Late April 2017 Journal Entry

It’s a deceptive day…late April flourishes…abundant in the blush of dogwood, the vibrancy of azaleas warm with fuchsia…delicate violets grow from concrete, lilacs constellate against the contrasting grey sky, rhododendrons flare as if in permanent twirl…dandelions button the fragrant grass, thick and uncut…white petals ghost the Spring mist, as cherry blossom petals are carried in the chill of the wind...it steals my breath just as it did in Winter...

E.A. O'Connell

She May Be {Edited)

She may be—

a guttural growl from an asphalt sinkhole
where screams in pitch of street light synchronicity
dazzle her eyes like hard candy melt
on her tongue— the taste of saccharine rocket fuel

—and she falls away, falls free, she gives to—

gravity pulling—
the blood running thin from her nose
like juice of a pomegranate
staining her fingers in the surface contemplation of her thumb

phantom lips wax and wane
as witness to a language homicide
—a violent ending to an incoherent thought

the blood runs thicker
slipping the dark caverns of her skull
silver coating the roof of her mouth to protect from the heat
as her body temperature runs high
the unconscious huntress
incinerating landscapes and inhabitants of her repressed mind
—picking them off one-by-one

they dissipate in sunburnt waves of viper percussion
atop a long stretch of desert asphalt
the tarantulas scatter
leaving ghost imprints in her vision, that make her swear she held them in her hand
like stunned birds recuperating from high-rise plate glass trauma

and then the frostbite seizes her bones, ceases the stream of consciousness

sleep-laced words slip the currents of her slowing breaths
—down, down, drowning in the swallow—
—and the death roll—

death extends to her—keeping a distance—he fears her still
he remembers her 
blood like star fire, or was it the tequila seal of her lower lip in kiss
—the permanence—
their fire eating reanimates life, if only for a moment, and she breathes
—shared lungs with a scar tissue tenacity—

her skeletal fabric remnants 
have begun thrashing in their chrysalis cell safety— morphing
the chemical combustion offers a slow pull into a suffocating disintegration
the insanity of letting go in the go
the blooming after wildfire ravaging

—a distant planet turns within itself—

—far, far, far-gotten—

She may be— 
earth static

She may be— 
the moon

She may be— 
the womb to birth a universe anew

E.A. O'Connell

Strange Beings {Edited}

Strange Beings: The wind blows forcibly. The leaves scratch and pierce the crowning night, their underbellies a thousand infantile faces: shrill― mourning in fate, in the disengaging and rearranging of a heart.

Funeral In A Matchbox: Burying a body with leaded glass wings, the burning gas of a star’s inferno mirrored in flightless migration.

Procession: Wrought cemetery gates, green muddy hills, runoff, and blood. Roots grappling the earth, lightning breaking and bruising bark, weathered ribbon ghosts fraying elegies over numb cherubin lips.

Funeral Rites: Risen in the moonlight and sacrificed as an offering to clock-working eyes― naked, burning, forging. Blood runs down my legs, as a stag’s eight points shatter and gore my pelvis― Death is morning glories vining, unwinding, wringing.

Resurrection: Maggots, earthworms, and insects alike, dismantling ruins, pollinators seeding pheromones― a soaking rain, an arid sun cycle. The birds that eat of their flesh, sing my essence― pollinators to petaled heads― bees brewing honey that taste of me― trees fruiting a nectar of me, that trickles down your chin with each insatiable bite― your tongue painting for your hands and mind’s eye― what my soul looks like.

E.A. O'Connell

Voyage, Voyage {A Micro Tale}

The world fell asleep last night; insomniacs found a rhythm and syncopated, children phantomed fog cities in the trees, lovers puzzle-fit their bodies and caught their breaths, animals, domesticated and wild alike, nested and denned in the absence of alarm.  As the world slumbered, the oceans inhaled and with every exhale gained fathoms, crested miles, until every suffocated cityscape, each stratospheric mountain peak, and colossal redwood were submerged; leviathans for a fraction of a second.  For a glimpse of time, all of life was reembraced by a caul of intuition, all life reverted to an in utero state of breathing, and every cell of every existence sounded back the beat of The Mother's heart.  Peace; the whale song and doppler pulse of currents, sonogram moonlight, and the momentary silence of an extinction.  By morning the oceans receded, back to lapping their shores, and the world woke to a water stained earth, as if rain secreted in the night.  Everything seemed as it always had, the people fell into their daily routines without a question or suspicion, and the problems that weigh heavy continued to plague.  But the sun radiated a warmth that lit an inkling of the night's truth to all; a faint primordial scent of origins and amniotic dreams, an awakening of sense, that cautioned a nightmare, that keepsaked a hope: the seed of kind planted in a reverie, the premonition of lot in the escalation of real time.

E.A. O'Connell

Meditation of the Morning

The lotus have died, receded to their watery clime of a regenerating sun in mud luck and deciduous fortune. Elsewhere, the renewed spring of greenery and blossoms within the garden borders haven’t fared as well; depressed, in a low slung green of vegetation putrefying under the weight of an unapologetic frost. They return not to a supple hue or texture in the sun, nor do they brown and release their hold in the dipping temperatures of November nights, they just linger in a limbo of being; awaiting, numbing.  On a walk through a churchyard I behold red begonias, winter macerated and pooled upon their sisters; a wax of thinly veiled youth, of blood ties to the mother, of a death and all it has yet to become.  Shadows spin about me, a split second of chill as they black out the sun: vultures.  I rather enjoy watching them wheel and dive on a breezy morning; how warm to the touch their feathers would be: a sun saturated abyss.  Icarus flying too close to the sun, and yet possessing wings incapable of melting.  I think they write poetry in their fluidity, or at the very least lyrics to a song.  They thread words together as their bodies cross and they raise choruses in their heights; percussion and strings and woodwinds.  Some think it odd, inappropriate even, to speak of the beauty of something believed to be ugly, horrid, that monstrosities are just that, monsters.  But who defines a monster?  Who defines beauty?  Who defines purpose?  I took my children to a cemetery and while there I explained to them that it’s not just a final resting place of the deceased, that it’s a garden; of contemplation, of gratitude and surrender, of a terrible beauty and it’s renewal: life.  I study the architecture of the church, the stained glass, and how the crows sit atop the slate roof, cawing out at all who pass; keeping tally or bidding a good day?  God and I made a pact decades ago: we’d believe in the other from within our respective houses of worship.  So when I go to the lotus, when I go to the trees, the mountains, the ocean, when I’m standing in a parking lot or outside of a church, when I’m a spectrum, when I’m faded, when I feel like a ghost to the world, to even myself...I still exist, because somewhere in the immensity of the universe, my mote of self, has someone, something, some energy, believing, knowing, that I am.  I finish my walk, admiring the damage of winter’s encroaching, placing my chilled hands in the pocket of my hoodie, nodding to the crows, as I turn and go with a whispered amen.    

E.A. O'Connell

polterheist of the alpha mind {a rework always in progress}

Chairs, ebony and knocked with wear, stack in Escher fascination…on pointe, the precision they spin, slow and methodical, a hypnotic optical delusion of black and sunlight…static builds in the atmosphere and sounds the descent…a waterfall crash…a tempest seat…piano keys and peddle release…

Serpent winds a derisive halo, atop the head of a woman, her womb a pomegranate ripe, her life solitary and defiant…reptilian underbelly slips beneath her palms, through her thighs, winding a return to her throat…forked tense and elliptical divination…it all equates to infinite constriction of her airways…she charcoals a door upon a wall…knocks & knocks to meet no response…she crashes the threshold…honoring herself…

Arachnid chessmen, cloaked in steel wool, stealth in their maneuvering about the disfigured floor…foregoing strategy for mind play…Shadows of men in child fun, run the stairs to find her eye, plastering themselves statue still, stretching and fading…incinerating in the black wick of a candle in slipped inferno…they terrorize the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, absorbing her screams with monstrous paws…leaving her paralyzed as the iron maiden mouth, clasps about her face…her throat welling & choking on the shit she refuses to swallow…leaving her a permanent power from a temporary slip…

{polterheist of the alpha mind}

E.A. O'Connell

...excerpts of thoughts in story {III}

Somewhere in the eigengrau hour, between the scream of a night terror and the sigh of a post mortem body, the cicadas stilled in a birth— stilled in the desiccation of a wound. In their absence, or rather from it, I took up a hum—my cells regenerating and calling to their familiar. In the Devil’s Hour, I heard a seat being taken, and I rolled to the ghost—I spiraled into the fugue. A slip of the tongue—No—A slip of the blade, beckoned me forth from the vapor state of thought. A kitchen…wood grain…paring knife…stainless steel reflection—I painted my blood across the glyphs and stitched my deeper self shut. The hum still creates—still deteriorates—my liberation. I lose myself on concrete and coffee— a straightaway dead ends with brick and mortar, columns and corners. In the shadows, his cigarette scissor fingers, his disheveled, bloodied apron— a butcher sends up smoke signals. I lower my hood, keeping my eyes on his, hiding neither scar, nor thread that lace my neck and face— I make holy, rites with a ceremony of feral instincts—a berserker—internally I'm at war. A second thought—a second glance—I turn toward, and he’s missed nothing, collecting my tells—my intimacy—all with merely his stance and eyeline. Marigolds bloom from my mouth, ruffled manes of sunlight, a dance of skirts masking my misdeeds, but they don’t fool the butcher—who recites an elegy in soft brogue. You know // Aye  The hum bursts the dam, a full blown commotion, chaos and communication—I’m lightning he’s caught in a bottle—I’m no longer impossible—I’m incredible

E.A. O'Connell