CEREAL AFTER SEX

Most Popular Posts

Labyrinth Milk Rinse (1)

Bread Mannequins and Green Mist

The Axiom Caboose

The Tepid Hemorrhage

The Crowns of Pluto (3.)

The Angelfish of Giza (Excerpt 1)

BumBuna O'Brien and the Evolution Oven (End)

Sudan, Texas

Created image

A no hope sky scar laughs lenticular, a vision stretched, a moment cascading down a mountain of gods. I suffer in the stomach, pangs of worry and dreams of the Greek island Crete. How I will ever get there? Never. My existence is limited because of shitty money. But I will go there on my own Odyssey. A mind Odyssey. Because that’s all I have. Reality is damp and strewn with disappointment, but imagination is bright and boundless, yet counters with endless suffering. A crocodile chaos soup in my Florida guts. Sitting out there on the everglades waiting for my leg to be bitten off. I can see the blood running down the world map. Sudan is splattered.

I once drove through a town in Texas called Sudan. It was a long stretch of nothing. A straight road, grain silos, mostly empty tan and brown brick buildings, adobe shelters with tin roofs that people called home, crumbling sidewalks, bandaged windows. There were lamp posts with broken bulbs, a few scattered trees, and a water tower that looked like the Tin Man from Oz with the town’s name painted on it—City of Sudan. There was a disintegrating white church of God, the door caved in, the glass portals to Heaven shattered, Christ laid out on a swamp cooler, prayers forgotten and decimated. Another old building, rectangular and extensive, was slathered with graffiti on one side, names etched in with urban color—Skylar, Britney, Trevor—where are they now? Why does this place stick with me like gluttony on the ribs?

If I was just somewhere. Somewhere with a sky or a lake. A magical forest with a stream and no bad dreams. A frozen pizza stands in the hallway, blue, cobwebs, a frail light from a window at the end of the run. Pepperoni eyes at Hotel Habanero. It smells like chips and salsa and sugar-heavy soda. Distant voices mumble in the wind. Somewhere a television sputters. Guts and genitalia are moving. Fear at the end of the road burns halos into heads, justice is nonsense anymore, the good get derailed while the bad sail on. Applause for inflicting pain. Laughter for sickness. But the real sickness is the garbage that floats around in their polluted brains. I want to go live on one of Saturn’s moons to get away from all these imbeciles. They so tarnish the world.

I was up at the Crags in Colorado. The chandelier rocks of gray and moss. To slip into another dimension, to escape this life that has been nothing but a shitshow from day one. To breathe without wreckage from the top of a mountain. To fly to Deathland on wings of granite and gold. I’m not that important in the end, I probably never have been. I’ll be cast off to the gravestone, hated and forgotten. Love for mankind but a cruel and whimsical joke. The torn divinity of all my disenchanted decisions. All I threw away so recklessly. I always have a knack for fucking up my own existence. Now the regret boils like a geothermal pool. My own geology kicks my legs out from under me. I trip, fall in, burn. I ache with all that could have been. Even when presented with all I need, I tend to go off the deep end, I dive head first into fire. Misguided eloquence burned to death. All the mess I leave behind. All the torn skin to be bandaged. There is no going back, and forward is hell. I’m just a wrecked fool. A deadly accident skidding across the freeway. Blood and bone ground into pavement. And now floating to the netherworld in a sheet of ice and sun. How did I ever survive my own exercise in living. My heart is void of meaning. My soul lacks LA energy. I’m a spilled cocktail on the boulevard of life and death. I’m as invisible as a blue sea. My wound is cold water languishing through time. I am destined to fall from the mantel. Broken shards lost in the carpet as another day dawns and dips. Lonely rattles from the other side.

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 Scattering

Created image

Anything that takes effort I back away from. Everything is overwhelming. Breathing is overwhelming. These persistent thoughts are overwhelming. I can’t talk. I’m like an inanimate object, a cubicle clown at an abandoned arcade from the 80s. The wind rolls through the electric canals, trash strewn on the currents, dust from the desert mountains, memories a half of a century old drift and haunt. The kiddie rides are all stoic now, no quarters to feed them, nothing to pop them back to life. The popcorn place is defunct, a boarded-up shell, but the café across the stream still thunders. There are the sounds of distant voices celebrating life with genuine joy, the clattering of dishes, the fall of the water outside, the crack of limbs in old trees, the ice cream stereo shop around the corner buzzes with sonic vibrato.

I’m a windmill with hidden purpose. I don’t know what to do to occupy the spaces of a day. Meaning feels meaningless. The memories of an Amsterdam panic attack. I’m embarrassed to be myself at times for I am utterly flawed. I suppose I shouldn’t expect so much gratitude from the world. My stomach flips at the thought of life and living it. Another heartbeat passes and what good have I done? I shouldn’t expect myself to fill every gap of time with a chore. But I’m so conditioned by this sick society to always be productive. Give of yourself. Give. Give. Give. At every moment of every day. Drain yourself for the good of the company, the good of the rich. My time has been a commodity for someone else to exploit for their gain, not mine. The Generational Trap. Born into it. Live in it. Death by depletion.

I surrender to the sun. Empty and nauseous. Dizzying heights in downtown Chicago. A pretty escape beckons. The lake out there a diamond blue. An apartment of glass, silent in the afternoon. A couch, a table, a pile of bullets. Too late now, you’re already three-quarters through. A piece of artwork on the wall is called Scattering. The city below is crawling like a machine. Everyone has somewhere to go. But why? Stand still in front of a window in a high-rise apartment building and look down instead. Stop moving. Stop panting. Stop ripping your soul out… Now what do I do?

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.
Yellow Yesterday

Created image

Yellow emotions skid across the floor of the only grocery store. Longevity unfurls in the cinnamon rolls. The man in the candy aisle is addicted to Hot Tamales—a fierce cinnamon-flavored chewy candy. Then there’s that yellowcake uranium house with the darkened, sunset kitchen that stands in the shadows. Aluminum windows, puffer-fish brick. The yard a mallow, deep green. Hidden. Safe. A place to stand and just think without interruption. He passes it on the long road—the drive from the dull, dull city mesmerizes once the country jungle is all around. A calliope garden of peace piping soul-swelling memories. Sometimes that ache of past life wells up. Memories derail the present, cloud the future. Windshield slide shows flash images of the pain that used to thrive. Nonchalant gravity disco pop-ups groove by the acid flower shop. Rings of power in his yellow eyes at the lake shore. Vast distances numb the guts, cold water, waves, a sentient red lighthouse watches with a golden eye, disciplines with a horn. A guy named Carlton falls in the water.

And then that slant of sun again casting bright blocks and lines through the orange psychedelic curtains. His place in all of life swells in the soul. The red walls play gravity screen. He lies in a bed and looks up at the dusty white ceiling. Beauty breathes beside him. Whatever shall he do in the darkening days? What future glow to focus the mind. That ruptured mind. The effort it takes to climb from the time machine. The lost cities in the far distance, primitive again. Green and yellow without choking. A hospitable world with promise presents itself again.

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.
Inverted Heart

Created image

It was an empty night by the desk and the heart inverted for the purposes of other people. Chocolate hearts drawn in chocolate chalk melt out there on the stampeding sidewalks. Too tired. Too tired from trying to leap beyond the barriers of all that is right and good. I’ll never make it, in the end, will I. I’ll be another body in a bed and the rows of visitors will come say their rehearsed goodbyes before heading off to some Mexican café for lunch. My eyes will close forever unobtrusive. They’ll burn me up and throw me away and move on to the next. I’m not worth gold in memory.

If anyone ever really knew. The fire in these fingertips. But I’m not even a chalice to spit in, heavenly father, there masturbating behind the altar. I am tik-tok Indian headlock. Those days out there on the Arizona prairies and the majestic treasures of dinosaur bones and petrified wood. Petrified? I’ll show you petrified. Just look back into the annals of my broken-hearted life. But haven’t we all been at the dead end of the road?

I hear so many people talking now about the end of the world while at the same time someone’s biggest concern has something to do with French fries or a prescription drug or a habitual molestation of the mind. I have no kin kind. Those things called family have taken off to space. I wish I could join them on some spiraling yellow planet with rings… But then again, I would just as eagerly take the crashing waves of memory.

And the world won’t even bother to know this. Some other’s words mean more. Somehow like hot dogs on a steel machine slowly turning in some shit life convenience store on the edge of a town with no soul. To ever think I would be there again. Me. Corroded like a vampire with rust on his wings. Me. A voodoo skeleton frosted in flesh. Me. A stock market number. A file. A digital memory. A frozen half-love. Left to die alone in a January Midwest storm of near snuffing it engagement.

Fornicating memories strike horror show in my dreams, and I awake with a scream. Love turned Titanic. Iceberg asphalt and body skids down the yellow lines of disturbed antelope dreams. Lunging forth like a prep school foil. College. To be that Rolex on the wrist. Yeah. Maybe I can’t continue with that line of thought. It will leave me endlessly basking in a dirty parking lot at dawn with a floorboard full of Russian roulette razors and Spanish bayonets. Mother dashes out the front door screaming at her psychotic son she never meant to birth. He was stabbing the stranger in the stomach with a poison tip. It was something similar to a bee sting.

I was never meant to be here. They should have gone through with the whole keeping me in the oven on Thanksgiving thing. I was going to be stuffed up the turkey’s ass. I was always stuffing, never meat. I was the 8mm mistake quaking on the makeshift screen in the basement. I was the one always watching from the sidelines because I was the one who never trusted the cage. But the cage is where they want you to be. The cage makes you controllable and convincing and good and like a conforming cow waiting to have your teats torn off and tossed aside to the thunder gods.

It’s 10:13 in the p.m. and I am barely there. My heart keeps beating but I don’t know why. My motions are endless, yet I never leave here.

By
Aaron Echoes August
On A Day

Created image

On a day

When I was blind

To the world a bomb

Am I the only one to see

The darkness inside of me?

Fragrant spells snow like crystal dander

From the rooftops above another tangled bed

A crippled winter branch

Knocks at the window to see

If we’ve been faithless rivers

Flowing water slits like wrists

In my fine apartment

With my fine view

With everything except what is new

Out there dancing under the snow and street lights

Wishes too good for me

Life is too much of a dream

Indigo dawn haze

Paints forever beautiful

On my wayward days

Out there, the other side of the world

The only reason to be

A divine message

This night of wind and drunk

I wrap the wounds of all that disappears

In the view of my rear-view mirror

The only one who sees

What everything meant to me

By
Aaron Echoes August
Sun Bones

Created image

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

Created image

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

Created image

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

Created image

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.