CEREAL AFTER SEX

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Ambient Endless

The Linguini Ballroom

Strawberry Safari

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The Oblong Warlock

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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

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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

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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

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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
The Abandoned Mannequin

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Our lives all tangled in a fishing net of anxiety. And then she’s lovely to hold. Warm wife. Oblong life. Woke up like lonely Hulk today, thumbing for a ride on the avenue of broken dreams, smashing through a brick wall in an abandoned town on the edge of the desert. Scattered bricks like broken red bones. Scattered sinew on sailing ships. My Hulk prophecy figure walks into an old diner and throws a coffee maker out a window. Fragile, time-tainted glass shatters. A bellow of life rage bursts forth from green lungs. To the bank, the vault. I rip off the door and step inside. I fill my torn pants with money. I fall to the floor. I’m beginning to transform back to a regular human being even though I will never be a normal human being. My eyes don’t look weird anymore; my hair doesn’t look stupid. I take all that money and buy some new clothes at the abandoned western store. A mannequin propped up behind the counter takes the cash. She has a rabid smile and a cracked eye. She says, “Thank you, have a nice day” in a warped, mechanical voice. There’s a vibe of cemetery creepiness.

I take the stolen money to Vegas so I can gamble and drink and walk around in an altered state of consciousness. I feel weird and alone in that great sea of people. The skin, the fabric, the suntan lotion smell, the erratic behavior and noise. It’s like swimming in an ocean of strange beings from somewhere else. I sit comatose in front of a slot machine and watch the world spin. Bells suddenly start going off, lights flash. Winner! I take my ten million dollars up to the hotel room. Dim light, an A/C chill. I throw the money on the bed and dive into it. I swim in my dreams come true. Then there comes a knock on the door. I get up to answer. It’s the mannequin from the western store in that desert town. She looks at me with that cracked eye. “I followed you because I like you. You’re handsome and cool. I need more for my life than just standing behind that counter and dying of boredom.” Her eyes shift to the piles of money on the bed. “And you’re rich. I love that. Let’s go shopping.”

People look at us because I am a man and she is a mannequin. Passersby take photos. I am taunted and teased. Grenadine, her name was Grenadine, defends me. She attacks people and rips out their hair. People scream and scatter. The police arrive and we’re both questioned, then arrested. The cops take all my money. I sit alone in a jail cell, an empty soul with destitute pockets. My dreams are shattered, and I blame it all on that damn Grenadine. I should never have answered the door. I should have leapt out the window with my life intact. Damn desert mannequin. Damn dreams and drugs. Errors are relentless, time is unforgiving.

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.
Broken

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Broken window puffs off the path. The dander of anger shaken from the tree limbs of devastating life. What being am I? Where do I exist? The red clam-colored house in the woods. Ancient two-story architecture. Humble seeds scattered upon the portico. Hazy windows with shadows inside. A bandolier of broken trees, broken dreams, broken bones. Graveyard peace and quiet, the pink bricks scream for mercy, the tattered roof begs for a bandage. A glycerin sun glaze paints smears of gut swirling lamp light brutal beautiful memories. Hurt, like a leprechaun with a broken leg left in a golden field of war.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Starless

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I am starless, spotless, as I lie out beneath this tattered universe ceiling thinking only of you… I hear your heartbeat beside me, how it rattles against my cage in the deepest dark of night to soothe me like a clock, where only dreams exist to escape, to wake to the sun and your beautiful blue-eyed face, your beautiful yawn at dawn, the place where the newest day greets me with everything you are, countless, too much to count, how love life lives with every sweet breath you take, with every single motion you make, with every tired whisper that aches out of your soul at morning’s break; you are endless beauty written on the walls, a gift with no ending, a memory worth waiting for.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Pink Floors

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I want to go to dreamland and stay there. To live among the colored angels and broken glass voodoo kings. To be anything but this comatose soul. To be anything but a sleepy creepy doll in a kaleidoscopic straitjacket of the mind. Now autumn longing. The orange sun ablaze on the ground and in the trees. Walkways littered with colored leaves. Bowed head in red lamps corridor. Pink floors. A crowd in the distance. Keep them there, away from me. I want to be in the solitude chamber of the midnight mall. Today white-gray sky. Rain in the air. An ache in my guts. Lackadaisical opium fields stretch out to the horizon. Happiness taunts me.

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Iron Throne

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The wide maw of sleep deprivation. Tunnel light etching scripts for the nausea people. The magpie man wants to blow his brains out on the high-wire. It scares and deafens the village below. Illusion Lake has no water. On the shores of vast emptiness. Always getting ripped on and lied to. The invalid code of humanity. Green numbers are counting down my last few seconds of ache. Someone’s trying to move me out. Someone’s trying to get rid of me. I can feel it in the air of this catatonic wasteland.

I sat on the iron throne on the patio in the back yard smoking Isosceles cigarettes and watching the orange tongues dance in the fire pit. The stars were ecclesiastic and guiding the worst of men to detriment. My nerves are frostbitten. I get punished for everything. Terrible things from the past are coming back to haunt me. Torturous memories. Mishandled manifestations. The sloppy retreat. I had the villa and now it is gone forever. The Italian seaside slaps the shore in my head. My eyes see a blue settlement.

The airport windows are large and tall. Hills in the shadowy distance. Runways with black skid marks. Planes come and go. Lonely people stand and look out. They don’t want to go back home to emptiness and killing routine. Crushed hearts, crushed souls seeking vengeance, but they are peaceful animals. They ache with the thought that they have done nothing but fuck up their lives, let love parades walk all over them. Poor decisions while high on untethered hearts. These crushing memories are ripping me open, and I can’t even scream.

By
Aaron Echoes August