Soon the earth and skies about me will vibrate with cicada voice, my heart will hue with serenity and my own vibration will be one of praise

The secreted hatchlings will slither out from under felted lamb’s ears and hosta cover, sunning and coiling…most welcomed guests in my gardens

The porcelain berry has vined its way about the rhododendrons and the Black Knight, perhaps an invasive guest, but their striking berries of violet, fuchsia, denim, and turquoise are a wild I cannot refuse

The dill I seeded strictly for swallowtail caterpillars, has clearly been serving its purpose…fulfillment from the simplest of acts

I sought out the thistle of last year, a drifter that found me, but not everything returns, sometimes underground for a year or more, only to awaken and make mystery once again…I suppose the gold finches will be forgiving of the absence, the sunflowers keeping them sated 

Every summer there’s a new wonder about the gardens and yards…I can feel a build, much like a thought not yet in voice…it hasn’t approached yet…hasn’t made itself known in physicality…nonetheless, I feel it and patiently I wait…

E.A. O'Connell

Felling

Silken saturated, honey hued
A soaking rain tempered bark
Peeling in plates, in sawtoothed armor
I adorn my body, sweat and lichen, built for war
Green sunlit youth, a weighted scent
Withers, steel to flesh
A rhythm in rush, in crash, and the howling of man
The rope wound about my fist
Felling, and the flight of song in maple keys
Death ascends, culling leaves by their wind-form
There's a smell it brings, an assault on the nature green life Springs:
Pitch flies, plump with waste
Their buzz festering in echo against dank sills and minerals
Humid carcass sugars and oily fibers,
A nest of knotted angular legs, and soiled wings,
Self-righteous poseurs of putrefaction, descendants of the mire

E.A. O'Connell

...

I keep finding pencils within the cracks of sidewalks, weeks of this, on a daily basis, shallow graves where the bodies wait, for my fingers, for the touch of thoughts smudged in graphite, leaving a passing word, in porous concrete, breathless leaves that flee in the breeze, from pain I write, it’s the only way I feel free, where my screams can bleed, beneath childhood chalk outlines, and pink petals of life, the only place I can admit, I’m too much like you, too much for my own good, and fuck it all if I can’t age long enough for Death to ask me to cover a few of His shifts…

Why are you there?, in the stone of a chimney, book-ended by lilacs, and sheer curtains, phantoms haunting Spirit silhouettes, ashes of Winters, ashes of You, and my fugitive youth, I always feared the pitted earth, falling in on itself, a tomb behind the greenhouse, where I’d stand and stare, feeling the breath leave my body, too much absence in that land, soil of solemnity, and the voice of the swing, chain and seat, legs kicking and pumping at my back, I guess I’ll always be a haunted house, ghosts peering out from my eyes, unaware they ever died, aware they’ve secreted immortality…

I’m unlike anything he’s ever known, unlike anything he ever knew could exist, it unnerves and disarms him, holding me to his body, his strength a thing to behold, in the dark, asking me what colors I see, breathless and spent, within an arms reach, and in the human space, within the vertices of cartilage and bone, maps of veins and unfathomed depths, I open him to the ugliness, to the feral beast, and he rests, easy and at peace, and with dawn he takes on the world, for me, pen to paper, to dismantle, to resurrect, to be…

Some people find coins, messages from the other side, masquerading monetarily, some spy feathers and wings that whisper, greetings from the deceased, I find pencils, in cracks of sidewalks, and hope they’ve been able to say all that had needed to be said, even if their last words, take shape in the soles of feet, beneath constellations of stories that remain, light years distance, security, under lock and key…

E.A. O'Connell

...

From a gaping second floor ruin

Of axe shrapnel and inferno ash

Against the charcoal shock of loss

Remains a widow’s peak of demolition

With a window of melted distortion

Framing blushed light through fractured firmament:

A cherry blossom inception

Flush with season and second sight

E.A. O'Connell

Vulture House

A death sentence, and no one even really knows why. It’s suspected money’s at the root of such ill intentions. 

Most pass in a blur, peripheral distortion of deterioration and destruction, and a flash of thought about the absence of man.

Grey or sunny days, it all gives shape to how ravaged, animal savaged, the perimeter has overgrown. 

Clapboard grey, termite timber, splintered…and yet, life…a home, a second chance, amidst the bacteria, parasites, everything molded and mildewed.

Shingles shred and slip a waterfall thaw, letting starlight fill the vacancy of a moss laden bed, where a sapling of misguided love rooted amongst the rusted springs and ancestral mites.

Broken windows peak and dip a current’s flow, bullet hole peeping tom cats arch their backs and shiver off thoughts of the warmth in a loving hand.

Back lit lunar clouds project spectral gaps, lengths of a silhouette grove paper interior walls in pagan knot work, while creeping ivy, under an open chimney flue, restricts and devours brick and mortar durability.

And there, in the stairwell of cobwebs and busted treads and risers, a landing…a nest, of scavenged bones, of feathers, and of waste. 

A marriage ceremony, undated and unseen…rites of feral, of ingenuity, of a hunger for death sated in a carcass dance. 

In the upper window sash, where glass would mirror the void, two black masses all hunch and jagged edges…perch…through sun cycles and planetary measures, they home and they eye…

E.A. O'Connell

...

A fingernail splits at the quick 
The moon hemorrhages a slow elegy
God spired fingers and sweaty palms 
The scent of descending Fahrenheit on silvered hair

I cross bones and innocence is bled 
India ink across the moonlit ceiling
A pin to my pupil and you claim it land you’ve traversed
Always wanting the contents of my head 
All I want to give is the marrow of my bones

It’s awoken 
Some would call it a hunger, others mislabel it a thirst
It’s a premature birth
It’s winter cicada nightcrawl from earthen tombs to lichened oak
Stillborn and stillbreath 
Ghosts of a bygone permafrost
Cloven steps snapped grass, splintering bare feet that cast cries swallowed by the wind

Absence of your wild from my tongue is catastrophic 
I hear the void of language in the hollow floorboards
Skeletal remains, buried dementia, a life: vibrate 
Crawl spaces to cry
Of a wicked loss, the bloodless beats, building rhythm
Every sin I've loved committing

I can’t sleep past 3:00am 
They come and hover 
They want and I need
Death beetles crawl names, Corvids carry souls, but where the bloody hell are you?

The dawn starts gray and grows anew 
Cashmere, wool, angora winds and sails that cast me headfirst back into their world
Hours travel as a small hand spinning a globe
Fast, faster: the rotational rail against marble and brain cells
I steady the Earth’s breaths and count her laugh lines

Dusk captivates as I drive 
Fire bellied storms navigate towards cremains in western cypress winds 
It all boils down to a bottle, a joint, and a hand that keeps me from hitting the ground 
I love you for all my failures, for all I’ve yet to unleash, I love you subsequently, and for our slaughterhouse resurrected

It’s only blood, we can wash it away 
It’s just the colors that press my brain when I feel your words
A hammer to stems and petals, a stain, a water ring that set fire burns
And they play circular games

I like endless highways, stretches and bends
To lead me directionless to an answer, an incantation
Cliffside speed and signage that reads, road ends in 100 feet

E.A. O'Connell

Blue Jay Language

Blue jay language is aluminum hollow vibrato, 
silver in sheen, 
glinting on angles of the tongue, 
blinding under midday sun, 
a double helix of chain link with sharpened barbs that scratch and pierce at the atmosphere’s tunneled walls, 
infinite in spiral, 
reabsorbing into itself, 
before reaching an angora soft demise in wisps of radiated November earthen warmth, 
one jay heaves gold, 
fluid falls of gilded thread running the length of a towering sycamore, 
such hue to a language fleeting, 
as flames extinguished under heavy black boots concealing a light foot, 
my mouth vacant of words, 
welcomes the misdirection of a lady beetle, 
the red of her armor green on my tongue as I taste her flight…

E.A. O'Connell