Photo by Frederik Merten
Coil of Ourselves
Gregory O’Neill
Someone mentioned, like a spilled drink,
mid-conversation, how time shifted from
liturgy to engine, a grand, gear-driven loss.
There’s the duration of cliffs, the tide’s
salt-rhythm, and the terrifying gaudiness
of a pause between caught breaths.
That napalm-stutter in the blood’s little
theater. Some refuse to shed their
ghosts, others deny the skin’s
heaviness, suspecting they are not,
after all, some sudden incantation. We
must pace around the sculpture of the hour,
inhaling its curious, artisan oxygen.
Even these letters, damp and still aspiring,
will vanish into a vapor of their own making,
a distilled liquor, the mind’s bright but
noisy weather–a pandemonium of
metaphor, lousy with raining words.
Gregory O’Neill
Someone mentioned, like a spilled drink,
mid-conversation, how time shifted from
liturgy to engine, a grand, gear-driven loss.
There’s the duration of cliffs, the tide’s
salt-rhythm, and the terrifying gaudiness
of a pause between caught breaths.
That napalm-stutter in the blood’s little
theater. Some refuse to shed their
ghosts, others deny the skin’s
heaviness, suspecting they are not,
after all, some sudden incantation. We
must pace around the sculpture of the hour,
inhaling its curious, artisan oxygen.
Even these letters, damp and still aspiring,
will vanish into a vapor of their own making,
a distilled liquor, the mind’s bright but
noisy weather–a pandemonium of
metaphor, lousy with raining words.