CEREAL AFTER SEX

Industrial Forest

Created image

Blankets of rain seed the important information of the day. Massive zeros invade my mind. A machined white cloud dangles in a black sky. Wagon tracks through a green field stretch to the horizon. No wagon in sight. A gray weathered house cradles tortured dreams inside the bell of a tortured mind. Tortured by the work in the grocery store. The round wheel or belt, the scanning, the bagging, the boring music above the ears, the incessant complaining of our guests… He holds his head together as he sits on the edge of a bed in a small room with one window. He wears a wife-beater T-shirt, his body sags inside. He sips on a sweaty glass of lemonade and then screams.

After a rough dinner of porridge and pudding, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette. This other dimension haunts him. It’s so placid yet so full of nervous vibration. Humming glass, that ever-present black sky and mangled cloud. There’s a light breeze carrying voices from the forest. He looks toward the place where the trees begin, and he shivers. The gods have always told him to not go into the forest because there were things there that he would never understand. He wasn’t fit for the edicts and the strange ways of the ones that lived there. His gray hair and his drawn face would be an anomaly. His weakness of spirit and aged limbs would not be welcomed. He was unaware that grandma bones dangled from the muscular trees.

He heard a door inside slam, and it made his head contort so that it nearly broke his neck. And then he thought it was only his imagination, had to be, for he lived all alone. Who could be slamming doors? He tossed his burned-out cigarette to the claws of dusk and carefully crept inside the house.

The floor creaked as he stepped. “Hello?” he called out. “Is there anybody in here, or am I just losing my mind?”

Someone bellowed “Cauldron!” and he quickly ducked back outside and looked up.

A kaleidoscopic nunnery sat atop a lonely dark hill at dusk, high brush blackened without light ring the reception yard. A haunted Ferris spins doldrums at the cross peak of the industrial alleyway. A sheepskin heart flutters in the wind, the man has electrode hands, and the blue juice is gyrating. He fires at humanity, melts the stupidity and hate. He fires at inhumanity, skeletal ricochets, harnessed bombardments, yellow notebooks for the lost minds to scribble in. The rubber walls reveal his incoherent poems and charms. Then he’s there on a hilltop in Germany. Looking out he sees a chain of snow-capped mountains, jagged, ancient, holding secrets. The sky is a late-day blue, an ocean blue curled with bruise-colored dew. He starts a fire and wanders through the flames. He hears the deep chanting, the haunting mechanical music. He is alone in a big place, the air is chilled, and it feels like the coming of winter.

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Oblong Warlock

Created image

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

Created image

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

Created image

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
Head Injury and Hot Dogs

Created image

A young girl fell out of a grocery cart in the meat department today. I was right there, looking at chicken when it happened. The rubbery thudding smack her head made against the polished floor was highly audible and excruciating. It rattled my guts. She immediately began to cry, and her mother went to her right away to check if she was okay. I was afraid to look because I didn’t want to see her skull cracked open, but I looked anyway. Her mother frantically parted the girl’s hair and searched her head for a bump, cut, bruise. It was hard to tell the extent of her injuries because the poor girl was wailing so much that her face was red and puffy and streaked with tears. The mother picked her up and held her. Damn, that must have hurt, I thought, and that’s when I noticed one of the meat department clerkies stocking hot dogs onto the shelves a little ways away. He kept looking over his shoulder at the young girl who fell out of the cart, and he was smiling, grinning, on the brink of laughter even.

I was like, damn that is cold. The meat department clerk set the box of hot dogs aside and pulled out his cell phone. He held it up and I could tell he was videotaping the little girl blubbering away like a sad whale who had fallen off the edge of the Earth. The clerk put a hand over his face to hide his laughter. It isn’t funny, I thought. It was horrific. She could have been seriously hurt. What is wrong with people? Oh, yeah. Hate is love now.

The mother and her traumatized daughter eventually sailed away to the produce department, the girl now sitting in the cart part, not the seat part. I wandered behind just to see if anything else was going to happen. I hoped she didn’t have to go to the hospital. How awful it would have been for a trip to the grocery store to turn into a day at the ER where they suffocate you with waiting and paperwork and questions about insurance. Profit over people. Great system. But the mother just gave the girl one of those free bananas to help make her feel better. I’d want something more than that. The girl peeled it and looked at it with tears still in her eyes. She bit into it and chewed through a big sigh. Damn. Life… You never know what’s going to happen next.

By
Aaron Echoes August