Month: June 2025

• The Oblong Warlock

  

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  Thirteen minutes to fill a capsized void. A laundry list of worry as the clock ticks in some kitchen bluebird hung neatly in the window and looking out onto the pleasant yard. Gas jaw dryer waits alone in the basement. Grandma’s caw caw like a crow beckoning me back inside. But I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be pulled into a world I do not understand. Pulled into a world that makes me feel like I am upside-down and inside-out. The heaviness of all this burdened breath. I step into the woods and everything disappears.

  I remain silent in the doldrums drum. Late autumn tree limbs are black and crooked against the sky. An opal sky. Like a ring in some lost wooden chest from eons ago. That heavy sigh on my soul dissipates in the woods. The woods are an escape from reality. The woods keep me hidden and safe. I gather wood and make a fort. I sit there and breathe, the world at bay. It’s just too much out in the real world. I have so much to do but can’t do any of it because I am so overwhelmed. Far better to hide in the woods and catch my breath, to lie beneath the sky, tenderize my banging heart, smell the leaves littered on the ground as antiseptic. Money falls from the heavens like snow, then melts and disappears. The sun is beginning to dip, the air is getting colder and so I make a fire. The crackle, the smoke, the orange flame… They are my companions. The wind and the winter snake move along. I could never get on top of anything in this world. I always slide back down to the bottom. Now the stars crack open and the world howls for me. The search is on to merely put me in shackles. The demolition doom of it all crackles over my transistor radio. Riots, plagues, and greed run amuck. Doomsday. Candle flame. A momentary fall to the other side of hypnotic magic to bereave the soul of  all its worth.   

        

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• The Latvian Eye Clock

  

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  I stare at a blank mind. The paint has run dry. I have no color in which to recite the words of a Latvian king. The clock is a dot, numbers all nonsense like anti-gravity wine in a spaceship. I feel as if I need to bang my head against an ancient Peruvian wall to dislodge something, anything. Thoughts, words, wisdom. I despair over the seemingly endless struggle and worry. Life makes absolutely no sense. The here and now is a there and gone in a matter of seconds. The future evaporates with every psychedelic tick-tock of the other dimensional clock. I am caught in a hybrid landscape. I want to run and scream. I want to fly and be invisible. I want to be motivated by an adrenaline electrode set against a perfect part of the brain. Every step and heartbeat is precarious. I ache for ancient wonder and escape. The queen falls asleep, every day, next to me. I can smell her in the rumpled sheets. Fear pierces me from beyond the curtains. The thin slits of sunlight are like daggers. Life has always been too hard for me. And it seems like everyone else has it all together. I feel like a failure fried egg. I feel like a broken toy, an empty bottle, a blank sky. I think I was born like this, from the lake of ache. Then cast out to wander a perilous world. I’ve always been too nervous, so I lurk in the shadows. I never know what to say. Quiet is a sin while loud and obnoxious are virtues. My soul is cluttered, but I have no spirit or energy to clean it out. So I sit and stare while the world spins and spins. Time diminishes. I am no contribution. I eat yogurt with a doll spoon and gaze toward the haunting.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• City of Machines

  

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  I can see my tangled soul reflected in the winter lenses of an office building in the factory district. The background is sun and discomfort. A broken man sits on a bench holding a sign that reads: Why can’t I ever win? I walk through the city of stacks. No voices, only machines. They’re building a better world while destroying it.

  I hear hammer on sword and the hiss of disembowelment. I see firecrackers exploding against brick walls. I can smell the soil of the world burning. I see an inviting bed on a bank portico and go to lie down. The dreams that come are full of cotton candy and pollution. Someone pokes me with a stick and tells me to leave. It was the dream police.

  I have a feeling like empty wishes, fleeting desires, mowed down motivations. I walk to the end of Factory Street where the world of man and machine meets the sea and its god Poseidon. Looking over the edge into the depths of the dark waters makes me feel funny in my stomach. It would be horrible to fall in, I think. I’m not the Man From Atlantis. I’m the man from nowhere.     

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August