The heat demands of me to submit…to shed layers of the day and extend my flesh to the warm breeze that cools as the sky watercolors…my hair a tangled mess of humidity and curls, pinned atop my head…my eyes momentarily contemplating the scissors, the release of weight from my neck…but the loose strands that sway about my face and shoulders, release the scent of sunlight, keeping me submissive…I stand at the French doors for a shift of light…lost in the beauty of the madly drawn world…a house darkening at my back, all but for the glow of a hemp candle and soft white fairy lights…there’s a song the earth and sky and trees release after a scorching heat, when the sun slips away and the body instinctively sighs in reply…

E.A. O'Connell

It slips in unannounced, an uninvited thought, winding through the instantaneous temperature drop of violet clouds at sundown, draping my shoulders in a veil of antique lace, a birdcage of scent about my face, I retrace steps in a time of near memories, no true recollection, I’m not meant to remember…but I have the fleeting perfume, of black locust blooms, and my body upon the marred hardwood floor, the moon rising to meet my eye, a bride of all that’s born to live must die…green leaves that shake off the burning sun, to adorn their shadows and whispered incandescence, the fox screams in a pitch of adoration for her mate, I can’t mimic her rise, my screams are silent and held in fists and escape in the tingling of scrying fingers, I war with my words and let flatline the doubt, I’ll never get it right, never be the idyll…but the violet evenings of spring, my flesh and hair awash in the sweet nectar of cascading white blossoms sweeping the night breeze, a lone bird singing to the darkness…and I’m the glint of a star awaiting to answer in kind…

E.A. O'Connell

Fruit of a mad apple, toxicity in quantity, subtle beauty in a singular pale bud, flourishing beneath its own shadow, close to the earth and broad in breadth, nourished by the forest floor, fed upon by soft screams, the decomposing flesh allowing the facade of a split ovum, opening a portal of firelight, the combustion of my emergence, my ether birth, a beast of inscrutable tendencies, a landscape of premonitions and skeletons, I step forward from my nethersphere into a world of sunlight that warms with goose flesh and peaked nipples, cognizant of a hunger that’s sated with wide-eyed touch, impulses taunted by scent, whispers in grass raise a need, from the lowslung moon he leaps, rabbit run and I give chase, feral instincts and teeth, my first mortal meal of cardiac rhythm and feverish blood, the stain to my hands highlighting the inborn truth of my making, I’ve no origins in eden, nothing there blooms my species, I’m of the poison garden, my existence is of intrigue and ruin, I bewitch and rob of breath, whoever wills the kiss of my ichorstained lips, a suicide of curious attraction, a design of incurable venom, I’m given a life just out of arm’s reach, a world of my own spinning, a body giving bowing and swaying to every storming wind, pounding rain, harsh mannerisms that strengthen my stature and resolve, allowing me growth in the wait, for the knowledgeable, one appreciative of my monstrous nature, who speaks my supposeds into truth, calls my possibilities into existence

E.A. O'Connell

Soft, through me, a hollow word lodges, and whistles a panic of blood rush… …I ignore the urgency to resuscitate, I give of me completely, in a slow demise, bringing me to my knees, I fall and foetal my beginning… …In a nearly mortem stupor, I clasp the grass and clover, a fist of green perfume, escapes, as my soul looses itself from rigor, like a scarf of silk slips fine lines of collarbone and nape…lost to touch… …Violets make sweet my sleep, crowning my decomposing thoughts, thistle barbs knit weather to my tense flesh, late season frost and midday sunburn, a chemistry of secretions, a compost tea that hardies the land for fertility… …Time is balanced in the radius of dials, morning glories and moon flowers, parasols of magnetism and interstellar complexities… ….My body escapes curves to exist in plane…supine algorithm of death’s geometry…I exist within a parallel existence…where insects and arachnids design threads of reimagined arterial-ways, a fawn beds down in a repurposed womb, bone refashioned as mushroom wood, adorning garments of moss and snail silvered slime…I’m earthly rites of transmutation, beneath a bedtime story of myth and spidered glass glint…I burden the soil with my wait… …There is no true love, no mortal restorative, no antidotal kiss to bring back what once was…There’s only Death, Death’s familiar symphony, and the haunting aura of Your horizon…and all the losts He pockets and sifts through His fingers, spilled excuses for misfortune and luck, that were all along the synchronicity of innumerable lives, barely capable of vocalizing their gratitude for one another… …My moderate immortality bookends Your rise…and I’ve only the hum of nature’s white noise to give voice my deteriorated heart, that once beat a ballad of pleasure, in knowing You existed when my lungs sustained life…and while physicality seems an infinite stretch, know I’m not completely out of touch…the breeze that briefly corners at the back of your ear, that gives you reason to pause and glance around for the source of the disembodied voice, is me, and the particles of energy that en masse my gratitude for the wealth of beauty that is You… …

E.A. O'Connell

Dearest Death,

Most dear of my darknesses…my soul’s oldest companion… …I’ve been catching a hint of your scent at obscure corners of the day. Closing my eyes, so as not to lose sight of your evolution, I center, and invite you…come closer…but a breeze shifts or an axis slips, and with it your essence flees…fleeting, yet timeless and unparalleled…the first sentence on the last page of a beloved book, a matchstick in full flame burning a quarter way down, the entirety of the month of August…the distinct scent of almost…and didn’t we almost more times than most mortals should be allowed. I wear your mysteries upon my head…the crown of cicada husks you honored me…bestowing the call of shadow to reside just below the surface of my skin…awakening and tempting, tormenting and pure. Under vacuous skies I’ve communed with earth, mud-caked and primal…I dug up bones, exhuming the confusion of man…my tongue coated in clove, I signaled for a mean, for an opportunity to convey what seasons instinct…but no one saw, the ghost of me, released and fallen, a pink petal caught up in the cyclone of city cacophony … …I dreamt of three sisters, tornadoes that hummed and vibrated at the pitch of my name…just beneath, the timbre of your laugh…the line they cleared, a repetitive path, foretold of my erasure, the severing and the seam… …and still, I wear your curiosity like a mourning veil…knowing you avoid, so as not to take…but my end could only ever be yours, my soul trusts, my heart bleeds… …we both know I’m not leaving this flesh alive…so come forth, excavate and discover, eclipse and blind…I only want to make it out of here if traveling at your side is my absolute divine…

E.A. O'Connell

Morning bleeds out…a stain of birth upon magnolia flesh…sweet breath and iron hint…the fourth has been an enigma of desires…what was once abandoned and withered, positioned for battle…has softened…boughs of golden spindles, form fingers in graze of sky and earth…fleeting in allowance…stars are given leave of the distance, to hover at eye level…soft in the seconds they awe…the robins weave early tales of grass and vine, the crows thread sigil trails in midday journey…light and shadow slant and divide the growth of time…where willow lashes of green in new, cascade in bioluminescence against azure falls of night…I’m awakened…the moon and a god at either side…an intricate rhythm…of soul in lean to the pleasure…

E.A. O'Connell

It starts within a thought, an unearthly inch of humour, beyond the human mindset

Growth, and all the effort, for the sole purpose of dying

The spread in width, the stretch in depth, the ascension in heighth

The allowance and will, to bend and break, to grow and regrow, to capitulate

To sever bonds, to thrive beyond husk and matter, and force forth life of minuscule means

With the labor of enlightening, in the seedling of truth and intensity of existence, and surrender of the immensity of impossibility —

Spring wields her glory in both rise and demise

E.A. O'Connell