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
