Category Archives: Poetry

Aquarius Sanitarium

Photo by Chevanon Photography on Pexels.com.

Sinisters are solace

Silence is alabaster

The creeps roam the roads at night

I see headlights that pierce the warm fog

Guttural engines, high beams, red eyes

The steam of a summer day, from the narrows it rises

Like snakes on bellies, ravens in the window, vultures perched on hay loft metal wanderings

Babes that begin with J

Her scent lingers like toast or English muffins

In a breakfast nookery, the cookery, clay cast by broken hands

Milk is here, melk is there, across the oceans we number

The maps we draw, the lines we force, the people we cage

Cultural imprisonment, the other side of a jackass wall

Taos and Laos, hybrid honcho burritos and fish stew

The words a jumbled Azio mess on a hot plate

Sometimes stupid stories are merely stupid stories

Binary therapy in a terrarium

An aquarium

Sometimes I just like to look at fish.


Blowtorch Pastoral

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.


The Air of Crows

Silhouette of a bird sitting on a tree branch during full moon. Crows at night.
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.



Red Rubber Concerto

Person wearing red hoodie for red rubber.
Photo by Sebastiaan Stam on Pexels.com


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.


SANDS

Sands.

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.


Tomah Graph

Tomah


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.


Beloved Fury

Fury


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.