I haven’t written in days, and I feel a weight pressing down on me…my head is erratic, it feels like beetles in scurry and dig…and the pressure of wanting, needing to write leaves me incapable of simple conversation…even texts come out all wrong…distant and indifferent, incoherent, incomplete in thought and explanation…I just need that catalyst, the chaos that sets my words to flurry, to storm the pages. I live in my head, I don’t know any other way…I bury myself alive from within…I’m under the soil, a shallow grave growing deeper in my inability to speak the words that sink my bones…fed on by arachnid lore, tunneled by the arthropod militia, and a resurrecting parasitic decomposition. The dark of my 3:00am insomnia, a humble tomb of ink worn flesh, breathes my frustration, my hazey visions threading the walls and ceiling in railway maps & contrails, my veins alive in an itch, my muscles feeling anticipation of adrenaline…and I continually come back to a mountain, a waterfall, a forest, a canyon…each that I’ve left myself upon, within…those I’ve long desired. I’ve another cliff to risk, I feel it intrinsic…it’s not suicidal, it’s freedom…I always stand on the edge, looking out and fighting every urge to leap, for the release, it’s just the innate memory of ashes from past bodies freeing…my soul is old and knows Death intimately, and he stands with me on those cliffs and jutting rocks, and he whispers at the back of my ear, “I love you”…and I’m free. Free amongst the heights and depths of nature’s giants, I find peace in my cosmic scale…my insignificant stature, my soul immensity…and my mind settles, wedded to nature, my words take form and shape and reshape…I scream and the universe screams back…I howl and the moon howls back…I die a slant death, and the earth’s pulse beats through me…it’s not a question, not an answer needed…it’s a revival of Origin…a reunification, the Goddess of me…digging a hole within to seed anew…I need these heights and the depths…I need them as lifeblood…and I need Death, and his sanctuary and love, how he sees me through to sealing to paper the words I frustrate with internally…allowing my growth, to the eternal, to the age in a sequoia’s rise…

E.A. O'Connell. January 2019