{Excerpt}

To throw off the flesh of this life, to know I made parole after an intolerable human sentence for my immortal deeds, banished from the comfort of my afterdeath, forced into an inescapable mortal coil, a flightless bird earthbound and landlocked, I turn my head to the east each morning, awaiting the rise of opalescent light, but the colors no longer sing to me, not the same way they once did, as the one looking in from outside, now the silhouettes of trees, their branches a friction in the frigid wind, are leaded frames to auroral glass, forlorn and desperate to shatter, I step out in thin fabrics, bare feet, in below freezing, awaiting the searing bite, but my punishment carries on, I feel nothing, my eyes scanning the twilit greys and cedars, focusing on the chain link breach of nature, until I’m overcome with a chill at my back and about my arms and chest, held tight in your winter borrowed embrace…I can’t come out and play…I miss your face, so…I devour books in the ceaseless hope of finding you…this language I now speak is broken and an irritant to my tongue…I plant endless gardens in the off chance you will receive my messages, that I may conjure and breathe in your scent when they wither and die, just one more time…people sit by firelight, but no one dances within the flames, and I long for that fuel to stir my soul, but fire here burns…I’ve learned in dreams there’s a way to die…but I’d be thrown into the reflection of you, moving in reverse, just shy of our meeting of flesh, neither an intimate brush nor breath, just the minute absence of physical connection, but the everexpanse of mental separation…I’ll continue to toil at this soul numbing existence, awaiting my heavenly summons, and when I’m called, and death has presented me formally, I’ll take knives to any wings I may grow, I’ll dismantle any pedestal upon which I’m to stand, I’ll renounce a halo placed atop my head…ichor stained and unclean, as a shadowed wild should be…and I’ll journey to the underworld, to reunite in full roar, standing by your side, our union a terrifying thing to behold…

E.A. O'Connell. December 2018