Intermittent raindrops tap an unsteady rhythm on the skylight, pulling my focus to the grey expanse, where it lazes and melds, unveiling…

My bones are old, some days they chant war songs and steel instead of splinter, other times they hum vesper light and radiate ancestor guidance, lately they constant an unearthly echo of language absent from tongues for centuries…

I’m unheard of, with peddles engaged and released, my fingers in play, my voice a whisper exhaling incantations in phantom rings, as the shadows existing beneath the same roof, shift and shape in a melodious dance, their presence a comfort when life proves to wear heavier than their afterlife…

We conduct ourselves as strangers in all hours, but three, where a singular tear falls upon the column and bow of my lip, a baptism of virus upon host, he can’t help himself, because god goes where he wants, and I taste his apology…

I’m aware daily of the ache that’s wracked my body, and of the hurt that reminds my heart to win, and that it’s when I’m lost to the odyssey that my being happens upon the most beauty.

E. A. O'Connell. February 7, 2022.

 The sky held a promise of snow, the unphasing gray of backlit clouds, and the still of cold, that penetrates the knuckles, until the age of my storied flesh cracked, blood as red as the Japanese maple I stood beneath, trickled like blood from the hunt in a fjord of inked permanence…the maple leaves, delicate in their size, severe in their edges, a stellar inferno that captivated my mind with memories of my babies, hours old and hands star-made in my vantablack void, the rivulets of my blood that painted me feral and infected all that was bleached in my ferocity…a gilded anomaly awaits my remembrance, tucked at the back of my left ear, an errant forsythia bloom in November dormancy, a supernova of temporal echoes…dawn, in the comfort of my home’s shadows, and the haunting lure of starling murmuration, stepping outside the French doors, an infinitesimal existence beneath the astronomical undulations of hundreds of wings, life sensations devoid of breath and pulse, my eyes shut in the terror and wonder of such sound, like beholding an angel that states, Be Not Afraid, while mesmerizing me with its ghastly form…love is celestial murmuration, is sore afraid, is blood stain permanence in my Winter lobe reminiscence…

E. A. O'Connell. November 30, 2021

 Autumn declines a solar invitation of seasonal commune

Temperatures dip with the rise of winds, low lying cyclones that discard leaves to hollows

Stalks still standing at attention, continue to haunt my vision with ghosts of where their kaleidoscopic color and honey bee ecstasy reigned supreme

While vines wither, rigor, and rattle their future generations in a haphazard scatter of regeneration

I can’t get out of my head the sycamore leaves that collapse and fold in on themselves, but never let loose from their tree

Is that strength in willpower? Strength in promise? Or mere punishment?

Death should be freeing…it should be freedom…the release and the free flow…

Or is it that the sycamore isn’t ready to let go? Not ready to free itself of the old to make room for the new? An element of fear of the what if?

Resurrection shouldn’t be a novel concept to nature…rebirth is the perennial mantra…

…but ahhh, a misdirected human attribute…I repent the error of my thought…and silence my mind…shuttering my eyes…enveloping myself in the blue hour…each dead leaf releasing from my body…

…I can feel the quickening of the flourish that’s awaiting me in the distance…

E. A. O'Connell. November 14, 2021.

 The ceaseless state of survival that clamps my jaw in bite, burdens my hands into fists

The damning weariness of wearing my guard, day in and day out,

A strength of fight and a weighted ache

…that makes an anomaly of my being

…that veils my clarity

…that cleaves my heart

I still dream, at least once a week, that my silence extends to my screams

The adrenaline ill suited to my greying flesh, and the backdrop of black velvet void,

…proximity of elements frictions a static

…a combustion of white sparks

…and collapsing, silver stars

Quiet moments of mind in synch with body, ease survival into existence, of the here and the now,

…where my hands extend in release,

…and I exhale tomes,

…as hope alights atop my palms

I may never know peace in multitudes, but I finally defined home

E. A. O'Connell. November 13, 2021.

 Blood sun at my back,

like a suspended king protea bloom,

that illumines hellfire in it’s waning,

saturating the world in silhouette.

The horizon awash in periwinkle,

sends forth white capped waves,

that whisper their destruction,

in a clashing of existence,

with secreted artifacts,

and primordial remnants,

that the tidal pull reclaims,

to keep mankind uncertain,

and helpless to feeling unreal.

E. A. O'Connell. July 31, 2021.

Afternoon Meditations

 3:00pm haze prevents the sky from revealing its depths of blue. But in that haze wheels an eagle, and a blue heron flying it’s straight line path. Tree swallows thread patterns overhead, while songbird tunes carry in the sweet breeze. Two cicadas fly past as dragonflies hover and dart, and a cabbage moth flutters in warm white. A tiger bee fly has decided I’m friend not foe, while a wasp seeks out sustenance in the form of swallowtail caterpillars…fortunately, all have grown and vacated the fennel and dill, as it’s their time to form chrysalides.

From time-to-time the sun is swathed in clouds, barely decipherable in that hazy sky, but the reprieve is welcomed on my shoulders. In the distance I can here my kids and their friends playing wiffle ball; laughing, singing, and arguing plays, while a charcoal grill somewhere is burning that nostalgic scent of lighter fluid soaked briquettes. In some ways summer afternoons like this are familiar…like an old memory I revisit…in other ways they are a first, giving me opportunity to experience them anew.

Afternoon Meditations. E. A. O'Connell. July 20, 2021.

Salt air and morning fog,

that rolls out to sea in fugue,

Bougainvillea

in a hue my mind can’t fathom,

against a cloudless sky of such blue,

that the interruption of a single contrail

could slice it,

coating the vista in a sanguine rain,

that transmutes the landscape

into a split pomegranate,

giving glorious new understanding

to the turn of phrase,

Hell on Earth

E. A. O'Connell. July 19, 2021