{Excerpt Edit}

In a trickling descent through fine eyed needle stitching, the day’s soft sunlight laughter extinguishes in a snifter’s hush, leaving in its slumber a dense forest labyrinth, where towering opaque ghosts haunt, and a placid lake of blue moon sheen, slips its shores in lily bell curves.  Whispers in wisps of spectral fog, lament a falling star loss, silencing black winged boughs of their cackles, and from the void, the snapping of dead twigs and the disintegrating of skeletal leaves… 

     —a wandering—

A distant home of stone and bones, its ivy strangled windows of beveled panes, glow a wild inferno from a seasoned fireplace, while a solitary lit flame webs the splintered windows through a figure swallowing stairwell and second story corridor, where the walls breathe with shadow dancer frames. The spiritless cuckoo emerges, counting distant footfalls in successive knocks of its head into plaster. The Spirit Guide summons the Lady’s return from the depths of her transcendental thoughts, her attention re-emerging, focusing on the placement of how the cards had fallen from her hand to the floor. Her head turning in the direction of her property’s gate…

      —an approaching—

The garden, built of a wild spirit, by hands guided by natural impulses, protected by a multitude of eyes, is awakened with an aura of curious wonder, its slate path, lined in pale bleeding hearts and gore splattered caladium spades, collapsing in a violigo astral breeze…their gasping…their glimpsing…of fearless steps in a determined dead man’s stride, halting upon the breast of the thistle barb knit threshold, a cold, earth-stained hand splaying against the weathered front door…

     —a reckoning—

E.A. O'Connell. 2014/2018.