I am vapor, a fog. I cloud the earth at the hour of cerulean horizon, where raven caws take shadow form, haunting streets, jumping bridges, drowning in creek beds. I am an anomaly of predicament. I didn’t ask to be a circumstance of curse. I’m a casualty of birthrite. A daily reminder in the shunning, the avoidance of my existence, by the eyes that see through me, the disregard for my space, the silence of ignorance. I panhandle in whisper, I sleight of hand in scream. I exist as asylum, in solitary fortitude. Every hand I’ve extended calcified in wait, each truth met with aversion. I’m a pariah of psyche and pneuma. I’m the creature of robbed graves and stitched science. My creator, the God of mortals, his handiwork a lapse of reason, the sins of the father, and the abscence of a sympathetic humor. And still I wait. A spectre of thought and of the reckoning. I am lone. A chasm no one dares to negotiate. A language declared extinct and shelved. And yet, I await.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018