Soft, through me, a hollow word lodges, and whistles a panic of blood rush… …I ignore the urgency to resuscitate, I give of me completely, in a slow demise, bringing me to my knees, I fall and foetal my beginning… …In a nearly mortem stupor, I clasp the grass and clover, a fist of green perfume, escapes, as my soul looses itself from rigor, like a scarf of silk slips fine lines of collarbone and nape…lost to touch… …Violets make sweet my sleep, crowning my decomposing thoughts, thistle barbs knit weather to my tense flesh, late season frost and midday sunburn, a chemistry of secretions, a compost tea that hardies the land for fertility… …Time is balanced in the radius of dials, morning glories and moon flowers, parasols of magnetism and interstellar complexities… ….My body escapes curves to exist in plane…supine algorithm of death’s geometry…I exist within a parallel existence…where insects and arachnids design threads of reimagined arterial-ways, a fawn beds down in a repurposed womb, bone refashioned as mushroom wood, adorning garments of moss and snail silvered slime…I’m earthly rites of transmutation, beneath a bedtime story of myth and spidered glass glint…I burden the soil with my wait… …There is no true love, no mortal restorative, no antidotal kiss to bring back what once was…There’s only Death, Death’s familiar symphony, and the haunting aura of Your horizon…and all the losts He pockets and sifts through His fingers, spilled excuses for misfortune and luck, that were all along the synchronicity of innumerable lives, barely capable of vocalizing their gratitude for one another… …My moderate immortality bookends Your rise…and I’ve only the hum of nature’s white noise to give voice my deteriorated heart, that once beat a ballad of pleasure, in knowing You existed when my lungs sustained life…and while physicality seems an infinite stretch, know I’m not completely out of touch…the breeze that briefly corners at the back of your ear, that gives you reason to pause and glance around for the source of the disembodied voice, is me, and the particles of energy that en masse my gratitude for the wealth of beauty that is You… …

E.A. O'Connell

Dearest Death,

Most dear of my darknesses…my soul’s oldest companion… …I’ve been catching a hint of your scent at obscure corners of the day. Closing my eyes, so as not to lose sight of your evolution, I center, and invite you…come closer…but a breeze shifts or an axis slips, and with it your essence flees…fleeting, yet timeless and unparalleled…the first sentence on the last page of a beloved book, a matchstick in full flame burning a quarter way down, the entirety of the month of August…the distinct scent of almost…and didn’t we almost more times than most mortals should be allowed. I wear your mysteries upon my head…the crown of cicada husks you honored me…bestowing the call of shadow to reside just below the surface of my skin…awakening and tempting, tormenting and pure. Under vacuous skies I’ve communed with earth, mud-caked and primal…I dug up bones, exhuming the confusion of man…my tongue coated in clove, I signaled for a mean, for an opportunity to convey what seasons instinct…but no one saw, the ghost of me, released and fallen, a pink petal caught up in the cyclone of city cacophony … …I dreamt of three sisters, tornadoes that hummed and vibrated at the pitch of my name…just beneath, the timbre of your laugh…the line they cleared, a repetitive path, foretold of my erasure, the severing and the seam… …and still, I wear your curiosity like a mourning veil…knowing you avoid, so as not to take…but my end could only ever be yours, my soul trusts, my heart bleeds… …we both know I’m not leaving this flesh alive…so come forth, excavate and discover, eclipse and blind…I only want to make it out of here if traveling at your side is my absolute divine…

E.A. O'Connell

Morning bleeds out…a stain of birth upon magnolia flesh…sweet breath and iron hint…the fourth has been an enigma of desires…what was once abandoned and withered, positioned for battle…has softened…boughs of golden spindles, form fingers in graze of sky and earth…fleeting in allowance…stars are given leave of the distance, to hover at eye level…soft in the seconds they awe…the robins weave early tales of grass and vine, the crows thread sigil trails in midday journey…light and shadow slant and divide the growth of time…where willow lashes of green in new, cascade in bioluminescence against azure falls of night…I’m awakened…the moon and a god at either side…an intricate rhythm…of soul in lean to the pleasure…

E.A. O'Connell

It starts within a thought, an unearthly inch of humour, beyond the human mindset

Growth, and all the effort, for the sole purpose of dying

The spread in width, the stretch in depth, the ascension in heighth

The allowance and will, to bend and break, to grow and regrow, to capitulate

To sever bonds, to thrive beyond husk and matter, and force forth life of minuscule means

With the labor of enlightening, in the seedling of truth and intensity of existence, and surrender of the immensity of impossibility —

Spring wields her glory in both rise and demise

E.A. O'Connell

…she cultivated an existence because of Death…around His hands and posture…He ignited her for her own good…to flesh out truths even He couldn’t chase…and she was an inferno and unconstrained…it made His laughter smell of boiling water to be in close proximity to her…His words incubi at bedsides of saints when she set to conjuring sins…He liked to dissect her…ether for His dreams…and it set her heart aflame…a cannibal combustion of consumption…not a trace of proof of her existence…mere ash and dust for His fingers to glyph…but every design calibrated to a new magnetism...and each attempt was powerless to the formulation of your name...

...He had awaited a headlight in piano traffic serenade…He felt the loss of her life in a metronome percussion…and He ran foolish tongue to barren teeth mining for golden words of coercion...but His conscience got the best of Him...allowing for Him to sit back in silence and give her the space to let free will decide if she'd walk towards or away...she confided she wanted the disaster...so He gave her life after the line went flat...and she resurrected at the cusp of when the expansion of lungs feels near rib cage capacity on a ventilator…

…you laid your back flat on a faded area rug…crimson indigo bone…undone…unaware...her grave was dug, but empty...

…and so she lived and loved you, never knowing with certainty of your existence…but she hoped...she loved before her eyes could see...the visage the world saw, and the shadow that exuded true power...and when she wrote letter after letter...her neck, a vulnerable thread, was always exposed as a sign of trust in your near presence...her teeth when bared in smile, a sign of restraint for the hunger she longed to sate…your taste for the world undefined upon her tongue...

...her awareness of the truth...of your existence and welcome...it was bright like aneurysm shock…and the guise of nothing laying beneath the sheets…of flesh peeling flesh…and metaphors in rounded vessels…a hum that screams the obvious…ever so absent, then ever so present…

…and your lust for solitude...silhouettes of lava pulling, morphing, melting…you wear it thick as agave running down and between your slender fingers, moulding to the lines of thoughts in curve…you abandon her name in your walk...you pocket her existence like inconveniences...

...both hide their love like an M80 in a coffee tin...

E.A. O’Connell

My God— My Hell—{Edit}

My God— My Hell—

gravel wedded pulp and bone in the fruit of my core,

gaping wounded knees pressing the searing flame of pain inward,

tidal waves of blood spilling human qualities within cracks of the asphalt reaper’s scythe,

the scent of patinaed copper taste buds,

and a dying autumnal fire lit at my roots,

a horrorscope of phantom roads mapping my thoughts,

a blind faith in the atmosphere levitating, immersing my body

My God— My Hell—

glass and mica mirror ball glamour on my feral calloused palms and heels,

splintered and spiked mace defense, weaponized

should my arms be hooked and pulled,

dragged to distances out of my toes’ earthly reach,

as my mind sought universal widths 

in a clearing beneath a sonogram sky of swollen star bellies

Juniper Francis Lee. October 2018/August 2014

“Your ears doubt that Winter howls in ache.
The absence of You from Him.
But His hands hold your approach.
He feels the bleeding of Your resurrection.
All through love.”

A familiar phantom voice whispers at the back of my ear, my vision widening from a nondescript hypnotic void, to a brewing morning sky beyond the hills.

There’s an abandoned Victorian house, of sun bleached black, decaying upon one of those far off hills.
My passenger, who goes by no name, points to it through the breaking gilded light.
My eyes cloud over, curtains of thought billow in the breeze, my gaze refocuses...a telephoto lens,
To the trees hanging the weight of overnight rain, orbs of prognostication crashing to the earth.

The grass beyond, rolling fields of new green, elicits goosebumps at the mere thought of the cold sway and cling of the blades to my bare feet and legs.

My nameless passenger begs that I not venture to the hilltop. That I not allow myself to be drawn out.
I defy her mounting fears, putting the car in park, and allowing the pull on my soul to direct me.

Going by foot to my calling, minutes pass like hours, as my heart anxiously vacates her post, joining my side, before ghosting herself through me, into the pit of my core.

My destination met, in the crumbling stone walls of a freethinking garden, growing this way and that, my heart crawls towards a thin veil of flesh, a window to the seasons I've written, alive in petals and stamens, herbs and poisons.

And there He stands, faceless and adorned in all black, His faith in me lain in the dark of a matchbox, held in the palm of His mud stained hand, a small plot of earth upturned and gaping.
My rib cage fails the impact of such a crush.

I'm subsequently growing, root to sky, coastline to mountain ridge, illustrating within my flesh obscura, my perseverance.

The eternal fire, that consumes my funeral pyre...that cauterizes my wounds...and gives life to my ruins, strikes the red phosphorous, burning the box into His palm, never stalling, and my gaze never faltering, not even at such a numbing sight.

"I grow. Despite the fact you can’t see my bloom, despite the fact you've dug my grave...I flourish. I die and I breathe life over and over again. If only you had faith in my resilience.”

His palm, a charred chalice of flesh, stirs of its own accord, vibrating with movement, as young legs dig out from the cadaverous remains, a cicada resting in His hand, before ascending on instinct to the vacant canvas of His visage, shedding and emerging anew.

Gobsmacked, I forget how to breathe, lost in the realization of His words...of His love...

E.A. O'Connell (July 2015)