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My mind sets a scream free when I sleep, reverberating off the interior walls of my skull, giving the visions that haunt the backs of my eyes, a vibration of near explosion…shadowed beings speak in lacerated tongues and hushed secrets, their footsteps giving more texture to the supposed dream, their touch like spider filament or a lost strand of hair, initiating a suffocating itch, that raises my hands and eyelids…staring into the dark of the ceiling, going further and further, getting lost into the eigengrau oblivion, I count the silences of cricket strings, knowing something, someone mutes their white noise, and I exhale my presence, rolling to my side…I’m aware the clock reads 3:03am, and as my eyelids begin to close, a singular tap from the mirror upon my closet door…a second tap and I know…a third tap, sends me to sleep, meeting him on the otherside of this reflection…

E.A. O'Connell

Thoughts

I happened upon a pumpkin, plump and orange. Upon the ridged flesh, a black sharpie scrolled,

What are you grateful for?

I gave thought to all the replies others had written in passing…all varying messages of thanks for friends, family, coffee, Autumn…and my answer hit me…

I’m grateful for small glimpses of humanity, reminding me of the good, keeping hope alive.

E.A. O'Connell

Tundra

Permafrost and polar icecaps. Snow blind days masquerading as endless nights. Regale me with too good to be true tales of having worth to another…to someone outside the realm of blood and DNA, beyond the betrayal of my maker. Whisper to my chest, straight through to my inanimate heart, what it feels like to be seen, accepted, unconditionally loved. Insist to my damned being that the matter of existing in the mind of another, to never be too far from their thoughts is a panacea, doing wonders for the condition of one’s soul. Hope seems but a figment of the imagination, a fable of my incoherent thoughts, a mind lost to, for not. But I plead, with all that is unholy for I am wholly undone, allow me this one fortune in a dismantled and reassembled life, to gift another with the wicked foretellings in my laughter, to know words I’ve spoken from my monstrous tongue, have set aflame the ragged remnants of feelings built from the life uninvited, imparting the knowledge that I’ve seen in implausible ideas come horrifically alive, to know the value of their existence isn’t lost on my scarred ideals, and in turn, I could entrust my idiosyncrasies in their care, my death-warmed hands in offering. Oh, to bear witness to our symmetry, an abomination of mortal parameters. Are you out there?

E.A O'Connell

{Excerpt}

…What is my blood? The origin and chemistry of the esoteric, abstruse and reviled…Spilled in rivulets of loss, the gnashing of teeth, set in a trap of rust clad iron, medieval and torturous, chained and bound, I’m a ship of a singular fool that ran aground, anchored to my undoing, tethered to a decision of drastic nature, I allow the teeth to sink straight through, devouring and severing me from the dead weight of my trapped limb, grappling at the earth, dead leaves shatter like glass with each palm slap…I pull away…blood trails in a most horrific fashion, giving weight to skeletal debris, I have no means for a tourniquet, resigning myself to the demise of another beast at the hands of ignorance…but what man steals out of folly and with disregard, nature avenges, gifting liberation and sovereignty…from the gaping wound, from my blood, a rhythm, a drum beat echoing off the earth, rattles of the venomous hiss in low tones, punctuating the night, widespread wings build a pulse in undulation, soothing my threshing body with silken winds, easing my evolution from extinction…

E.A. O'Connell

{Excerpt}

Butterflies in a dying season, float in a mysterious rhythm, acknowledging their end in a youthful flow of sunlight and hope

The cicada song of summer has grown absent in lowering humidity, a lull that foreshadows its cease, that beckons a familiar longing from me

Corvids toll of the end, they frame their shadows about me in pentacle fashion, designing of my psyche and body a crossroads, in the flare of a savage star

I learned young, if I should scream in panicked fear, the hounds will rise of gnarled roots, howling my demise from their sanctioned corners, reflecting my afterlife in their gazing orbs

I center my thoughts with eyes shut, taking in the swell of ripe orchard, encouraging the growth of fruit within my palm, the forming of origins

Raising the gilded red skin to my lips, I sink my teeth in, allowing juice to slip my mouth, chin, throat, spitting the tender chunk of flesh to my feet, a snake approaches and covets the discarded

Hunger of temptation, hunger of control, I feel the vibrations of the earth in quake intensify, my flesh in sync with the throes of shedding skin, scale-for-scale, eye-for-inquisition, allowance & vindication

The snake entwines me, slowly climbing a coil of limbs and body, taking hold of my long forsaken being, and devouring my pneuma with compassionate precision, never aware of how restrained was my tongue, to speak of the pine

I vanish in the brilliance of that sun, particulates of life energy and an unspoken love, the hounds retreat to muddied underworlds, sinking deep in their own fall, never getting the better, never dictating how I know, I died

The premonitions of others in their glassine spheres, gives room in my mouth for the corvids to shatter the silence, aware of the absence, they stuff me full with borrowed souls, making a vessel of Pandora’s curiosity out of my sentient corpse

E.A. O'Connell. September 2019

September. It exists beyond thirty days; to the depths of hours not kept by ticking clocks and straight-edged sundials. It’s a season of it’s own design, where Summer and Autumn forget their opposition and embrace in a tryst of indifference to the laws of seasonal nature. Greens are lush in shades of grass, vines, and thorns. August blooms of crown and divine, the broad leaves of sycamores, stalks in repetitive wave, secret a slow gilding and bronzed glow. Cicadas accept the allowance of later mornings, taking up their measured percussive rhythms as moonflowers curl within their evanescence. The earth from which they resurrected, no longer weighted by the scent of force and toil, mineral rich and sun baked; now a hover of cooling subterranean decomposition and sporadic leaf litter decay that rolls down the line of gutters. In September, the sun’s a brilliance of gold tones, the sky a blue of honesty in waning humidity. Trees in silhouette raise whispered vespers in breezes that elicit gooseflesh to run the neck, shoulders, spine; awakening an urge in the core of my being. The evening sky, in flame of mythical fires, reflects parallels between mortals, Gods, and the Cosmos; who were we when our flesh was worn inside out? Doppelgängers of self masquerade in moon ascending moths, broad-winged and enamored lunatics, the patient eight-legged hunters, weavers of homicidal perspectives, the salivating canines of unidentifiable cryptids lurking in underbrush, the shadow of steps, ditches, desperate to sink their hunger into heels, stunning and stealing away with their victims. September dark of night, vibrations of atmospheric seams disentangle, pin pricked portals to imagination flare and reflect haunted tales of sacrifice; rising smoke and sparks. Sleep steals me momentarily, the skeletal hand of the Autumn Man, tempted by soft flesh and clove breath, caresses the freckled tan of my bared clavicle, stirring me, his desire lingering at my ear, imploring for a taste of my immortality.

E.A. O'Connell. September 2019

{Excerpt}

The sun…a blindfold of white light that slips about my eyes, mesmerizing my deficient skin with a heat that tingles and pricks my body alive with chills…my sight flashes a loss, staring upwards to the singular frosted glass pane, eliciting a burning haze that vaporizes the chicken wire threading, until the only barrier between my hunger and satiation are my fingers, splayed and shielding of their own accord, an arachnid transfiguration of shadow play and rearranging joints, slow and methodic, my fingers creep the expanse of light, severing the contact in a slight shade, leaving pits of endless depth in my vision, overflowing their essence into dilating pupils, bleeding their emergence into one, pitch blind eye…the prison should bar the likes of me from its wisdom, and yet, here I sit, in a cell of chipped paint, a white sullied by decades of cigarettes, humidity, and the sweat of ghosts that walk through walls…with no exit, save for the portal above, I visit with ideas of flee and notions of rot… …tobacco shreds from hand-rolled means to an end, vibrate into existence tiny red ants, thousands materialize from concrete pores, circling my tri-legged seat of unstable tilt, unwelcome at my toes where some burrow and bed beneath the nails, the remainder trail my legs in henna hued lines of determination, designing a survival plan that imparts question upon and behind my skin, traveling to my torso, encircling me, cinching me with fear, what of me would they covet and feed? Take back to their queen in honor? decomposing nourishment through winter…from the sunlight a rook’s talons can be heard, catching hold of a metal frame in a startling din, its tongue clicking shamefully at my submission, a crackling purr that unsettles the balance, I keep on the seat, I open my mouth to speak, its low slung caw coaxing forth my tongue, extracting the essence of disquietude, and then a scream from its throat that robs me of internal and external sound, deranging my equilibrium, imploding the skylight in a downpour of geometric shards, one severing my tongue, as the ants pick up their pace and infest the vacant tomb of catalogued words, cultivating their nature between my teeth, setting me into a phase of unease, the blood rushing forth is a river of disbelief… …the sun saturates my face, calling me back to my hands in a sight-saving attempt, the draw of the sun’s excruciating power, sets the chair upon which I sit in a slow diabolical spin, a prism of intention held by one strand of translucent filament, my flesh filleting at the intensity of laser precision rays, voices escaping every cauterized laceration, each recognizably mine…the freedom in my multitudes, in my voice of body and limbs, in their purposes… …I am emerging…existing beyond my flesh and mouth… …

E.A. O'Connell. August 2019