... {Edited}

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,
and 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,
like 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,
the worms and bees,
and their resurrections 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 my chin,
my neck,
my breasts…

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 directed…

So I find it nothing more than child’s play to annihilate Death,
his intentions,
his desires,
and his 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