CEREAL AFTER SEX

Free Falling in a Mall

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You can’t say “write like magic”

It isn’t right to be so tragic

And Nob Hill hip

And Q-Town super fresh

So write like magic despite the tetherships of the world

I ache to conjure up all the words I need for literary architecture

Why doesn’t my mind simply bleed?

It’s a spring dream these days

Warm in the guts

And people look at me like I’m crazy

But they’re not wrong

I’m always rehearsing scenarios in my head

A little theater played across the stage of my mind

And sometimes I feel like a vending machine cafeteria

I suddenly got scared about something

Life mostly

Thinking back to Tom Petty days

Free falling in a mall

Then flying, floating, watching, waiting, approaching

Tasting, running, tumbling to Alaska

And now all is white and cold

All alone, wilderness

Ice, shelter, fire, water, food

Maple crème sandwich cookies by the blaze

Suddenly alone and broken and laughing

A hungry heart and soul begs for mercy

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.
Psychedelic Encounters in an Empty Vessel

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Pink jukebox spins an array of psychedelic tunes in a diner on the wrong side of the desert where the crows dance and bow and she wipes away the sweat from her frosted brow. She thinks it’s cold outside. Cold in the desert. What does she know? It can get cold in the desert. There’s wild wind and snow on those blankets of dirt. And then I don’t like to hear what she says. Toilet breath. Busted lip. Motorcycle up her crotch. Says she’s going to shoot the place up. For what? The demise of manners. She eats fierce cinnamon flavored chewy candies. Shouts something in German. I think she’s a Mad Max type. All hyped up on jolly rogers and gasoline fumes. She pulls out her cell phone and starts taking pictures of the diner. Says she wants to have something to remember it by before she burns it down. Shoot it up? Burn it down? Which is it going to be? Why not just come inside for a nice piece of pie.

Then a lemon-yellow sun setting. A feeling of void. I keep stopping. The white woman climbs into a gunmetal-gray submarine in the harbor and dives to a new destiny. The tourists are dumb and laughing. The ice cream shop across the street is a memory machine. Yellow light, mirrors, tight booths, the smell of candy, the smell of sweet, the small glasses of water. There’s too much time to undo, unwrap, unravel. The monorail, a life derailed. I recall the charming neighborhoods. Stuck in time, just a boy, wearing a brown tweed coat with a cap and eyes squinting by the angle of the sun. There’s a driveway and a covered porch, the brownish-pink house. I remember standing by the fireplace and reaching my hand in to touch the flames and it never burned. Not me. What am I?

What am I going to do today? The unanswered question. My vessel is empty. My soul doesn’t care. Love is questionable. Memories keep popping. I wonder if I should shave. I’m a tangled mess, a negative blessing of the head. An aqua-blue heart thump. The thought of the hours and how I will fill them. It never used to be like this. Being afraid of time even as it slips away with each blink of the eyes, with each beat of the heart. The birds keep singing, the breeze rolls in through the open windows. The teeth are breaking; the limbs keep locking up. I am fighting my own wishes and dreams, and I don’t want to. I want to be set free.

By
Aaron Echoes August
The College of Cannibalism

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A skirmish of desire

I fight the voracious appetite of distraction

But I eat myself alive

Like in architecture school

The room, the windows

The drawing tables

The long walk across campus on a fall day

I never fit in

Especially when they asked me to disrobe

A study in free-hand drawing

To loosen the wrists and loosen the mind

Long days turn to long nights

Lonely Colorado skies so big and bold

And all that I’m told

By the flagrant fragrant world

The smell of drawing pencil ash

The sword-like quality of the architect’s scale ruler

Staring out windows, the world an open vista

And I misjudged the trajectory of my life

In the blink of an eye

I said goodbye

And now I hunger for the old wounds

I long to eat time and start over

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Blue Villa

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I ordered two kitchen sinks because I’m crazy. They’re for my blue pastel villa in Italy. The blue is cerulean and at night reflects the yellow light of the outside lamps in shapes resembling swaths of butter pads. It’s a reclusive place that sits near the water. It’s two levels with a walkway leading up to it and stone stairs at the doorway. The walkway meanders along the water’s edge and provides pristine views of the bay. The upstairs bedroom boasts an iron veranda that offers up stunning vistas as well. Further up the coastline there are large, steep cliffs that people often leap from.

I’ve watched many times as a figure approached the edge of one of the cliffs and then horrifyingly jumped off. I’ve gone to the authorities about this and proposed they erect some kind of barrier at the top or a net at the bottom, but each time they said they cannot defile the natural beauty of the place. Too many people would complain, they said.

Well, isn’t that about right. Human selfishness to the point of obscene and disgusting disregard for the lives of others. I suppose they’ll soon start setting up lawn chairs at the top of the cliff so they can sit and spectate as the aching souls leap to their demise. What next? Applause? Betting? Cheers and jeers? Prayers? Monetary rewards for slinging racial slurs at the death-bound?

The great golden Buddha must then float down from the heavens on a spaceship and blast them with his ray gun of peace and love. That would cast their ghastly practices to the netherworld. Or maybe Jesus would appear, and he’d be so pissed off he’d want to shake the selfish suicide downplayers until the lumps of coal from their rotted hearts fell out as he yelled, “This is not what I said!”

I ate real Italian pizza by myself at the lone table and chair in the kitchen. It was May and warm and I had windows open in the house. I could hear the watery songs of the bay and the far-away yelps of joy emanating from the wandering tourists on holiday. I sipped on my Italian soda espresso and slowly thought about life. What should I do now? I’m running out of ideas. The villa was quiet, a reminder of lone living. Then I heard another distant cry and the crash of bones.

What kind of world do we live in where people want to end their own lives? It doesn’t seem blessed to me. I wonder if there is anywhere else in the universe where beings do this. Maybe there is. But to do it because things are so bad, that’s just sad. There’s no need to crush one’s self. Hang on. Go to sleep. Wake up.

I went outside to smoke an Italian cigarette and watch the end of day close in. I looked up toward the cliffs. They seemed innocent enough. The bay shimmered. Acid trip colors began to melt across the sky, and once again, I decided I wouldn’t climb that night.

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 Comatose Scarecrow

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The emotional river flees fluidly like me. There must be some kind of disabling plate in my head. A blockage, a barrier reef, a comatose scarecrow holding an eternal lamp in a Halloween field of moonlit night. Frosty crows soar across the face of the man in the moon. They cry for salvation, yet cruise for depravity.

What if this is some kind of progressive brain problem? What if my ability to create is slowly being erased? That’s a sobering thought. I feel myself lying in a field of pumpkins. A head full of straw. Thoughts are butchered mush. Eyes stare straight to the sky. I try counting stars but it’s impossible. The moon laughs at me.

Now along the water in sleepy small town Two Rivers. There stands a large stone church, and picnic tables in the grass. There’s the smell of hamburgers cooking on a charcoal grill. Sun hanging high, an orange yellow eye dangling in the sky. The hurt of the ancient mall. A city of rubble and rebar, tumbled and bent, dust, tombs, the walking dead.

Suddenly tired. Want to sit and watch and think. To escape within myself, within a foil of peace. I’m considering dream time tonight: a rose, a job, a night court, a crucified blow to the head. Something that pinches. Something to remind me that I am alive.

By
Aaron Echoes August