Month: April 2025

Chaos and Color

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This world has a stick up its ass and Romeo is unhinged

Juliet has aborted her American dreams

With a uranium-gilded coat hanger

Highway sounds ungloom the world now

Star-spangled Heaven’s sheet

Unburden us from the greed

In the aisle of serenity

Where no one walks or stalks

A lingering solar eclipse buttons the sky

A pathway bends toward a stoic horizon

Rough gray hills, short trees, dry scrub

Bottle-brush cacti

A whimsical dark world

The emptiness, the bleakness

Almost beautiful and soothing to a muddied mind

No chaos and color on high

Broken birds float through time

A wooden post fence stands hobbled

A broken gate opens

Time absorbs all life

By
Aaron Echoes August

My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
Medicated

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I feel like loose wires blasting

Electric impulses heavenward

My skin is shaky

I want to run, but I can’t move

I start to do something

Then I stop

My thoughts fall flat

My attention span spans a second

My nerves are cut open, exposed

Noise sends me stratospheric

Aggravated by everything

I don’t have time to stop and breathe

So it seems to myself and me

Wishing for the lull of the ocean

A small bungalow up from the sand

Windows and fire

With dreams coming true

I can hear the birds through the air-conditioned glass

I can see her star-spangled American ass

Wet streets calm me

Coffee in windows watching the rain

Peace, quiet, warmth

Huddled beneath the orange neon

A muscular old church at the end of the block

A bookstore across the street

The smell of paper and ink

The taste of thoughts

Apologies in the windows up above

Figurines arching, parting curtains

Looking down upon the street and its wonder

A tortured writer pens the script of life

The crumpled bed sheets cradle his wife

As she journeys through dreamland

And I am preoccupied by fate

By
Aaron Echoes August

My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent creators.
Head On a Spike

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That’s what we need

A head on a spike

In times like these

Of unchecked greed

And deprivation of need

A broken gold star

On the refrigerator of life

I feel senseless and selfish

It’s 10:27

Take the pill

You know the drill

Esophagus lockdown

Too soon to drown

How will I go?

I may never know

Not before Tokyo

Banging my head

And my golden leaf gong

The cherry blossoms—

We’ll get to see the cherry blossoms

I think of Bar Harbor, Maine

Blue pharmacy light

Neon all bedazzled and high

Sipping through another drink

One alone in the sea of the loud people

This life of beatings

In the market square

I could have done

So many things so differently

The guilt, the remorse

The ache inside of so much blindness

All the things I did not see

All the things I just did wrong

Like a sad song

Regrets asunder

Heartache like thunder

The mountain gods stood by

Pissed on prayers

I am untamed electricity inside

By
Aaron Echoes August
Cultist Amethyst

Cultist amethyst

Lingering by the lagoon of life

Stranded on this island of strife

I was wrapped in a jacket of rain today

Hiking through the jungle

The big green leaves like plates catching water from the sky

The falls, the mist, the heavy breath of solitude

Addicted to Russian candy

While looking up at the blue panel of Earth

The madmen are swirling in the clearing

They do not know I live among them

In the green, black shadows

I look down upon their strange rituals, the odd worship

The punishments, the exaltation, the sex trade

The people in their amethyst robes

And the wishing beads strung upon their necks

The yellow wall is all I need

To separate myself from the deceit

A roaring fire around where they dance

I’m glad I’m not one of them

But I hold their secrets inside banana leaves

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Veiled Journey

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I was the man beyond the veil, and I was upside down in sunlight, so it seemed. A crystal-clear river of icicle vibes sparkled in that light to my left. A grassland to my right. Broken people with backpacks and real live monkeys on their shoulders wandered through traffic unaware of all that worldly danger that I could feel myself right under my olive and oiled skin. The black hairs on my infinite arms curled and crawled like villains coming up out of the ground—ground on a green hill, ground littered with the stones of the dead, ground covered with thick trees and their companion crooked branches that pointed off into all sorts of directions, all sorts of times and places, pointing off to one hamlet or village or town or metropolis or suffocating hole of hell that included far too many bodies living on top of each other.

I watched as they bathed in dirty rivers. They held red buckets near their dark brown skin. The hoods and the shawls and the shirts were all decorated with brightly colored flowers and yet no blue god with a golden and ruby dragon for a crown would grant them peace. They suffered for living. Yet some smiled. Some laughed. Some even splashed and jumped in the water the color of diarrhea. I turned the other way like so many of us do up here on the mountain in the clouds.

Bibles for bullets, burritos for warfare, turbulence for tractors… I see him in a straw hat and loose blue shirt sitting on the machine as it putters its way through a big yellow field slowly turning fresh brown. He plows the world under in search of an unsustainable hope. He falls, dies, and is buried by his own machine, man’s own metal devices. I move on with the stars, the planets, the universal exoskeleton.

By
Aaron Echoes August

A reminder that my new book is now available for purchase from a variety of online stores: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent creators.