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