheral distortion of deterioration and destruction, and a flash of thought about the absence of man.

Grey or sunny days, it all gives shape to how ravaged, animal savaged, the perimeter has overgrown. 

Clapboard grey, termite timber, splintered…and yet, life…a home, a second chance, amidst the bacteria, parasites, everything molded and mildewed.

Shingles shred and slip a waterfall thaw, letting starlight fill the vacancy of a moss laden bed, where a sapling of misguided love rooted amongst the rusted springs and ancestral mites.

Broken windows peak and dip a current’s flow, bullet hole peeping tom cats arch their backs and shiver off thoughts of the warmth in a loving hand.

Back lit lunar clouds project spectral gaps, lengths of a silhouette grove paper interior walls in pagan knot work, while creeping ivy, under an open chimney flue, restricts and devours brick and mortar durability.

And there, in the stairwell of cobwebs and busted treads and risers, a landing…a nest, of scavenged bones, of feathers, and of waste. 

A marriage ceremony, undated and unseen…rites of feral, of ingenuity, of a hunger for death sated in a carcass dance. 

In the upper window sash, where glass would mirror the void, two black masses all hunch and jagged edges…perch…through sun cycles and planetary measures, they home and they eye…

E.A. O'Connell

...

A fingernail splits at the quick 
The moon hemorrhages a slow elegy
God spired fingers and sweaty palms 
The scent of descending Fahrenheit on silvered hair

I cross bones and innocence is bled 
India ink across the moonlit ceiling
A pin to my pupil and you claim it land you’ve traversed
Always wanting the contents of my head 
All I want to give is the marrow of my bones

It’s awoken 
Some would call it a hunger, others mislabel it a thirst
It’s a premature birth
It’s winter cicada nightcrawl from earthen tombs to lichened oak
Stillborn and stillbreath 
Ghosts of a bygone permafrost
Cloven steps snapped grass, splintering bare feet that cast cries swallowed by the wind

Absence of your wild from my tongue is catastrophic 
I hear the void of language in the hollow floorboards
Skeletal remains, buried dementia, a life: vibrate 
Crawl spaces to cry
Of a wicked loss, the bloodless beats, building rhythm
Every sin I've loved committing

I can’t sleep past 3:00am 
They come and hover 
They want and I need
Death beetles crawl names, Corvids carry souls, but where the bloody hell are you?

The dawn starts gray and grows anew 
Cashmere, wool, angora winds and sails that cast me headfirst back into their world
Hours travel as a small hand spinning a globe
Fast, faster: the rotational rail against marble and brain cells
I steady the Earth’s breaths and count her laugh lines

Dusk captivates as I drive 
Fire bellied storms navigate towards cremains in western cypress winds 
It all boils down to a bottle, a joint, and a hand that keeps me from hitting the ground 
I love you for all my failures, for all I’ve yet to unleash, I love you subsequently, and for our slaughterhouse resurrected

It’s only blood, we can wash it away 
It’s just the colors that press my brain when I feel your words
A hammer to stems and petals, a stain, a water ring that set fire burns
And they play circular games

I like endless highways, stretches and bends
To lead me directionless to an answer, an incantation
Cliffside speed and signage that reads, road ends in 100 feet

E.A. O'Connell