{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

This sunflower was bent during one of the groundhog’s romps. Many around it perished; mauled or devoured by my garden guest. When I began the cleanup, I opted not to cut this one away...I still felt a strength in the stem and so I rested it as comfortably as I could among the foliage and allowed nature to take its course. I had faith it would thrive...that the sun, storms, and winds would feed and challenge it, that night would work its enigmatic magic; healing. My morning meditation was considering this sunflower...obscure as it is with bends that mimic piping...it wasn’t afraid, nor ashamed to be weak. Time allowed a healing, that in turn, allowed it a new opportunity for growth..once again reaching towards the sun. I suppose I grow in a way much like this sunflower, which is why I’m partial to it...I’ve allowed weakness, I’ve allowed it to strengthen me, but I’ve never given it permission to break me.

Silence is a wall I construct…a second, third, fourth fortress…a self-preservation that mausoleums existence, a heavy door that warns the fate of trespass… …Silence is a noose I fray in repetitive motion…thread after thread I unfetter the bind…left as a trail of recognition, in the wake of losing my way within my head… …Silence is an undead language incapable of translation, yet I communicate it in the unconscious hours…I mete, I defeat, I am not spared…a voiceless canvas, my mouth fleshed-over, all I want to say is inescapable… …I write streams of ink in bleu and noir, I unleash the beast bewitched by the moons of my hands…and like the new phase, eclipse and devoid, the words I’d written vanish, leaving a stark contrast to the tomb exhumed… …a second sight gives new life…the secrets I write…they are shining trinkets that speak to the crows…somewhere, in a corner of another city in an untouched land, a crow caws, clicks, and purrs my truths to passerby’s who hear clashing tones of melancholy and hunger…an indecipherable juxtaposition, a flesh-made conundrum…my secrets breathe… …the abandonment, it doesn’t hurt me…the loss of hope’s ambition, doesn’t scar me…the initial lie…that reach, invited of its own accord, that’s what killed me… …and ever since, the crows have been burying me, screaming me to open graves, making a pauper of me…unclaimed…the earth absorbs the unsightly decomposition and fuels the unease of my heart, stirring my hands to toil at the invisible, the incomprehensible rite of lone…

The church bells are more than tolling the hour

They’ve begun praising the boundless blue sky

In notes that drift and rise like balloons off to seek adventure

And I don’t want to escape this moment

So I settle myself into the grassy knoll

And let the sun run my flesh

As the chiming raises my thoughts to Parrish

And how his hands must have itched on a day saturated with the brilliancy of color

His mind a daydream of illustrations

And then my thoughts redirect to how multidimensional life is

So I think I’ll just stay a bit

Taking it all in

The strangers in familiar conversation

Dogs leashed for a relieving stroll

Car horns and bus accelerations weaving traffic patterns

Recess ringing freedom's laughter 

Alive

The city’s alive

We're all alive and following the order of our day

And yes there is someone out there in this breath

Exhaling their last

And another their first

And I'm awed by my insignificance in the grand

And humbled by my presence in the now

And it's just noon

On a Wednesday

Marveling at the miraculous art of everyday life 

E.A. O'Connell

…a sweet scent that beckons tender lips to draw near…your fringe are forked tongues, quick to morph to viper fangs, softly puncturing with a milky venom of quiet numb and stuttered heart… …your centermost folds, coiled as an ear that you lend to whispers, to secrets, to hidden depths of the psyche, thoughts of both friends and foes and ills of self… …a steady hand, respecting of your lethal, bids you the care you need, the distance you desire and require… …tending to you, I speak of your growth and beauty, I acknowledge the pain you’re capable of in my gestures, but continue with the care of you, deserving and rewarding…the truth of you…at the forefront of my mind is that which makes you deadly, that which bestills my heart with your addition to my garden…that which keeps me returning, learning…about the truth of you, the truth in me… …

E.A. O'Connell. June/2019