...

From a gaping second floor ruin

Of axe shrapnel and inferno ash

Against the charcoal shock of loss

Remains a widow’s peak of demolition

With a window of melted distortion

Framing blushed light through fractured firmament:

A cherry blossom inception

Flush with season and second sight

E.A. O'Connell

Vulture House

A death sentence, and no one even really knows why. It’s suspected money’s at the root of such ill intentions. 

Most pass in a blur, peripheral distortion of deterioration and destruction, and a flash of thought about the absence of man.

Grey or sunny days, it all gives shape to how ravaged, animal savaged, the perimeter has overgrown. 

Clapboard grey, termite timber, splintered…and yet, life…a home, a second chance, amidst the bacteria, parasites, everything molded and mildewed.

Shingles shred and slip a waterfall thaw, letting starlight fill the vacancy of a moss laden bed, where a sapling of misguided love rooted amongst the rusted springs and ancestral mites.

Broken windows peak and dip a current’s flow, bullet hole peeping tom cats arch their backs and shiver off thoughts of the warmth in a loving hand.

Back lit lunar clouds project spectral gaps, lengths of a silhouette grove paper interior walls in pagan knot work, while creeping ivy, under an open chimney flue, restricts and devours brick and mortar durability.

And there, in the stairwell of cobwebs and busted treads and risers, a landing…a nest, of scavenged bones, of feathers, and of waste. 

A marriage ceremony, undated and unseen…rites of feral, of ingenuity, of a hunger for death sated in a carcass dance. 

In the upper window sash, where glass would mirror the void, two black masses all hunch and jagged edges…perch…through sun cycles and planetary measures, they home and they eye…

E.A. O'Connell

...

A fingernail splits at the quick 
The moon hemorrhages a slow elegy
God spired fingers and sweaty palms 
The scent of descending Fahrenheit on silvered hair

I cross bones and innocence is bled 
India ink across the moonlit ceiling
A pin to my pupil and you claim it land you’ve traversed
Always wanting the contents of my head 
All I want to give is the marrow of my bones

It’s awoken 
Some would call it a hunger, others mislabel it a thirst
It’s a premature birth
It’s winter cicada nightcrawl from earthen tombs to lichened oak
Stillborn and stillbreath 
Ghosts of a bygone permafrost
Cloven steps snapped grass, splintering bare feet that cast cries swallowed by the wind

Absence of your wild from my tongue is catastrophic 
I hear the void of language in the hollow floorboards
Skeletal remains, buried dementia, a life: vibrate 
Crawl spaces to cry
Of a wicked loss, the bloodless beats, building rhythm
Every sin I've loved committing

I can’t sleep past 3:00am 
They come and hover 
They want and I need
Death beetles crawl names, Corvids carry souls, but where the bloody hell are you?

The dawn starts gray and grows anew 
Cashmere, wool, angora winds and sails that cast me headfirst back into their world
Hours travel as a small hand spinning a globe
Fast, faster: the rotational rail against marble and brain cells
I steady the Earth’s breaths and count her laugh lines

Dusk captivates as I drive 
Fire bellied storms navigate towards cremains in western cypress winds 
It all boils down to a bottle, a joint, and a hand that keeps me from hitting the ground 
I love you for all my failures, for all I’ve yet to unleash, I love you subsequently, and for our slaughterhouse resurrected

It’s only blood, we can wash it away 
It’s just the colors that press my brain when I feel your words
A hammer to stems and petals, a stain, a water ring that set fire burns
And they play circular games

I like endless highways, stretches and bends
To lead me directionless to an answer, an incantation
Cliffside speed and signage that reads, road ends in 100 feet

E.A. O'Connell

Blue Jay Language

Blue jay language is aluminum hollow vibrato, 
silver in sheen, 
glinting on angles of the tongue, 
blinding under midday sun, 
a double helix of chain link with sharpened barbs that scratch and pierce at the atmosphere’s tunneled walls, 
infinite in spiral, 
reabsorbing into itself, 
before reaching an angora soft demise in wisps of radiated November earthen warmth, 
one jay heaves gold, 
fluid falls of gilded thread running the length of a towering sycamore, 
such hue to a language fleeting, 
as flames extinguished under heavy black boots concealing a light foot, 
my mouth vacant of words, 
welcomes the misdirection of a lady beetle, 
the red of her armor green on my tongue as I taste her flight…

E.A. O'Connell

...

Our bodies linear
limbless and righteous 
amongst the thorns of infantile black locusts 
your eyes of mesonoxian dew
fix as vacant moons
bloodlet atop the sunset 
graves of lilacs
hatchet dismemberment
our earthen anguine forms
my head upon yours
I still
the future withers before me
dead on the vines
never again shall we sip of God’s wine
our cold blood
our venomous love
our thrive and will
undressing 
every memory of renewal
I will not leave your side
I will swallow you whole
make mobile my heart
chimera our souls
I will keep you
memento mori
I will bite, I will writhe
I will keep wild 
ever and a day
lest we cease to exist
of matter or of myth 
My love, Our immortality
come to me
upon the back of Death 
ride forth 
bring with you
a seed of universal knowledge
clasped within your teeth
to plant upon my tongue
with our final kiss

E.A. O'Connell

The Devil's Darning Needle

A dark abyss, 
upon which the offering of petals pale, 
ripple the mirror

The Devil’s darning needle, 
propelled by soulful sighs, 
winds boughs, 
shaking loose a gravitational spiral, 
where He hovers in shallow graves, 
unearthing hair and bones with archaeological precision, 
soot-tipped wings stirring aging sediment phantoms, 
His body lifting earthbound cyclones, 
driving debris through psychomanteum stone

Dusted arachnid filament, 
long threaded within the cypress eye, 
where the darkness bites, 
the hell-tongue pull 
spinning ghost wires, 
unhinging a cabinet of curious perfumes: 
a heart of sutured leather hide, 
a mandible of corvid cadence, 
a vow fashioned from river polished bone

Oh, messenger of afterbreath, 
where the water witch conjures 
upon the air of moony weather

Her: a death meal praying 
a tinny voice of triangular overlapping chimes

His hot breath panting 
the reverse of the pane, 
the chilled glass etching His baritone howl, 
His curse pleading of
fingers, fabric, flesh, 
and as He harnesses Death’s patience, 
tapping out Her headstone epithet, 
syllables of disbelief and spatial frustration, 
the ground below Him ignites, 
Her candle extinguishing, 
Her countenance surrendering a smile, 
as the pricking of Her finger draws pomegranate seeds…

{We’re going home}

E.A. O'Connell

The Garden

There’s gold on the thistle
pulling from her breast a mother’s milk
soft silk with tortoise shell pins in the hem
that she furiously casts to the wind
violin throats absorbing
reimagining the cadence of release
bronze hollowed bones summoning
the humidity of cicada manifestation
a gilded phantom presence
a giant of folklore who’s exhalations cloud with wings and blood thirsty proboscises
the black knight’s perfume
a chasm that unapologetically consumes 
clock working blooms vine the sky
and trumpet Goddesses
where a chaos of leaded glass panes
reflecting dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight
distort storm clouds breaching the horizon
a child’s footsteps halt with the awakening to vibrations of earth tremors that shook a millennia ago

E.A. O'Connell