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.
One million beings ring the rings of Saturn while one million more stands in the stuffy queue for a chance to eat mediocre breakfast. And still one million trillion more stands in line with their exhaustible consumables, and I sense a vagina in the wind, an overly impatient man is holding a fuselage of Pick-Up-Sticks and chewing watermelon gum and one must wonder if he has a gun beneath that long rubber coat. On the other side of town, a beautiful woman fills her belly with a ham and gruyere omelet before breaking ferocious wind in a disheveled but crowded Target store. People run as if Godzilla were attacking. All is laughing gas madness as she denies it to the judge who deems it off-handed assault. She gets 43 years in the penitentiary and a lifetime supply of Ivory soap for her crack.
A man sits on an uncomfortable bench on Dillon Beach Road waiting for a bus that will never come. He reads a glossy Hollywood magazine. The pages flap in the sea-salt air. He’s wearing a Gilligan hat and suddenly becomes hungry for sausage and coconut. He wonders how the Professor gets so much action. Then he realizes it’s easy. The Professor is so much better because he himself is so much worse. No woman wants a Gilligan. He’ll never be able to compete in the game of love and therefore will die alone. They’ll roll him up in some sailing fabric and stick him in a cave. The Skipper stands in front of a mirror in his bamboo and grass hut and practices his imitation of Oliver Hardy. Then he starts to cry when he realizes his “little buddy” is gone forever. He can never be happy, not ever.
What else? What else?
The blades of a helicopter chop at the wind. Monster Magnet is playing the song Space Lord as they ride a green comet around the planet. It’s an unfruitful war and pirate eye patches and Wilford Brimley talking about oatmeal kind of day in the universe. Karl Childers from Sling Blade is now the man in the moon, and he keeps talking about biscuits and a book about Christmas… Mmmm hmmm. Nothing seems normal. There is no normal.
I know about the universe. But just exactly where is the universe? When I go outside to pee off the edge of the porch, I enjoy looking up at the sky, the stars, the planets, the satellites I think are UFOs. And yes, I always wonder, just where is the universe? What is outside the universe? It’s such an incomprehensible question. There is the unfathomable vastness of the universe, but then there must be more, and then even more… It’s infinity at its finest. It just goes on and on and on and on… And if there is infinity that carries on forever in front of us, then there must be anti-infinity that trails forever behind us. Do the two infinities ever meet up? And what if they did? Or what if they do? Maybe it’s all just an endless loop stuck on PLAY. But who pushed the button and now refuses to release it?
I am an anonymous donor spreading my seed of grief across the world and I might as well be blind for all I see is black, the rubber room menace rotating on some wobbly wheel and my gifts have all been opened by other people and I sit and watch in a pile of gold paper remembering the uncle who shot himself the cousin who shot himself the brother, who someday may shoot himself And all the bleeds will flow like thick wine and pool into an ocean where God Neptune will pierce me with a sharpened shovel and all the angels will laugh at God’s biggest mistake.
And this all a malenky bit sad, isn’t it? But what is joy without sadness? It does not exist. What is love without loneliness? The deeper the isolation the brighter the kiss … but still, time stretches out like a river vastly flowing over the rocks and the limbs crushing flowers with a wet fist, numbing hot legs braving a dive and where will I be tomorrow? In a treehouse with a shotgun or in a bar with 11 empty shot glasses before me or on a dancefloor with a whore or alone in felt-like desolation sipping at the tears in my wrist or clapping for the might of the clouds or then again nothing at all. Bear with me bears of the forest for I cannot get a grip on yesterday or tomorrow or even right now stone sober and burning and while someone is making wishes I am losing my mind Another red another notch in the bed another twist of cold morality, but then, things could always be worse and so, I’m not positive, I don’t need to be today I am bleak and writhing in the fuel the dirty fuel casting spells of the tepid hemorrhage and I ache relentlessly for my heart is an inferno download me into the electric sea and you will see who I am meant to be.
I met Edward Abbey at the sand dunes, but he was already blown away I met Miller at a French cafe, but he was already blown away I met Kerouac on a railroad car, but he was already blown away and I met me at yet another airport, but I was already blown away. The bleed pile of my grace is wiped away with a red rag and the doctors can’t patch me together anymore so many holes have I, so many disturbing dreams and polarized realities, my only sanctuary is to drown in paper and words pictures and photographs and electric men pumping bullets into nameless enemies. Today has been fried bologna on burnt toast, water and pills, ashes on my eyes and the sound of her bellowing in the background and the weird upstairs guy snoring through the ceiling. What new ache will tomorrow bring? What will I be forced to swallow into the hollow grave of my soul?
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.
When you want to be someone but no one knows who you really are when you’re living in the worm that lives in your own belly drinking dirt and eating poison wine crying to live laughing to die and everything inside vanishes and you feel like you’re living in a Neverland with a never hat and a never coat and you’ve spent every dime you ever had wasting time strolling on the sun with a hip pocket full of memories sprinkling them on the lava like seed counting all your bad deeds all the dirty visions you’ve seen all the air you’ve breathed that was never meant for you or me and you want God to do some CPR but you haven’t been filling his golden plate He looks down on you with pity and shame rips the angel from your veins deserting you in a Neverland wasting away like a dead urchin on the road as jets fly by overhead pissing fuel and exhaust to clog it all up crawl into the can man drink your way to the cave and follow that light to the other end to that great big grin and a candy-apple red Neverland.
By
Aaron Echoes August
An online journal of fiction, essays, and social commentary.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 