A sudden realization of coming to consciousness in darkness, surrounded by a screaming in all directions, that porcelains my flesh and concusses the back of my head, an audible ferocity of words in a language I can’t decipher

I feel bitten by his diablerie and spit out by his spleen

I make stories of the scenes that captivate hours in sun cast shadows and arachnid baiting, of vulture princes feasting on rot and viruses, and motes of dust fusing into amorphous beings phantoming a dance in the coastal breeze

I feel his stare like a stoning punishment

I want him to read the story of my lives, those living and dead, in retellings of flaws within my flesh, in the shallow and deep scars, the mutant stretch marks, in freckled constellations and portent tattoos

I won’t deny the longing and hunger for the sanguine spilled rug burns of the white room, with floor to ceiling windows that drench the wanting sex of feral psyches in sunlight

Your vulnerable neck in my grasp, your heart a delicacy to my palate, unbidden tears captivating crystal prophecies upon my hands

Solitary in form again, I watch from the window, the waves break and burn in sun phase hues, as the ghost of your voice widows at the shell of my ear, giving my head a haunting distant roar of loss and lust

I move to stand in the threshold of the door, in the realm of other, not in not out, and I star my limbs, suspended in the space of entranced or possible retreat

My celestial body becomes a wheel, slow spinning my metamorphic silk, a chrysalis of irritant effect, I take on a baroque pearl contour awaiting the splitting of life

Upon extraction of the bindings that happened my transmogrify, I haunt the house you built around thoughts of me and the wicked shape of my mouth, fevering the syllables of your name, the histrionics of your unbecoming

It’s a fine house you’ve crafted for me to haunt, bathed in dark actualization, that I decorate with tasseomancy finery and slipping candle wax, taxidermied nocturnals and minuscule houses constructed of leaves, whistling rust and framed whispers of your self-reproach

E. A. O'Connell. May 7, 2022.