CEREAL AFTER SEX

Sun Bones

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A red sunset is hanging in the sky

A warm blotter of heat love

Hanging on a hook in space, my thunder

Talking to me about motion, heartbeats, time moving

Like machines under the earth

Your heartbeat tastes like chocolate

Melting down my red bones and blue sky

Love is but a moment

Beneath those yellow streetlights

Emotions scattered across the boulevard blown cold

Remnants of my heart

All tangled up in the sheets of the universe

All beautiful in the rain

Too beautiful to even know

How I trace the chalk hearts against these walls

Of harbor town night, glass partitions, drugs, intoxications

A trembling wedding, sorted by space, stars

Brick town surrender, operations in moonlight

You changed your name… Violet, tender, memory

A love, a fall of breath

Her name has changed

Yet the gravity never fails

Immeasurable, I can’t count the ways

The sun lights up the day

From dawn to beautiful sleep

I can only imagine

For I stand outside,

Shivering in the cold with broken bones, heart

Married steals her breath

For I want to steal her hand, her heart, her future

But it’s just me

Knocking at the wooden door,

I bring nothing, but me, this heart, these arms

To hold you like the beating at night

We made the days in Neverland

And to sweep the big, hard world away

With the swipe of a windswept soul, thumb

Numb, out there in this world beautiful one

Wet locks of spear-straight smile harpoons

I dream of other places at night

I rush memories to the clouds

The atmosphere burn up crushing my invisible heart

Wishing everything was here again

To make the fire hotter, dreams bigger and brighter

That lonely smile that fires up every day

Love heart ignition like rocket fuel swallowed

I’m alone heart skip sidewalk stroll

Inside these four, painted walls of cold

Missing life like love lights going out

Digging a bigger hole inside here

Love-strewn nights aloud

Ash, winter cold, what arms if any cradle you long night?

In that night of cold air, I held the moon in my hands

Warm, the night, a million heartbeats behind glass,

I wrote the world a love letter

Forever, forgotten, trash can eaten

That is all I remember ‘till the break of day

And the sense of the world is all astray

Every word a dumb knuckle

Every sword and dream reality askew

If you only knew

The way I think of all of you

When sun collapses

And stars stand tall

Beneath the countless sky

I drive nowhere

But I have to go north

To my home by the sea

Number four-hundred and three

To finish out these days

With a needle and a pen

To wipe away every love’s tormented birth and death

To just sit and breathe—for once—quietly

Without any ache at all knocking down the door

To wash away, ordinary

In unabridged, final surrender.

By
Aaron Echoes August

My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
The Essence of Time

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Ink smeared across a hand that once clutched the sky of your life

Now just bones, that crack and roll in the night, without the moon’s light

Sun means nothing, stars fly away and the quasar but a beacon calling no one home

To the shores

Of this dark place, where I sit in front of the window, a candle flame

Burning my skin, a small hole of light, in the glass

As I watch and wait

For no one

To come home

And I awake restless and in need

But then

There are no souls

Who but I dawn on

Why do I still

Be still in the thought of everything

Walking to a bar at 3 p.m.

Just to grip someone else’s story

And later…

Walk out into the sun and rain

Across sidewalks gray and demeaning

I must be crazy

I have to stop thinking about how it used to be

How I used to feel

In red dawn light mercy drink upon a hissing lawn

A heart just beats now, carelessly

Sans tethered to nothing but cordial, brutal memories

I park in the empty spaces where once I belonged

Time flies away

But the asphalt remains nearly the same

Summer has just begun

But I just want it to end

This hothouse fire bleed of heat

Is making me weak

Whenever I stand in nowhere

Thinking of Dublin

And the other side of the world

Can sometimes mean empty

Without a soul to share

That hot, hot breakfast with a view

A small cigarette in an alley

As sun collapses

Beneath the weight of another end of day

Cold against the historical brick

Someone dazzled in gorgeous gemstones

And the world slaps at my face

When I say it’s a waste

Find beauty in your own skin

But this fucking world has tarnished

The way you are supposed to look

Don’t you even know

You are most perfect at sleepy dawn

In the fizz of a glossy television glow

By
Aaron Echoes August
Champagne Darkness

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I want to wake up to a fire

Out there, in those champagne skies

Where my impending death

Is but a sketch, an outline

Circling the globe all stratospheric

Love trailing behind

Like a wet, creamy comet

They don’t want to touch anymore

So I climb the high brick

I look out to sea

I see the wandering loves and lives

Washed away like uncalculated time

Love whispers darkness now

The ache of everything lost

Every universal breath I used to catch

And swallow, and digest whole

Until we were one

But unloving god and bad luck have twisted this turnstile heart

To a point of sad icicles and sea slams

Against the harbor protectors of hard stone

So I go to the corner bar of lunatics

To kiss sunset whiskeys and igloo absinthe bombs

Until I am twisted unrecognizable

To the point where you can no longer love me

And so I beat you to the punch

You don’t have to make any excuses anymore

I’ll cash out before you, my love

And walk the beach invisible

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Hotel Room

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There is a dark hotel room, and the butter hearts of paradise dawn come rushing through like maniac bullets. There is her beating heart, living beside me in dreams of blue, majestic light, somewhere out far in desert kiss of red. I look up at the nondescript ceiling. Bumps of white now muted in the cracked glow of the bathroom light. The muffled sound of footsteps shuffling up above. I keep forgetting what I forgot. I wanted the top floor, but they didn’t give it to me. I even asked nicely, but they still didn’t give it to me. Now I’m pressed between floor number 2 and floor number 4. The noises and the smells float up and down and right through me. And now a couple is humping in the room right next door. I can hear the grunting and the moaning. The wall vibrates. I get up to use the bathroom.

On my way to the window I stop beside the bed and look down at her. She’s sound asleep. The cornsilk hair with a light dusting of powdered sugar frames her face. I’m married to a woman. I ache to touch her, but I don’t want to wake her up. It’s too early or late, I’m not even sure. The grinding sex commotion next door is getting to me. I take a trembling drink of water from a plastic bottle on the nightstand. I go to the window and part the curtains.

A parking lot full of cars. Steam and mist from the sky brightens in the glow of tall lamps. I can’t be sure, but I think someone is killing another person. Or maybe it’s just rough love in the rain. No, there’s hitting. I watch them. Should I interfere by calling someone? I decide to let them fight it out. One falls to the ground. There’s wide-mouth jawing going on. The one on the ground gets up and hurriedly walks away. The other stands there in the mist and then lights up a cigarette. Now he is leaning against my car. I tap on the window as hard as I can. The smoking person turns their head and looks around. My hand drops. What’s the use. I can’t control the actions of others. I can’t control the world. It will break me in two if I try.

What is it then? How do I contain myself in a world gone mad? How do I live in such a ridiculous society? So much I would change but feel so helpless to do so. It’s getting away from me. I can’t stop it all, or any of it so it seems. Breathe deep. Small actions of love and peace. I turn away from the window and look back at her sleeping so soundly in the bed. I go to touch her face. Kiss her forehead. She stirs. Mumbles something I don’t understand. It is everything the world offers.

By
Aaron Echoes August

My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.
The Scarlet Sea

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I pointed a .45 at my reflection in the sea

pulled the trigger and started to bleed

She came up behind me

Wrapped her arms around me and whispered

We spend our whole lives, going out of our minds

I looked at my rippled, red reflection in the salty water

Saw her face, came to my senses, somehow

when my senses seem so radical lately

broken bottles cutting scars

I held her hopes to the stars

when night finally fell

and we cradled beneath the moon

the air began to cool

and she led me back inside

to show me I hadn’t died

the wounds all memory now

healed and stored away

in a life gone astray

We laid on the bed and watched TV

237 channels and there’s nothing on

I finally fell asleep

the waves out there silent and still

the sea as calm as glass

The sun broke through in the morning

and I awoke

alone, sheets void of any angel

and realized that love was but a dream

By
Aaron Echoes August