I’d like to take this opportunity to announce the creation of a new website I have.
Blowtorch Pastoral is a space I created to post some of what I consider to be my more serious writing… Under the nom de plume Aaron Echoes August. It’s still in the early stages of development, but there are poems and stories already posted.
I know it will be difficult to produce content for more than one site, but I do plan to continue writing for Cereal After Sex as much as I can. I enjoy it too much to stop.
In the meantime, head on over to Blowtorch Pastoral, check it out, and follow if you’d like. And as always, thanks for reading and supporting independent creators.
Photo by Douglas Henrique Marin dos Santos on Pexels.com
A misty green jungle glow leaves me melancholy high at mid-morning sigh the curtains in the kitchen hold back the ashen stare of this cell block with eighty tiny windows and hands reaching out to pray for the immoral justice to fade, fade with the orange gassy glow of another wet night of multiple ampersand weddings and lonely shuffles beneath creaking porch lights … and I cannot stop thinking of the wandering crows in those tiny black clothes and how they blow through the air and into a fractured face when the hobbling world is overworked or tired as I light these mystic candles all alone the mantle missing pictures of all the seas of you and I at the shores of blue water space and it’s blessed to imagine the days we are tightly knit together our lives wrapped around each other like newspaper on fish, like wings on wheels and it’s fun to play life with you for without you this game is already over and I am merely a wedge stuck beneath an open door letting all the air out forever and ever.
Beauty is in baskets lying all over the world a tumbler of goodwill a shot glass of decency lined along the bar of distant scars the marathon jubilee pounds the ribbon strips gray across bridges and country lanes laced with the structure of Big Brother Nostradamus and Orwellian patriots rolling pool balls across the lawn whilst Beethoven wails to the sky life is but a red rubber concerto kick your ball to the stars feel the pressure of toe on geometry and you wonder about the girl living in the cube the colorful cube before your eyes and you know she is ocean beautiful you know she is fun in the sun Morrison dialogue falling from her lips Kerouac’s beautiful dynamite stripped raw from the bumper of your guts and you envision ancient Mexican sunsets in her arms her peeling back the clock and making you feel alive again not a fool, but a partner of comfort turning counter-clockwise in the twine of a misshaped reality and you try to cradle every tombstone in your aching arms pulsing with sweat but you’d carry every burden for her just to make her life a bit more comfortable when all she wants to do is cry so when I’m coughing up all the pain I feel the beaches of my angel’s city call to me and say come join us again for another red rubber concerto witness life witness love witness the fall of my American dream come wear your name badge the golden flask pinned to your chest the prick that draws blood the tag that identifies you as the big log we drink oceans of breath but do we swallow the meaning of life or do we just spit it to the shore and watch it be pulled away by the wet arms of a burdened destiny full of secrets and closet lies and I want to be lead away not on a leash but on a touch to sincere eyes and a head of hair that smells like some dreamy garden and the click click of this oily phantasm draws sand paintings on my tongue and I spit the dryness the emptiness into a dirty space of asphalt always looking toward the sketches in the sky with the hope for new hope with the setting of the sun dial the bright hot eye in the sky beckoning at me to arise and live another day even when God’s spinning wish list is torn in a storm.
I went to the place of high sands, the place of paper wasps swarming around my heart looking to sting, to puncture another hole in my already bruised organ. I walked among the hibernating cottonwoods and the mulberry bush lapped by the setting sun I saw a great owl rise quick from his post and the noise and speed startled me, really startled me like a pan noisily collapsing atop its pile in the cold kitchen of my romance novel abode gone sour every niche cold and silent every breath weeps lonely and I cry out for childhood again, dumbfounded and swimming in the hopes most likely false and it kills me inside wants to make me kill it all around tired of this everlasting ache constantly welling up, then subsiding welling up again, never subsiding as I try to ignore the complications of human existence as that bird outside my window takes a kamikaze dive into the crooked steeple the church bells toll toll through my soul golden gongs of everlasting love echoing of destiny derailed and the sands of time don’t spill quick enough it’s already all flubbered and flucked and I want to get off, get off, get off.
The days here now are cold and polished the gray sky like some sheet of ice dangling from the ceiling clouds like membranes all pulled apart everyone flying south and I just want to go north or east to feel her breasts press against my chest as she goes down on me in 4 a.m. lust, the sands of time, the sands so smooth and arched trickle down with gravity filling in all the spaces that I’ve stepped in before erasing me, erasing me from the palette all color blank and void the purity of her pronounced speech fading to a cold, silver shimmer sand and shotguns blasting me all away to another day where my memories do not thrive and poke where my past no longer plays magistrate eternally swallowing the key if I knew not love I could triumph in life’s wars not knowing love I would be without a soul where do I go without a soul I do not know.
When life has ended at the midpoint but you are still waking up, still breathing, what memento have you become? what cherished scrapbook do you yellow within what guts are you released from ever so violently wicked violets leaving purple bruises on the hands, on the cold glass of winter dusk, on eyelids heavy with sleep, on dreams inked by the utterances of self-depravity, lost in all the spaces melting together that crush crush me, crush me, crush me with charity and the goodwill of electric casual sex.
I am the canvas stretched and splattered, splattered with the annoyances of modern artists of cave dwellers bar dwellers bedroom noise dwellers and the sinking feeling you get when you break a bone and you are all alone and starve helplessly gnawing on carpet fibers in your very own home but no one is really home the doorbell is disconnected the knock is dissected the blessings never resurrected like Christ tied to a goal post and everyone kicking the shit out of Him just because He is who He is.
Everyone gasps at his philosophy he is such an atrocity how can he be allowed to live mumble the Pee and Em as they read from the good book and hate and kill just the same behind turned heads and silver tears candy is the only one left on Earth to me and even sugar is drifting away sometimes it seems though not entirely elegantly true throw me another bruise God wipe my face across the broken glass once more kick me breathless beat me senseless stuff me back into the womb and cut me away why won’t you save me for another day?
And everyone walks on eventually can’t stand the sight of me so what is my reason today to breathe, to walk, to slide away? To put on shoes or arise from slumber I’ll only be smacked around with a piece of jagged lumber, a beer spill down the shirt is cold and I want to be washed away to a bar in Denver hyped up and comatose with a drink in my hand and a smoke plastered between my fingers talking to the broken bodies of bones who pass by me like nuptial ghosts and I never rode a hotel bicycle in a wedding dress phoning cock-throbbing villains fleeing the scene like sand carving away another piece of forgotten history, tucking it neatly in a pirate bottle of glass.
Censor me still-life take my Tomah Graph swimming in the Hollywood Holiday Inn pool now drowning in a pool of my own painful frustrations and jitters uninvited guests in the gray of night this brain hurts like cinema for Alex have another stick of chewing gum another stick of dynamite to ease the grief you so gallantly feel at this moment these white office lights bleaching me pale invading my blood and neuropathic welly wells the gondolas paddle through my veins of Venice churning up all the nicotine clots and bad vibes where is my slice of American apple pie I must of dropped it in Vietnam when the grenade went off and all was nonsense
Cradling three bags of light in my coat pockets as I walked along the Lake Marion Passage Trail some 30 years later I noticed the sky was still the same deep blue the leaves of the trees still fell in perfect rhythm every year the dissection of Autumn Saroyan and Whitman staring down Jack passed out in a beached aluminum fishing boat the narrow, quiet roads lined with the dangling limbs of tall, skinny trees the Spanish moss hanging there like the fallen locks of a stoned Medusa the quiet so soothing, the calm so intoxicating, the wet so disheartening but a woodsy wander it shall be in the rural confines, gloriously gorgeous confines, of the southern Carolina place
Until… Put my fist through the timber lodge paneling the boiling inside again asking for it again just asking for it again, the other side of the coin.
With blood With guilt I scurry beneath yet another moon, another field of grasses swaying in a nighttime breeze howling and empty, like a heart away from silver rains, a fate too hard to swallow force fed, like a bullet from God, like a train feeding on my guts and sleep so distant now, dreams too clear and bold, the unreality called to bandage my reality a blotter for all the blood leaking, spilling really, from a jaundiced and torn heart
This all comes on like a violent storm pounding through the sky like a metal thorn piercing the hull of my West Texas ride, and my confusion only gets worse latitude becomes longitude, feathers become stones, joy becomes madness, bone becomes air and memories become burdens like oxygen, gas, and light all explosive and hot another fiery escapade without any prerequisite contemplation
Diving into a dark cave without a lantern, kissing cobwebs with no mask fury, fury, fury all a beloved fury and untamed waves of smashing, lashing coiled energy and then a quiet puff on the candle, another tangled, flushed and rushed night put to rest save I, living on the barrier between night and light save I, rushing the dreams to cradle me in cinematic sleep save I, the one who greets the dawn with a much greater need.
By
Aaron Echoes August
An online journal of fiction, essays, and social commentary.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 