Morning Observations...

Roses, 

electrically charged incarnadine, 

hang heavy curves and thorny angles

Rain, 

laying mist orbs that hug leaf margins, 

slowly slipping the verdigris of hosta veins 

Bare feet following a shaded path of weathered flagstone, 

where starling chatter bounces like loose pebbles 

Gray is deceptive to clocks, 

Gray redirects the earth’s magnetism

The muggy atmosphere feels like anticipation on my skin, 

like a thought cupped in my tongue, 

and time running out

From which sage and lavender commune, 

rosemary blues for the bees,

And coriander breezes reduce me to ash

E.A. O'Connell

Open my eyes to the darkness, I see nothing but obsidian walls, their immensity
storm charges, wind and rain fall, the energy heightens

My head hammers and stars swim, silver sheen on phantom koi, I feel the peak of pain
the skull shifts

The fever builds, my thoughts humid, as my body temperature plummets, goose flesh and tremors
I inhale a lung’s full capacity, exhaling an incantation

The hemorrhaging commences

My weakening

Amniotic fluid, and the still, of a soft violet face

The circle doesn’t break, my body withering outside, clasping fingers about a sliver of moon, from the underbelly of a whisper
I cast: my tongue, my heart, the last energy of this life

Ambient noise and voices fade…silence and her infant face my only vision…and a breath opens..stutters to a cry…a crescendo building, pulling me with it

And the blood ceases its run

I’m weak, but she breathes
we sync, and her otherworldly eyes catch mine
gobsmacked

I read it wrong all along:
I’m not what’s new to her
she heralds the dawning of me

E.A. O'Connell

…my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …and the mourning doves grieve above me, nestled amongst black locust thorns… …the blue jays’ throats shriek in time with the vibrations of my tangled thoughts… …the crows bow their heads, lowering their eyes, so as not to see… …my head is screaming…everything is spinning… …the vultures wheeling in eigengrau sky…above my body… …a feral hound, black infinite, submits at my side… …a shallow grave, a vessel collecting rain…scrying…and a deathly baptism… …my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …wind chimes clashing…silver stacking…knives sharpening… …it doesn’t hurt to hear my fear… …and I don’t succumb… …my mouth bleeding… …the street lamp flickers and goes dead… …the shadows that come forward, garden my soul…burning cypress and laurel, moss and lichen…smoldering stone…and ignite…the pitch fly’s home… …Fly Agaric spirit rites… …my head is screaming…the voice is smoking… …you’re not dying…you’re dying…dying… …my pulse…drumming, pounding, sounding music…my head is percussive beats… …the voice is smoking… …you’re surviving…reviving…inviting… …the water rises…swallowing my body, my face…taking me under…silently sinking…golden spiraling… …coming out on the other side…upright and dry… …dusted in dirt and sunlight… …the voice is smoking…this is what bone feels like bleaching, disintegrating…your hair loose in the breeze, length and weight, are willow lashes designing…language in the grasses…you’re not there…you’re not here…you’re not dead…you’re won…and one…

{I wrote this and had been sitting on it days before I read a quote from Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成), House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories…but that is how my life has always been…timing…the things I see and hear within my head, colliding with the outside world…it’s happened so often and for so long, I know it’s not coincidence}

E.A. O'Connell

...

Blood: stop summoning me.
star scrying and shadow silence, 
cease.
beneath my flesh, 
crawling fingertips 
along brick and stone, iron and bronze, seizing my breaths, 
thrumming my bones,
feet hammering pavement, 
my brain screaming: fire, 
coming to in pitch, 
fingers to my lips, 
a language I keep
undisturbed.
clouded and heady, 
frisson in the Devil’s Hour

E.A. O'Connell

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