Gregory O’Neill
Longevity
The universe is humped
open between oblique
and oblivion. The insistent
carpet of a shaggy sky,
the unspooling energies
of the earth, a meringue
of whipped air. Science
eats up the wonder
while reclining on its
leather cushion. Some
morning we’ll all be toast.
Secure or not we
dwell in persuasion.
It is something more
like the recognition that
some things matter
enough to absorb a cost
that cannot be fully
calculated in advance.
Whatever came before
is the same as
whatever came after.
The distance
conducts its enormity,
its wonder of whatever was.
And ever since.
~
Corridors
It’s the oldest guilty secret,
the way life spools on, tromps
along, hardening each upturned
face it trails across and sets
a blister there. We swap them
for aches, then callouses. Our
eyes, possessed entirely by
the sky, to a minus quantity.
An atmosphere of clues, a pool
one might fall headlong into—
indigo, cloud, black and light
speckled by night. A quotidian
object lesson in the brutally
distant, the squeamishly close,
and the complicated dance of
siphoning power among a
succession of multitudes
spiraling like fish, toward a
distant unperceived surface
of nothing but reflection.
Advancing equally into the past,
empty spaces so crowded
they push you into the corner,
take your lunch money, turn
and move on.
Gregory O’Neill, from Seattle, writes that readers might feel less alone in their ambiguity, more whole in their partial truths. Recent poems appear in The Laurel Review, Mantis Literary Journal, Sagebrush Review, San Antonio Review, Opiate Magazine, Route 7, whimperbang, Midsummer Dream House, Route 7 Review, Relief Quarterly, Cathexis, Eunoia, Litbop, Jackdaw, Quasar, Last Leaves, Zoetic, Jake, Bristol Noir, The Words Faire, Half and One, New Feathers Anthology, TrashLight, Wordrunner eChapbooks, Four Tulips, Gabby & Min’s, Larina’s Lit, Closed Eye Open, Journal of Undiscovered Poets, and others.
