CEREAL AFTER SEX

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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
Sanctums of Stickiness

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Nothing in this head but letters to the dead

The hollow hell of yellow hills

I berate the dirt and uranium trails

The travelers wail

Sitting by a fire in the drunken woods

Blue-white flames pierce the black of night

Then on the beach

On the shores of the Gulf of Mexico

El stupido

I’ll go at you with dragon glass

And send you back to the dirt

In Sierra Sierra

Where the red stone wages peace with the blue sky

And grass is stones and trees have pricks

Yet jagged emotions in the adobe houses

Where the people howl like forgotten wolves

Spires of snake pain

Inflamed margarita nerves

The days last forever and ever

The sun never hides

Men with electric drills and masks

Climb streets of heat revving

The lost and the depraved

The children wander aimlessly

Bicycles click on palm tree lined streets

Slowly they sail in a daze

Dreamland sugar boats

In sanctums of stickiness

They all sleep with the stars

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.
Opium Milk

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I stepped into the room and spun the globe

A world of magnified madness started to fly

Countries stuck to the walls

Oceans fell to the floor

Mysterious islands went out the door

I was glued to the window

A spring memory in orange sun

I could hear the menagerie of birds through the glass

I lit a pipe and took a puff or two

The birch trees are quite white I noticed

As they straddle the horizon with bark groins

I want to get lost inside those ivory soldiers

What would be on the other side?

A new world with new hope

Where the licorice tastes like butter

And everyone isn’t so hateful just better

And the poppy pods breathe milk

To calm yet another day

A yellow porch I rock

And watch time make its way

Through the canals of the Earth

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Walk

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A man walks from a house to the edge of a lake. The house he leaves behind is white, so it blends in with all the snow. It’s modern and elegant. Straight edges and lines, levels, elevated, lots of windows, and even now someone looks out one after him.

His breath screams out like a chemtrail as he stands by the edge of the partially frozen lake, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. The air is eerily still. He hears ice crack and snow fall from a limb, hitting the white ground with a muffled thud. Deep winter it is. Deep like the trials of his heart. He never meant to go crazy. He had been high on drugs.

He tilts his head and looks up at the blue winter sky. A white sun looks down at him. There are a few stray clouds, but the rest is a clean blue. He turns to look back at the trail. He steps toward it and begins his daily hike. It cleanses his mind to walk outside in this seemingly endless refrigerator. Mountains in the distance. High. Snow-capped. Looks like Norway. But it’s Canada. He thinks of riding his motorcycle. The speed flashes through his mind. The helmet. The throttle. The curves. Straightaways. The sound of the engine. The flash of the landscape. Now it’s in the garage. Silent and still, waiting for spring and the power of his crotch.

He’s surrounded by trees, and a cascading forest. The foothills slope upward, he walks along their legs. The man picks up a walking stick, drives the point. His boots crunch through the snow. His breath is like dragon fire. He reflects on all his mistakes. And now he sees how people look at him. They don’t say anything, but they think it. He can read minds, eyes, and gestures. They pretend he is part of them, but he knows he’s not. Not after the family gathering where he lashed out at her. The upturned table, the yelling, the crying. It didn’t really happen. He was there, but he wasn’t. Then the sudden kiss. It wasn’t him. She had been making banana pudding. He ran upstairs and locked himself in the bedroom.

He stops to catch his breath. He’s at a point where he can look down and see the lake spread out like a misshapen icy bruise. He finds a rock that serves as a chair. The muted air soothes him. Someone had wanted to call the police. She protested even after all of it. Let him cool his jets. Let him be alone. He had climbed out a torn window instead and ran away to the center of town.

He smacked his boots together to rid them of snow before he went into the house. She had coffee ready for him. The house was warm and quiet. It was a Sunday in early February. He sat there in the kitchen with her. She looks at him with concern. “How are you feeling?” she asks. “Better,” he replies.

“You’ll behave when they visit?” she aches to know.

“You can always lock me in a room if you’re that concerned.”

She scoots her chair away and goes to the sink and dumps her coffee.

“What did you do that for?” he asks.

“You make me so uncomfortable,” she says.

He swipes a hand at his own coffee cup, and it flies from the table and smashes on the floor. “There’s the door,” he says with steam. He gets up and goes to his office and closes himself in. He hears the garage door open, and a car engine start. He peers out a window and watches her drive away, again.

Alone once more with the memories that haunt.

“It wasn’t me… It didn’t happen.”

By
Aaron Echoes August
Evil Love

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She could fill the entire house with crap, and I was expected to keep my mouth shut.

That’s how it was back in the days of evil love. Junk mail would be piled to the moon. Boxes filled the floors to the point one would have to carefully dance around them to avoid tripping. Laundry would be stacked high on a chair waiting to be folded or hung up. And that was our life. Piles of things everywhere. I had no space of my own. Everything was hers. If I wanted to enjoy something, anything… It was postponed indefinitely. My feelings, thoughts, desires, wishes, goals, and dreams were all crushed down into a coffee can and shut away in a dark corner of a closet. I was never allowed to be human, and it felt like it. It was suffocating and painful to the head and guts.

I’m worn out from worry. I worry about everything, every speck of dust. And here we go with the storm countdown again. 50 minutes until Armageddon. Rooftops torn open. Watermelon-size hail. 612 mph winds. Torrential rain that will lead to catastrophic flooding. Power outages that will last for weeks. Trees falling onto houses. People crushed in their beds. Lives ripped apart! You will lose everything!!

The weather people are so very over dramatic. And it makes me worry.

But then I remember letting go of swim trunks at Laguna Beach. Where the sand is made of silver switches. And the sandwiches are made with golden bread. I remember hanging there in my green Ocean Pacific tee. That’s when I had a hard body, muscles. I was lean and firm. And I stood on a rock above the sea and the music poured out of the cantina, the waves were crashing, the California sun was beaming like an eye from Oz. I put on shades to be cool. Then the long, murderous crawl back to the basin as the sounds swam to the sky.

To an empty apartment. A refrigerator in the living room. No oven. Hot plate. No bedroom. Couch. Palm trees outside. People looking in my windows. Bad bottle dreams and a typewriter on a table. Hot electric love among the natives. No wishing stars, only the dome that traps all the light pollution. Police helicopters in the sky. Their beams searching, seeking, never surrendering. They caught me nude at the curtains. One has to duck from the light before they laugh like the Joker.

The world wishes us well but how well can we be when the world dishes out depravity. Here I am what seems like 400 years later from anything else I have ever known. I sit in a dark room with the things in my head. The news is obscene. The rampaging stupidity now swarming the globe. And it makes me worry. I don’t understand the blind acceptance of utter buffoonery. I want to shake people until the rocks fall out of their heads. And then these godly claims. They kneel upon dead boxes and pray for love but practice hate. And then they stand and applaud the butchering of a once great nation.

I want to be on a high mountain in Colorado. I just want peace and quiet. I want to look out and see the refuge. I want to taste the air and swallow forgiveness. I want to see the armies of rocks and the soldiers of trees. I want to hear the sound of a mountain stream and smell the void of people. I just want to breathe.

Then I’m in the grocery store and the aisles are clogged with people. I can’t get to what I want. Ever. There’s always somebody in the way. I need space to… Breathe. I can’t get it. I hate it. I need to fill my cart with expensive food that wasn’t going to be expensive anymore. Orange lies all the time. It’s all congregated chaos. Two cashiers work the lanes. Two more stand by the self-checkouts on either end staring into space while the ding-a-lings try to do their jobs. It’s a nuthouse, man. I’m getting hungry. The eyes blink. The lights go out. The storm of evil love has crushed us, but not forever.

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.
Hotel Hectic

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I sat on the corner of Hectic Street and Blasphemy Lane, waiting, swamped in the neon gasses of Hotel Hectic and purely beyond, and checking my watch every two minutes and wondering if your train has arrived or if you just said “fuck it, love is a waste of my taste.” And I evaporate near the rails so pounding against the land. And everyone gets off to greet another being, to jump into someone else’s arms, and I watch all this while sitting alone on a bench drinking a whiskey sour from a big whistle… And you decided not to come, decided I was not worth the effort or the pulse or this place on Planet Love Me Tender, and I smoked a cigarette with head bowed and soul cracked, all around the background full of cheers and laughs and I could even hear the kisses… Until the day dropped away, and I stayed, reckless and abandoned, once again, to fuck a world left unseen by the real.

And it was broken bar time once again, and “maybe that is the reason for it all,” some mad chick all fucking drunk said to me, belting me in smoky, neon midnight glow rope, you starless wonder, you beautiful, cracked lyric staining the wall of everlasting grace, in some downtown place, where the beggars and the whores ache for decapitation, in starlit clock towers, your heartbeats wasted away, losing it, trembling it, wishing for it… To be nothing but a quiet shore, for fucking once, I wish they would leave me alone to just think… To just enjoy my raspberry drink until the fire gets too high and the body finally rejects the abuse and puts you on tubes in some Manchester hospital in Angleterre, where the walls and the sounds are all too damn sterile, and in the middle of lonely night, you have nowhere to turn but inside out and upside down, reaching for a marmalade viceroy that isn’t there, because they took it away from you, replaced it with their medical voodoo, and you look back on your life, way far fucking back, and you have to close your eyes, because it just isn’t there anymore, and you know no one cares, they are all out there, with destinations in their heads and they write letters to the deads, but think nothing of you now… Crashing.

Flatline faux pas. The lighter flicks flame in cold winter dark. I am still here all you wombats. You all didn’t kill me yet.

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 Caspian Tea House

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I was in an Azerbaijan tea house at the shore of the Caspian Sea. The house was soft in texture and made of orange wood and white curtains. I went to a large window facing the slow, curved road and looked out. The water was the deepest green blue, like the woman’s glasses at the optical store back in the States merely a moment ago. I looked down at a dais made of the same, orange-colored wood and there sat an open book against its lip, a guide, old silky paper like in an expensive Bible, but it wasn’t the Bible, just a book, maybe with names, and I walked right through the window and across the road because I wanted to get closer to the water.

I looked down at the shoes I was wearing… Dress shoes in the sand that had blown onto the walkway. I thought that was strange. The shoes were made of the same orange wood as the house and dais. It was sunny out with a slight breeze tossing about in the air. The water was high and left only a narrow pathway of sand along the beach on which to walk. The light voices came through the dream there. Odd people came streaming in, gawking and pointing at how astounding the water was. Tourists. I just wanted to be alone. I wanted to be alone to just stand there and look at the water and to do nothing else ever again but love her.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Chaos and Color

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This world has a stick up its ass and Romeo is unhinged

Juliet has aborted her American dreams

With a uranium-gilded coat hanger

Highway sounds ungloom the world now

Star-spangled Heaven’s sheet

Unburden us from the greed

In the aisle of serenity

Where no one walks or stalks

A lingering solar eclipse buttons the sky

A pathway bends toward a stoic horizon

Rough gray hills, short trees, dry scrub

Bottle-brush cacti

A whimsical dark world

The emptiness, the bleakness

Almost beautiful and soothing to a muddied mind

No chaos and color on high

Broken birds float through time

A wooden post fence stands hobbled

A broken gate opens

Time absorbs all life

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.