Month: February 2024

• The Tomatoes of Oz

  

  The doorbell rang at dusk

  The old woman came bearing fruit

  She held three tomatoes in tired hands

  One was the size of a softball

  The other two she cradled like bloated testicles

  They came from her very own garden and she beamed with pride

  I had to accept the gift, for it would be rude not to

  But inside my tired mind:

  “Old hag, have you not heard my decree in the dead of night?

  For I loathe your foul tomatoes.”

  My hand shook as I reached out to take charge of the vile fruit

  The skin was orange-red and smooth

  There was the tousled cap of dark green on the large one

  I wanted to vomit on her canvas shoes

  But I feigned delight instead

  And closed the door

  As the sunset roared

  The Wicked Witch of the West was cackling

  The fireballs delivered

  And I stowed them upon the counter of cold granite

  And they looked up at me

  The brainless one

  The heartless one

  The scared one

  And I looked down at them

  I, the most powerful wizard was crackling with power

  And I denied them gifts of love and grace

  I reached for the switch and snuffed out the light

  “Suffer for a while in silence and darkness,” I boomed with evil

  My large onion-shaped head on fire…

  And I returned later

  Drunk with tiredness

  Longing for my cuddle cobra

  The Dorothys now rolling about and chanting a high-pitched menace

  “There’s no place like salad, there’s no place like salad, there’s no place like salad …”

  I quickly reached for the glinting kitchen hatchet and hoisted it high in the air and yelled out with a heart full of psychosis

  “Fukison smash!!”

  I stopped just short of the kill

  I caught my breath

  I was moist with sweat and I whispered over them

  “There will be no salad. There will be no sandwich. There will be no salt and pepper. Your lives will end tonight at the bottom of a barrel.”

  I scooped them up and they cried

  I punched the pedal of the trash can with a socked foot

  The lid flipped open and I dropped them in

  There was a thud, thud, thud

  And then all was peace and darkness

  A real quiet, country dark

  The frogs croaking gladness in the grasses near the pond.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• Roswell 1969

  

  The low machine hum of the big, big city is entrenched in gaslight dawn.

  The birds and the killers are mum, waiting for the razor light of god’s heart to percolate and breed as the handmade souls rise, wash and run.

  And it was a hot day in the desert, a blowtorch sky was blowing up my eyes as I steered the ship down hot highway grace and peace, the vast and beautiful wound, an Irish pub in my lap, the steel wheels of a Santa Fe hulk grinding away to the east. A mystery and a fear twitching in my belly, a calm anxiety described only as sickness in my nerves.

  We all have addictions in this shitstorm

  I drove mine to the desert and wiped its crucifix clean

  And it all came undone again

  My legs heavy with the sweat and sand

  Constructing a sundial and a time machine for the Swede

  Near the apex of the Ink Pot porn shop

  When the deer came through the brush in a rush

  Followed by a pack of wild coyotes tripping on bloodthirst

  I jumped down into the mud of the fleshy soft creek bed

  Found that crown of thorns and spelled out someone’s name

  Large enough for the spaceships to see

  Those ancient alien gods shaking their yellow heads

  At the world we’ve stained with sin and greed

  Americans too fat to walk

  While others shiver in a blanket of their own bones

  And there’s no sympathy anymore for the broken

  No desire but thy very own

  The royal ice cream lady back from Haiti

  And her eyes have changed

  They burn with images and swirl

  Now eclipsed by fucking REALITY TV and all the other brainless passions of my AMORIKA.

  And then there was a dandelion

  Sitting in white Tee on summer lawn

  Watching the hot orange blossom take its final bow

  Getting up, running to the tracks

  Like a bullet, flying off

  A new world calling

  Like a hit of dreamtime opium

  And a red, savage bar.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• The Moon Has Its Own Scars

  

  The moon has its own scars, just like the sun and all the planets. Most men and women have scars if they’ve lived any, if they’ve breathed any, loved any, hated any.

  I stood out in the yard last night because the moon was big and bright, and all those scars were visible to me and the entirety of the world. The alien invisible wounds brought to light, along with the green streak that went past us and them.

  Police helicopters hovered above the interstate a few miles away. I watched them go round and round in a tight circle, casting their watching eye. I tried to peer through the winter trees for any sign of fire, any sign of destruction or the usual dismay of the world. Instead, I saw the electric pearl eyes of white-tailed deer. There were four, and they were as still as statues of dead men as they cautiously watched me. The slightest fall of a foot and they would dash off.

  Here where I am there is grave darkness and then plumes of light dotted around. This place is tucked away and most of the world is unaware that this is where we sleep, we eat, we laugh, we love, we wonder in quiet. The outside world is so unaware, but here we are, right up on it, but not in it.

  This morning my wife turned in the sheets and went back to sleep as I got up. I looked out a window in another room and the sky was colored in layers: white, pale blue, oxygen yellow, a wanderer’s green. I fed the cat in quiet, save for the chirping purrs of hunger and excitement. I made myself some Guatemalan roast coffee and the aroma filled the kitchen. I looked out that same window again and it looked like winter with spring waiting in the pen. It looked cold. But there wasn’t any snow.

  I reread the birthday card she had given me the day before. Her loving words give me hope and peace as I eat vanilla yogurt and sip my coffee, the meditative sleep sounds still coming out of the small stereo. I fire up my computer and try to think of words and how to string them together. Some days they flow like Niagara’s waters, nonsensical and with a rabid heartbeat. Some days they linger at my feet and are unable to come to the light. Some days it’s a little of both. Some days life halfway hurts and halfway heals. I never know what the end result will be. Not until the review when I return to my bed at the finish of the day, when I’ve run down my battery and crawl in and hold her. I always look toward that and the dreams beyond.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• Velour Beans

  

  Velour Beans hid deep in The Garden of Carrots in Laos. His uniform was made of unicorn fur and torn. The remnant war bombs in the wet, green Earth cornered him into a basket of worry and long-lost wonder. Code name bath and bask and the tribulations of mind grains… The gongs in the hills washed down a hollow, haunting soul from the temples above, the ones cradled in snow-capped mountain guts, the ones that sparkled in her blue eyes. Immortal blue eyes like rare crystals.

  Now that memory from the times in the summer sheets, the winter comforter with its mandala pattern, the delicious smell of her lingers on the pillow, her nightshirt applied to the skin and dreams of the man with the strange name, the strange purpose, the strange reason for being and breath. The demigod of dictators and shaman.

  He was looking up at the sky that moved so slowly, like a marijuana brain. He smoked an invisible cigarette. It was a deep blue sky with lacerations of periwinkle in between, where the world was rubbed wrong and raw and the windows to everything open to a parapet of princesses in flowing gowns so neatly tapered to their royal souls.

  Garbage and granola, French lessons from her mouth, fingers tangled in the work-swept hair. He couldn’t get enough of her. He will never get enough of her. He was addicted to her taste and her laughter. Velour Beans was in love beyond any kind of love there ever was or is or will be again. Not even universal gods of immortality could love like that. Not even when they throw marbles and talk about Hollywood.

  She clutched him tightly in the cold of a February morning. It was the beautiful crushing love of animals with true hearts. Suddenly, there was no more helicopter Laos. He had retuned from his dreams, carrot stains on his hands from all the handling and peeling and stabbing of the enemies fueled by a delusion that was a neighbor and a friend, a bad friend.

  But then he thought: The enemies linger throughout history like the smell of burnt toast in the morning. A morning where a sunburst orange fog molested the hills and valleys but not in a felonious way. He wanted to write an opera about that. He wanted to write about the sky and the landscape getting heavenly humped below, but he didn’t know where to begin. (Take a step, and then another).

  He needed to unclog his muddled, overcast brain of sizzling worries and frenzied dissipations left to fecundate. He tried to eat a simple man’s plunger, but it didn’t work. So, while she slept, he went out for Chinese buffet. The silver spoons were big. The sauces bright as orange blood from a capsized ox. The plate was bleached white and still warm from its time in the commercial dishwashing machine. Why did she smell like that?

  Velour Beans was suddenly taken back some 30 years when he wore a white uniform in another Chinese restaurant in that other time and life. The Wongville Orchid. The restaurant had nearly burned down. He could have killed people. He was being careless with the tins of blue methanol gel used to keep the buffet platters warm. Some had spilled in the hideout room and the flames took hold like liquor on fire light. Velour Beans quickly grabbed a busboy’s dingy yellow plastic pitcher of water and threw it on the blaze. It worked. It worked. But his heart was never the same again. The stem of fear. Those rattled nerves that came about from a rough birth were always there. He would never be normal. Except in that love with the forever girl with the eyes like a primordial, clean ocean. Deep waters from a time before man soiled the Earth with greed and war and hate among the same.

  To think of Laos 10,000 years ago. It wouldn’t even be Laos. There would be no arbitrary borders. There would be no remains of bombs, only bones, only chiming monkey gongs. The world would always be better off without the cruel minds of men. The guardians of the space above dropped them here billions upon billions of eons ago. They had to rid themselves of the prophesized downfall they would bring and so cast them out to the outer rim of another astral plane. The third pebble in God’s eye.

  Then there was a puff of reality, like looking at her morning loved lips in the bathroom mirror, and someone shook Velour Beans’ shoulder and said, “Sir… Please bring your seat to its full and upright position. We’re beginning our last descent.”

  “Vientiane?” he wondered through eyes of dreamy dust.

  “Why, of course not, sir. Chicago.”

  She smelled of Khao Niaw Mamuang.

  END

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• Awkward Llamas

  

  She is fireworks over a city that sits like candles torchlit and like flames.

  She is a walk on a quiet street in the dark with murals of Dylan in her head.

  She is quiet glances out a window, sleep drifts, warm against me in the rain of our devotion.

  She is life as I never saw it, see it, predict it. She is my future from 50 years ago.

  She is a summer lawn, a winter bay, an autumn sway in another way, another time and place.

  She is a magnet for my heart, and everything broken in it, my focus, my angel, my precious attribute.

  She is the most beautiful gliding reflection in a shop window, hands clutched, hearts forever touched.

  I need to unbreak my soul and always turn to the wave. I remember Myrtle Beach and the way the ocean called.

  She is wet in the rain and dry in the sun, when I always come undone. She is tonic when I am nerves.

  The voodoo vibes laid out at her feet; she lifts me up to forest canopies and says: Here is the sun.

  And pushes me through.

  We walk on broken sidewalks, the world is loud, then the world is quiet. We cling to each other like frustrating wrap. There’s blue elephants and precious wood. There are pictures of mushrooms and phallic Mexican holy ghosts colored like an acid trip. Beyond a movie-screen window there is a circle of ceremonial people playing out a nervous drama. Fidelio.

  And when I walked into the dimly lit kitchen of dawn today, I knew I never wanted to be alone. I knew I needed her forever, again and a million times again. From the edge of the ocean to the edge of never-ending space. She is the one.

  Outside the old windows of the house, the world is new white, the houses are white or red brick or yellow boards. There’s a peacefulness in the asphalt. There’s the temperature gauge that is the rain against the window. A weeping willow prays invisible. A city awakes and people break, and people save, and my heart plus more quietly sleeps as I rake through the leaves of my mind. Maybe my name should be Tumble. Maybe my game should be Clue. Sometimes I don’t have one. I forget and forget and forget. I fear fading. I fear leaving her behind. I fear the bad trail I leave at times that she must walk and tether to. Then she shows me steak rub in a fudge shop. She smells like candy and love and warm kisses. That smell that binds us, passionately blinds us. She reaches out for my hand and takes me along. This life together.

  We sit across a table from each other seeing March Madness and human madness. Our future, our past, our forever more reflected in all those pizza souls. She is my shelter in all those storms. Just breathe. Just love and let love. We walk up that quiet dark street. Her and I are the only ones in the entire world at that infinitesimal second. The funeral home turret looks like a haunted elf cap as its tip points to a streetlight moon. A hand moves aside a white curtain in a high window. I’m afraid, but I’m not. She thinks I’m being silly. I am. Because I can, and I don’t feel uncomfortable. That’s one of the greatest gifts one can give, receive. I don’t want to be awkward like llamas in the highlands of New Mexico.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August