Orchard: First Bite (Revised)

illustrated thoughts in bass string voices, 
pulsating my nerves and flesh
summer breaking autumn, 
like a tree’s bark in plaster crack ruin
eyes drain of color at a wind downed apple
     your appetite whetting
mental storms in atmospheric fury, 
cast a cyclone pressed orchard
     you think upon me
     upon the first bite, 
     a succulent revelation
swell of lips, 
will of hips,
and grass stained thighs 
the waning warmth of rain, 
welling within the whorls of my fingerprints
     the length of your spine
     your head rolls heavy, 
     full with earthen-womb daughter songs
     your eyes see ghost shadows,
     dancing in the wake of rusting leaves
our imprints remain, 
giving life to tenebrous dreams,
proof to
the incarnate
the resurrection
the impossibility
     the walls of your mind,
     still echoing my feral breathing 

E.A. O'Connell

Dream Series: Wildling

…the mountains keep calling to me… {return}

…every time my eyes shut and sleep begins its theft of me…I’m bare and left on the side of the interstate…walking right through high speed traffic —ghosting— nothing but a breeze rushing through me…car radios and conversations, accelerations and chains…cyclone and fall silent at my back…

…the mountains look straight into me, their knowledge felt in every cell of my being…their language spurs me on…speaking in colors, textures, and fragrances…their music a spirit song of forests, rocks and minerals…feathers, scales, and follicles…raindrops like gazing balls, particles of light through vapor, streams and ripples…unbalanced chimes that center…my heart beats an errant pace, of Gods & Monsters rife with abandonment and longing…they know: conceived and stolen to industry…they want me returned…

…clouds that swallow me whole…hide-and-seek me from civilization, giving me back to roots: feral and free, earthing and puncture wounds, the blood and dirt a rite…scars on full display…I don’t feel ugly and wrong, nor out of place in the unpredictability…I thrive, I know I’m some wild extension, a myth, a beast of its own making…evading capture and the hunter’s sentence…I’m a familiar and my foretold was not for keeps, they want me home…they want for their wildling…

…further in sleep…under a new moon, devoid of light…the expanse of secrets before me…Its presence made known, taking place at my side…”Escape.” “I fear they’ve broken me.” “If you leap, we’ll catch you.” “They’ve conditioned me to human fears and comforts.” “You know the ways of the ancient.” {Silence} “I have nothing to leave you.” “You’ve left traces of yourself. That’ll do for now.” {Silence} “Where do I begin…” “You are a tale being told. An open ending.” {Silence} “I already know how I’m going to die.” “And?” I smile, shedding man-made fears and Earth-given skin, and allow my soul her swan dive…

…I awaken…my eyes open, but the glorious void and the depth of phantoms, still my vision…I hear the 4am birds and stars…I hear the adventure thrumming my veins…I hear the next mountain calling my wildling name…

E.A. O'Connell

...{Story Excerpt: Letter}

Dearest,

…I wish I could be less…too much…I’ve a dark mind and incomprehensible thoughts…nothing translates, so I write silence…my hand into the letter box comes up empty…I fear I’m too late…if it weren’t for the moon…turning a blind eye to all the blood I’ve slipped…wicked and warranted…I’m afraid my time is soon…if I will you my soul, will you find a crossroad of an origin she’s familiar…she doesn’t cross over…she circumnavigates and distracts…she doesn’t transcend or transmutate, she grows fierce with a hunger, but not of the stomach…she’s a pain in the ass and knows it…she doesn’t answer when spoken to, and if you meet her eyes, you’ll feel the rush of liquor fueled flames beneath your flesh…don’t mistake it for lust, it’s a spontaneous combustion of your nervous system…if she smiles at you, you’ve sealed a pact with Death’s mistress and I advise you to not request a happy ending…but if she inhales you, her eyes closing as her lips part, a slight tremor of quiet language escaping, and her fingers stitch the air and impale into her sternum like a pincushion, you’ve been sealed…bound…to her soul existence…and she will spill blood and crack bones for you…her teeth are a decoy, don’t get caught on the sharp of them, she’ll shred you, roll you, and smoke you…you’ll never learn her name, and don’t ever ask her of it, and if you should become in possession of it by some strange twist of fate, you’ll most certainly be going to a baser Hell, and not by way of God or the Devil…so just don’t…I only ask this of you, because leaving her to her own devices never bodes well…when you meet her you’ll know why I am…why you fell in love with me…why you couldn’t ever explain what you knew… …once you’ve found her a crossroads, don’t speak of parting ways, and don’t look back…it’s not biblical, it’s practical, it’s a preservation of your sight as she eclipses…if she offers you a gesture in kind, it’s a sleight of hand…you’ll surely be missing something when all is said and done, and it won’t be something from your pocket…if while there you should see an obsidian mirror, out of place, let curiosity overcome you…she’ll allow it…and you’ll get answers you’ve sought…but she may steal a glimpse from over your shoulder, and you’ll have to dare to ask for her to extract her thoughts…it will be less than flattering, and take it as a sign of good will if she offers it to you in pellet form…dig a grave and bury it…unless you want to finally ask a question of her, then you’ll have to ingest it…but one extremely well thought out question…and not her fucking name… …take comfort in knowing she’s impossibly stubborn and refuses anything, but that which she makes of this world…her refusal to cross, is my resurrection…she’ll seek out a new mortal form, so keep clear your peripheral…we may shadow step and spar with your sanity…you’ll know it’s we, Baby…and then the real fun will be had… …if I’ve forgotten anything, I trust you’ll learn as you go…and all will end well, with you still in possession of breath and a breaking fever familiar…

…all my flesh & armor…

Mon Horreur, Mon Coeur,

Your Agony

E.A. O'Connell

...

…sometimes I hear an orchestration in a song…it swallows me, rolls me like a wave…sinks me deep…drowns me long enough to borrow my existence for a fraction of time…and I get to own a corner of a deep water trench…a space within the song is temporarily mine, amongst the instrumental fluidity…I reside…I temporarily die a deep-sea anomaly…I write a tale beyond any voice…no palate nor teeth no tongue…I am sound and my hearing loss…divinely mated…and in my ears, years of words I didn’t catch…are caught in a net…and the wave that rolls me, is the same that gives my hand reach…towards the surface…to extract these words and piece together sentences…incoherent masterpieces of my life… …and when all I’m left with are pulses and memories of sounds that sing my dreams while asleep…I’ll have that abyss and that net and the words that slipped into silence…and I’ll morph from ocean trawler to river spinner…I’ll spider myself…I’ll quicksilver my body, building a diving bell…I’ll web words beneath green…destructible designs of mortality…I’ll await the inevitable collapse, and rise of my free will…and I’ll do so in words that escaped me…my daily grind…my gain…to give voice to what I no longer can hear, but profoundly feel…

E.A. O'Connell

Hyacinth Blue: A Gothic Work {Edit}

She woke with Hyacinth on Her tongue:

Beneath a sky of equal hue, a plain of infinite saturation

Birthed of grounded flames, rose smoke from a winter garden’s pyre

~a March wind gave shift~

The sky, masquerading as a butcher’s blood flecked apron, upon which red tails were wheeling

left shadow threads in Her aqueous humour, like fingers smearing their duty

Piano keys in hammer and caress, from a rain rotted porch, gave hymn to the hatchet, as it forced through the block

The trickle of the thin stream, quietly fattened in winter’s last melt

Sunny lambs gave a mama warning bleat, as the grass splintered under a slow uneven weight

His shadow stormed Her frame

~a cell of expectation unlatched Her lips~

from them Hyacinth blue speech, as intriguing as the cool lit center of a match...

“Walk”

Her bare feet, out of step with His heavy black boots

His eyes of clouded white, gave stare to Her throat

His salivating tongue, pressed to the back of His teeth

{a gash-burning touch ~ the claw scratch of enamel}

Rough pronged vulture wings circled hungry, screaming their pangs into a silvered silence

His eyes and neck, in turn to seek their angle, to sniff out the carcass of their want

~such a curious fool, such covetous rot~

Her hand, a quick release, the hatchet slicing through the breeze, embedding within His malformed skull

~an eclipse of laughter unlatched Her lips~

from them Hyacinth blue speech, as precise as the pressed hem of Her funeral dress...

“No”

The rise of Her arms,

{sweeping downward, stretching backward, floating forward, to pause at a calm shoulder height, before slowly resting at Her side}

called forth the vultures, talons scarring the earth, as they circled His body, nodding and dancing their gratitude, before lacerating the fabric of His bones

Retrieving Her hatchet, and a serrated stone, She gripped the aged handle within Her left palm

With Her right, She carved a single hatch-mark, giving company to the great many that came before

Eyeing the boneyard, where all remains of Demise are discarded, His to be so rewarded

She wrapped the skirt of her dress about Her left hand, wiping semi-clean Her hatchet, and right palm 

Turning, She walked the path of bent and beaten grass, returning to Her daily toil at the block 

humming to herself a melody of Hyacinth blue, as translucent and fluent as the flight pattern of a cabbage moth, in early June

Her song, interwoven with temple bells, as a feral cat gave chase to a rabbit, upon dormant beds of vegetation

Her hatchet, in echoing pulse, rhythmed a visitor’s one-way welcome... 

...

E.A. O'Connell

Morning Observation: Vulture House

They've come for the Vulture House.  Annihilation atop the hill...where once stood its abandoned neighbor, now bulldozed land...no tree, nor shrub spared by the greed of man.  I just stared at the deep tread marks scarring the earth, and bled inward.  White with forest green trim, a two-story, architectural beauty...reduced to a spacial memory...to thoughts blueprinted within a journal...a feather pressed between the covers.  Paneless windows, where weather worn curtains billowed in the breeze...wrapping spectral bodies in watchful habits...gave light to the vines that spired the walls...flowered the rise of the sun...and storied the vacant years.  They'll callously dismantle the Vulture House...no care or thought to history...no admiration for Nature's reclamation.  I think of the vulture...his perch within a broken double hung window, atop a battered rail...his body wider than the opening...a foreboding silhouette...intimidating, with his head always held high...surveying...acknowledging...finding eyes.  Where will he go?  Upon which land shall his shadow cast?  And the phantoms of the corners and under the stairs...the hallways and the porches...upon what floors or tall grasses will their tales haunt?  Will moonlight still play upon their figures...casting them in sight...giving shade to their dance?  And the ruins of birth and death...the scavenged bones building catacombs...and the honor of survival in spite of man's wants...who will fashion the memorial to such a wonder?  To such a glorious fight?...
Here Lied the Vulture House: Built Upon Man's Fate

E.A. O'Connell

... {Edit}

Our bodies linear, 
limbless and righteous, 
amongst the thorns of infantile black locusts 
Your eyes, 
of mesonoxian dew,
fix, 
as vacant moons
Bloodlet, 
atop the sunset 
Graves of lilacs, 
hatchet dismemberment
Our earthen anguine forms, 
my head upon yours

I still.

The future, 
withers before me
dead on the boughs and vines, 
the fruits of Gods, 
in glutinous rot
We never did sip, 
and I shall never succumb
There is no sate to this thirst
I will hunger and lust, 
always, 
after thee
The exquisite sin, 
of leaf litter, 
hollows, 
and bark,
A beast's den of carnal delights, 
homed within a brutally trespassed rock
Memories to savor, 
bitters and sweat, 
umami-bodied,
how we ripped into each's flesh, 
and scored either's bones
Our cold blood, 
Our venomous love
Our thrive and will, 
shedding, 
undressing, 
every memory of seasonal dormancy 
and self-renewal

I will not leave your side.

I will swallow you whole, 
make mobile my heart, 
chimera our souls
I will keep you, 
memento mori
I will bite, 
I will writhe, 
I will keep wild 
My eternal vow,
never to pale, 
never to shallow 
lest all we've been, 
all we'd ever be, 
shall cease to exist,
herewith,
and further still
We are of matter, 
We are of myth,
Our spiritual fray
My Love, 
Our immortality

Come to me.

Mounted, 
upon the back of Death, 
ride forth, 
bring with you a seed, 
malformed and of consecrated earth
Clasp it within your lips, 
impale it upon your fangs,
then plant it upon my tongue, 
with our final earthly kiss
I'll conceive an afterworld
where we'll confound the very blood of Life, 
each and every terror of man
eclipsing, 
constricting, 
commingling
Our unholy, anomalous forms
My love, 
My will, 
My fight, 
is entirely
Yours

Mash-up of My Writing {Writing Sample Edit}

Asleep.  Wrapped in nosebleed soaked cotton,

her silhouette has been pressed through to the mattress in a carnelian stain.  

She’s the flower preserved between two sheets

in the name of a hunger that cost her the privilege of sound sleep.

In muted colors of night terrors seeping,

her neuro-fluid rushes in a rhythm of rain water flooding a storm drain,

leaving her head absent of equilibrium and near comprehended thoughts falling,

scattering like leaves in the scrape of claws on pavement.  

They flee the impending drowning

that will catch up with them at the cul-de-sac’s bend.

The spectral fingertips quietly spread out upon her,

caking her body in a clay mud,

painting her bare skin in wounds of rough bones, twigs, and stone weapons;

her body the war and the warrior.

Lifting her from the cold slumber, her limbs limp and head hung right,

her length of hair sweeps the cobwebs

and cold breath of the floorboards creaking in the wake of their footless steps.

Lithe are the hands of the dead,

a haunting toil of a surgeon’s precision with a new mother’s delicate touch,

stealing her body away to the pyre of sassafras and orchids

where they lay her upon the vessel of ceremony.

Commencing the sacrificial rite,

their rabid hissing and growling calls forth canine teeth and talons,

tracing the language of their desires into her neck,

painlessly slicing and folding back the flesh of her throat and meat of her tongue. 

Unhinging her jaw, they study scars in her teeth,

all the while seeking the source of her impenetrable silence,

while force feeding her the jackal’s whine and buzzard’s scream.  

She gasps a strangled choke as she is pulled into the sudden reemergence of life,

throwing her body over the edge of the bed,

coughing and spitting the taste of nightmares against the wall,

their long shadows hunching as they back away in a defensive creep to the window.

Turning in warning, they taunt her with the threatening of their return,

as they liquefy, running down the brick and mortar,

mixing with the rain, running towards the sewer grate.

The blood flowing from her head, out her nose, and through her fingers,

stains the memory of the terror to her thighs, breasts, and lips.

From the north corner of her room,

a new moon voice, reminiscent of sub zero wind through frost bitten pines,

chilling her marrow deep.  

“When will you let your soul out to play?”

Her flesh pebbles, her nerves sting, but she doesn’t startle.  

Releasing her hands from a chalice pose beneath her chin,

her blood slips her palms to the sheets beneath her seated form.  

Closing her eyes to regain an equilibrium, she opens them slowly on an inhale.  

Her lips part, ichor-washed teeth barely on display,

exhaling a visible winter’s breath, she expels her silence in a hushed voice.  

“Blood. Stop summoning me.”  

“When will you despair, Small One?"

“Devil’s Hour. False shadow bravado. Blood cease.”

His thickset fingers thrumming the darkness at his side,

as a thundering origins in his chest, soars to his throat;

a guttural growl issuing forth,

indiscernible as to whether it’s an act of warning or amusement.

“Beneath my flesh. Crawling fingertips.”

Weighted steps carry him out of the shadows, stalking the foot of her bed.

A warning.  

His nearly seven foot, beast-like physique,

broad shouldered with a capricorned head,

pale in comparison to the intimidation storming in the impassive abysses he wears as eyes.  

Steadying herself, she rises to her feet on the mattress.  Petite in stature; just five feet in height.

Her bloodied visage meeting him eye-to-eye.  

Without blinking or flinching, she stands her ground, shoulders back and stock-still,

rooting in the knowledge that she is power.  

Her voice building in volume.

“Seizing my breaths. Fracturing my bones. Blood. Cease your hold.”

His massive hand darting out—stopping— just shy of clasping her throat.

An entity in its own right—silence— takes up residency between them,

sizing each up, before clearing a path for revelation.

“You...” 

“...You fear me.”  

“Why else would you come for me through my mind—my blood.”

A hint of a wry smile reaching the left corner of his sadistic mouth.  

“Untouchable.  And so very brave.

I saw a crack in your foundation, Small One,

and I exploited it. I’m in there now.  Indelible.” 

He slowly taps his temple, a mocking wink to ensure the blow to her pride lands.

A smile, equally maniacal, but ever more fierce,

slowly crawling the length of her blood-rouged lips.  

“As shall I, Mon Horreur.”

Without hesitation,

she grabs ahold of his sinewy wrist and forearm with both her small hands

—no force or strain—just a moderate pressure to her clasp. 

Looking him dead in the eye...                    

“Pitch igniting.

A language I keep. Undisturbed.

Summoning. Blood—”

Try as he might—through force, strain, and rage—he’s overpowered and lost, incapable of breaking from her behexing hold.

“—& Fire.”

Her room immediately lit by the distinct smell of primordial hide smoldering and searing with a brand...  

E.A. O'Connell