It was an education in blind followship, to believe in bombastic sermons of words uncited, to bow and bend at the knees, to chapel my hands, and embrace my being as built from a rib.

I was a hostage to a man. a god. a devil. I was imprisoned by a grand lie of my birthright sins, and the tiered veil of an afterlife of forgiving golden halos. tormented limbo. excruciating fire.

There was no prayer to answer my dark descent into questions, no miracle to spin my faith into a pious congregant.

My faith, broad in scope to ask of the condemned and damned, my right to know why fallen angels couldn’t be forgiven, why my imperfect flesh and interminable mind wouldn’t be embraced as good stock for considering such thoughts. Why my ideal dark was banished from their idol of light.

It was a ring of maniacal laughter, a deceit of holy manipulations, an intentional shrinking of my existence for their grandeur, that raised me in a seraph’s screams, the monstrosity of its being a relief, its burning my release, as I thrashed and fought for my abysmal soul, an unhinged myth screaming lightning. I rescued myself.

I forced the hand that stigmatad my body, bleeding out their teachings, weeping eyes broke from the essence of pain, forging the will and the strength. I was reborn a child of earth. moon. death.

Drawing a threshold within the dirt, I honored God, and with civility and respect, I tolled my limits, and asked of this existence a parallel, honoring the other from our respective houses of worship, and from the dark of a new moon shone the faintest of light, and the answer I had always sought from man was found in nature, and in too many ways to count, so was I.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

Poppet of my flayed flesh, my tormented bones, cloned of blackthorn and rowan, adorned in clair de lune

Intricate details of my far flung soul, like a scavengers nest spilled in storm: broken bits of wrought hedges, shiny trinkets of glass and resin, frayed threads and strands of hair, copper heads and cobwebbed dust

Thoughts that skip like stones, upon the placid obsidian mirror of yesteryear and the morrow, ring the mental fuck it wherewithal, the ghosts of incandescence moan my mournful dirge

Fingers set to work, in black salt smudge and hallowed earth, bindings and pins, she’s stitched lipped and blinded, her bare body righteous upon the pyre, the instrumental flames, rise in a cacophony of words from the pages of her own tome

The whipping girl, the wretch, the witch

To burn, to proof and cast, I curse her, the embodiment of intellect, so no wound, nor gesture of kind could fell her strength, her will…I expel, I recover, I seal the threshold, crafting an invocation of blade and blood, with which I spill, I exhale

Nights, I await our resurrection, the evacuation of tomb and the unveiling of caul, whereupon I splice foe with soul, aware the cycle won’t ever be broken

Our duel of heart, dual of will and woe, our evidence of circumstance, my most murderous crime against self

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

{Excerpt}

I find pencils within the cracks of sidewalks…weeks of this, on a daily basis, no matter where I walk…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 delicate 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…I must break this cancerous curse…quicker of wit and the lengths I’ll go…

My preservation and your displacement…Why are you there?…in the stone of a chimney, book-ended by lilacs, and sheer curtains…phantoms haunting in 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 surrender to the haunted house, ghosts peering out from my eyes, unaware they ever died, aware they’ve secreted immortality…

He loved me incapable of words, grew resentful of my voice…he once told me…I’m unlike anything he’s ever known, unlike anything he ever knew could exist, it unnerved and disarmed him, holding me to his body, his strength a thing to behold, in the dark, asking me what colors I see, breathless and spent, I broke free…within an arms reach, and in the human space, within the vertices of cartilage and bone, maps of veins and unfathomed depths, I opened him to the ugliness, to the feral beast, and he called me incomprehensible and just shy of evil…he rested, easy and at peace, and with dawn he rejoined the chatter of the masses…but for me, a night’s long contemplation, I don’t live permission nor approval…I spent a morning of pen to paper, to dismantle, to resurrect, to be exactly what I was meant 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, a light years distance, in security, in the space of concrete seams…

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

An unseen hand, be it the God of man or the Deity of self, force feeds me steel wool fibers, rasping the soft tissue of my cheeks and tongue. A complex system of saliva, swallow, and speech, bludgeoned into a primordial gobbet of raw inability. If I could only convey…

Emerging from the cavern of self, a steady crawl of joint footed hydraulics, ascending my esophagus, suffocating my airway. Slowing to a stop, and scratching, tearing at, puncturing through the hollow of my throat. Stretching and forcing, the beast steals out the stoma, given in the light an unholy name, and a secondary purpose. To my mouth it creeps, where it silks a Kevlar thread, venomous fangs piercing my lips, as the sharp of the exoskeleton meticulously stitches, a web of silent design. An acursed weave that captures words as they attempt to escape. If I could only conceive…

From the netherabyss of the earth, upon which my stilling body lies, roots of sinew strength break through, instantaneously vining, binding, trussing my body. Thrashing violently, my flesh rips and bleeds, my hair pulls from its scalp, scorching tears of wrath blind my eyes, a rabid foam seeps through the web of my mouth. I am on the verge. A growl of frustration, an urgency for conscience, a chemical combustion of rage and fear, a death rattle of warning…I implode…in a pitch of deafening fury, electricity discharging and glass splintering…I am blinding white light…a phenomenon of disbelief…and from this, I speak…

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

The earth is fractured this morning. A humid steam seeps from its bowels, coaxing a sweat to nectar my flesh. From the Devil’s hour, a solitary scream ripped the fabric of time, the clock in my bedroom halted, and a momentary confusion befell me, as I attempted to regain my bearings aside an indecipherable roar…falling rain or crackling fire? The misplaced scent of clover beeswax coating hammered iron answered. Bedded down atop a thin sheet, sleep was dense like the fur of a hawk moth, erratic like its flight. A dream torn at its edges, leaves behind faded faces in speech and forearms in gesture. Has a seal been opened somewhere? A release? A most gentle breeze alights my skin…a faint hint of clove on my tongue.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

I am vapor, a fog. I cloud the earth at the hour of cerulean horizon, where raven caws take shadow form, haunting streets, jumping bridges, drowning in creek beds. I am an anomaly of predicament. I didn’t ask to be a circumstance of curse. I’m a casualty of birthrite. A daily reminder in the shunning, the avoidance of my existence, by the eyes that see through me, the disregard for my space, the silence of ignorance. I panhandle in whisper, I sleight of hand in scream. I exist as asylum, in solitary fortitude. Every hand I’ve extended calcified in wait, each truth met with aversion. I’m a pariah of psyche and pneuma. I’m the creature of robbed graves and stitched science. My creator, the God of mortals, his handiwork a lapse of reason, the sins of the father, and the abscence of a sympathetic humor. And still I wait. A spectre of thought and of the reckoning. I am lone. A chasm no one dares to negotiate. A language declared extinct and shelved. And yet, I await.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018

Hawks have been prominent in my daily life, as of late. Often at eye level and within close proximity to my body, and on two separate occasions capturing and feasting on prey. I am reading these happenings carefully, paying close attention to where my thoughts, actions, words are when we crossroad. I feel it is in relation to my work, just as the praying mantises, snakes, and eagles correlated with my life, health, and writing at integral points. I believe in the importance of being in tune with nature, as signs, guidance, and answers we seek are present.

Monarchs have been abundant as well, so much so, they are fluttering outside my classroom drawing my students attention. My gardens are rife with them. I cross a parking lot on foot, and I nearly walk into them. This is more a communication from the other side, but nevertheless, a reply I’d been awaiting.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018