Sunburn my lady sun burns morning glory glows of you while I wait in the queue on some dock in Liverpool the dusk dawn of ending day perched high on the wireless clouds polished antique haze a dirty orange smear in the sky a trench coat wrapped in rain a pocket watch ticking out the pain songs of doves and ice-cold cod tolling bells of doom booming through the fog the sunburn rains on down an apple, a rose turning brown halfway through the memories on haunted hill halfway through the turnstiles stuck in glue sun burns red, sun burns blue a wind sick hotel in desert hue sagebrush rolling through dry dust dew
I’m tapping on the dirty windowpane scratching out a lullaby with jagged nails the lovesick howl of another lonely road the lovesick boil of crooked yellow veins pumping globs along the asphalt trail thunderclouds muscle the mountains bloated bruises whispering might I take a flashlight and head out into the night sun burns down the juice of a pale moon stars like angel eyes fill the room of lightless morning desert bloom there’s a knock on the door but no one is home there is a fist on the brick shattering tender bone sunburn rains down wanderer all alone the clover and cattle moan a sherbet shining erection of sun blocks out the light of all that is done wet spit harbor lights shimmer and shake wet spit city lights clamber on the lake little blue boats sweep against the waves sunburn eye scans the sky to alleviate the savage to tempt the tea kettle to howl to rise one’s heart from horizontal rest yoga flirtations in a rocking chair sunburn swirl in a rocket ship her bottom lip licked moist within the sway of a hammock
The sun burns a Bakersfield cathedral porcelain dolls wet with makeup make their way up God’s holy stairs and even angels stare at the divinity of sunburnt blonde kneel down and pray coddle the crucifix sun burns Jesus stained with holes high noon it’s time to go to the factory or the ghost town to the clown with an upside down frown time to go to longevity to sweat the sweat of brevity motel mattress smells of dust motel mattress saturated with lust checkout time was long ago pounding on the door… It’s time to go
Sun burns the empty rot of a drive-in movie lot weeds and grass all a cluster speaker boxes corroded like old toasters the flicker of the screen sun burns a celluloid dream twists and melts and scatters away yet another sunburnt Technicolor Day cloudless blue burns right on through to this heart and on every bruise sun burns the junkie loading a needle high times on the highway 90 mph plus to negativeland screaming green neon the width of the band whiskey sour at happy hour the beat of the desolate the beat of the chagrined taps out the code of a breathless heartbeat swimming rings around the warm wet circles piling up on the warped mahogany bar sun burns the ice chime singing to the glass sun burns the momentum of a lover’s last stance
Back home in Hollywood trying to find the ocean back home in Dino’s Den the racing pen the hog tied hypocrisy of CNN humming American voodoo at the tempo of a sunburnt porcelain doll in heat swipe the cherry bomb across the mouth 98.6 degrees of candy store junk dripping all along the Walk of Fame from hence the angel cove I came sun burns the jungle land of another Eden and Disneyland heat up the honey in the jet stream blur out the flag in another American dream sun burns the justice and the liberty sun burns the momentary meaning for us all.
Enter your email address below to follow Cereal After Sex and receive notifications of new posts. Thank you for supporting indie writers.
I bought a green and red striped lampshade in a small shop on the corner of 5th and Main in some battered and bruised American town. It made my lonely place look like Christmas, but more importantly, I needed something to shelter me, from the rain, coming in my windows, running down the walls, it’s even chasing me, down and through the halls. Can’t remember what to see, I was looking for something to just say, something beautiful, something truthful, wondering what parts matched your eyes, your crystal-blue cornflower eyes, that made your face a place of peace, like high-country grass beneath the better parts of space, like a white farmhouse, a red barn, a green lawn, all ringed by a wooded place of trees and quiet and the amber hands of some Summer God, reaching down, parting the canopy and letting in the light.
Clothes void of bodies, flutter in the winds of my crowded and unkempt closet, the one over there, on the wall full of bullet holes and big, red hearts all shattered and astray. I got venom in my pocket, I got a bottle rocket — “don’t shoot your eyes out,” the maniac under the bed, said, and Charlie Chan stares in through the window, biting down hard on a skeleton key. I was getting way beyond damaged… Much too soon and much too hard by the tollbooth dictator via Kansas way, that hot sway on the highway and the hunt for a Motel 6, somewhere near Lawrence, where Burroughs used to live and where he died, but it got too late and hazy, the lust wore off like bad medicine and I went on driving—to Kansas City, Amorika, via the fatal stroke of midnight.
Sleeping pills and mind medicine sat on the bedside table like jewels. I could not sleep. I rattled my feet. I stared at the white ceiling, where there cast was the shadow of a one-eyed alien lamp, and then I thought it would be a good time to take a ride in my vimana, and I put on my flying pajamas, wrapped the dog tags around my neck, and then carefully crawled inside. I closed the hatch and ignited the mercury, and we went up, up, up and out through the retractable skylight of night like Mr. Wonka and his magical elevator. I looked around as I rode over the world, the rooftops all shimmering and wet from the rain running down your face, and the Earth an electric grid, with some places very dark, these, the dens of the poor and hungry and forgotten—and some places very bright, these, the dens of those that do all the forgetting.
So, my vimana and I flew around undetected, no one knew us like I know them, if she only knew, what I know, what I know, what I know, of everything back then—and the sun began to creep over the edge of my destiny, and I felt it was time to bring her down. The vimana landed in some other world, looked like the realm of De Smet, South Dakota in the late 1700s. There was a great meadow of tall, yellow grass and it swayed back and forth a bit in the light breeze that they had there. I shut the vimana down and crawled out. There was a chill in the air, and I put on my long, black coat I kept stowed behind the seat. There was a howl of emptiness in the air—as if I had been the only man that had ever been there. The sun was not orange or yellow, but a bluish white. It was a steely sun, a cold sun, a sun undone by time and space itself, but it lit the world around me, no less than the sun of my own.
I buttoned my black coat and put on my Moroccan cowboy hat and lit up a Marlboro red. I looked around at the landscape, seemingly vacant of any man or animal. To my left, a great, long wall of gray yet bedazzled rock for as far as I could see. To my right, that sea of tall, yellow grass crashing against some invisible shore like the feathers of tender Eve. Then straight ahead. There was something there, on a small rise of land. I wondered, if it was the grandmother vimana, waiting for me on the landing pad porch, ringing the dinner bell with the tail of a comet, hanging out the clothes for proper dying, ready to depart to my new world of love and peace and long sleeps in bone-bleached sheets in some white house on a clean street in small town bizarro-world Amorika. I crushed my smoke out with the sole of my cool boots, the boots I bought in Albuquerque right before all that madness began in the Nob Hill pub, and I walked on, toward grandmother vimana.
As I got closer to it, I realized it was no mother ship at all, but instead, a grounded structure hewn from sturdy, gray wood, now bleached by the blue sun. There were four sides, a roof, a porch, rectangular windows with crisp white curtains, and a door. I walked the perimeter of the place and looked around, over my shoulder, no one to be found. I peeked in the windows. There was something there, but I could not tell. It was somewhat dark and hazy in there, so I went for the door. The white knob was cold to the touch. It turned. The door was not locked; it opened with a nearly inaudible squeak. I stepped inside, the wind outside blew in. I walked around slowly, quietly, like an uninvited guest. The floors creaked. It was just the one room, that is all. The walls and the air in there were void of any signs of life. There was but one thing in the whole of the entire place, and that was a wooden chair; it was set near the window that faced the direction I came from. I sat down in the chair; I adjusted my Moroccan cowboy hat and lit up another Marlboro red. I stared out the window for a very long time; it never got dark ever again. My vimana was gone. The wind shook the tall, yellow grass for as long as I stayed there, which was forever, like her crystal-blue cornflower eyes, melting winter’s dawn at the very moment you leave dreams and enter life.
Do you enjoy a good short story? Consider signing up to follow Cereal After Sex and receive notifications of new posts. Just enter your email address below. Thanks for supporting our publication, and the hard work of independent writers.
Oxidized eyes and diamond fireflies doing the rotating Merry-Go-Roundabout above in the sky, under hot sun ozone hole as I’m mining in desert Minehead up the breach highway linear West near the Hondo – I’m hitting into dirt wall with pounds and pounds of frustration while the rattlesnakes and the antelope watch, cocking their different heads in wonder, sniffing the air with nose and tongue, searching for an unwound rag doll named Sheena in this desert Mars land of bar.
There’s a tattered zip line over a deep gulley to get across when the mad, mad water rushes in from the West – but this place be bone dry today and yesterday and probably has been for a long, long time by the looks of the bleached skeletons down in there playing bad hands of poker with weathered cards set to reel off at any second with the slightest breeze. This is Deadland and I am deep in it, shins and thighs scratched to hell by the muscled, thorny bitch plants that thrive here, the ones that dine on salt and spit and kick at you with tentacles of nails.
It’s Christmas day and it’s still too damn hot. I’m hiding from St. Nick because I know he’s going to beat me with a pillow sack full of fresh beehives. The family of strangers back in the village is all too damn hypnotic, admiring those dumb faces as they hold up the shiny new toaster as if it were a mirror – you’re burnt bread baby, I can smell it from here. How can you live in such a fucking catacomb Mrs. Nannette Hourglass? How can your soul stand to be so bound? I for one cannot take it and let out of there like a hurricane playing a harp, a roughshod whisper, phantom skin squeezing through the door, starting the car, driving away, away, away.
Sure, I think about my bad case of anti-social and radical behavior as I ride alone on the Rose Highway smoking sheepskin cigarettes and listening to defunct, angry music. Sure I feel the rocking horse guilt well up inside and think I might puke it all out over the steering wheel, but this mind muscle can be hallucinatory, can trick you into believing that what you are doing is right when in fact could be wrong, but most likely is correct anyways, baby – listen to your soul, not the fucking TV – for Christmas is meant to be spent alone, alone in the dry hot, hot whorehouse, alone to recall the dead ones that used to give you gifts; gifts now broken, now tattered, the ruined parts sent back to China or Bangladesh where they are piled in heaps right next to the used and worn bodies that made them in the first place – stockpiles of corporate shit and the starving enslaved with those melted, plastic fingers scratching at the emergency exit just to get out, out, out. Smile and sell for hell.
The sausages are boiling in the pan over the small fire I have built here. The smell is fine. The stomach is growling. I look at my scratched pocket watch – they are all probably sitting down right now for the big feast and the blah, blah, blah, hah, hah, hah, chit chat shit of waggish talk whilst imaginary butcher knives twist in the spine of who sits across. It’s all pretend love and love until the polite goodbyes and then the door slams and the backstabbing blurp, blurp comes rolling off those twisted tongues. I wanted no part of that; I wanted crisp sausages, quiet, fire and Christmas cheer – toasting the rocks, the gravel, the wayward scorps – it was lonely as hell either way.
There is the aftertaste of chagrin in my mouth and guts – oh, how I long for guilt-free freedom, how I long to never return to the same space twice, how I long to taste every road, every directional arrow, every point on the map, every carriage, every castle, every loch, every green garden ever grown, every ocean, every river, every trickle of light in some small English cottage – but I am far linear west poking at ash with the metamorphic girl sitting across from me now dressed in lava rock – it is the shimmering sheen of some prehistoric volcanic sacrifice in hallucination – the wild makeup and hair; the savage, spitty pout; the long, velvet legs leading to Heaven’s flesh; the eyes bursting like honey bombs set ablaze by a sharp, silver Zippo.
Flick, burn, inhale –
“Merry Christmas,” I say to her anyway.
She fades away, but I can still smell her – like roses and spray paint.
I thought I saw that dude Arafat scrambling around in rocks and brush, but the longer I stare the more I realize that nothing is real. It’s all a memory bank baby. We were all here many moons ago, rag-tagged in the back of some trashed out Euro sedan, barfing out the remnants of mad ragers all over the freshly polished desert floor, the groaning, the twisting and uneasy sleep – everything always comes back around again no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Memories are deposited, the pains and joys withdrawn – it’s like black-and-white Poland to me, wandering in rags, sleeping in parks, losing muscle just to hustle.
888 West End posh and some baby hot, hot lady in bed-ready red is sipping my best brandy like it’s water as she sits on my couch looking at all the shit I have on the walls. Does she even know she’s just a mannequin who happens to know how to breathe?
“So, it’s New Year’s Eve, and here we are.”
That’s what I say to her.
Her glassy eyes look up at me as if I were some loon.
“Do you like chainsaws?” she asks. “I’m afraid of chainsaws.”
She holds out her glass for more brandy.
“You know, this shit is pretty expensive.”
I pour her more of the brandy and walk out onto the veranda. She doesn’t get off the couch. She just sits there sipping my expensive brandy and staring off into space like some bucket of chicken in need of a warm towel. How can I tell her to get the hell out of here, but still be polite about it? Am I really that boring? Is it me? Has it always been me?
I turn just in time to see her putting on her coat and walking toward the door.
“Wait – it’s not midnight yet.”
She smiles, puts a chick cigarette between the frosted lips.
“So, what? “You are boring me; you always bore me.”
That’s what she said to me in that thick Euro accent.
“But wait, we could take a drive in my car. It’s fast. We can go wherever you want.”
She stopped at the door.
“All right, but you let me drive.”
She was a maniac behind the wheel, but I said nothing. I even removed my seat belt when she went faster, faster, faster.
“Are you afraid I will wreck your car, or worse, get you killed.”
I just let go and flew with her. She accelerated. Faster. Faster. She went faster still until we were out of the city and in the luscious throes of country dark.
“Are you afraid yet?”
She shut it down in some lonely void.
“It’s 12:01. I’m going home now.”
She got out of the car and walked away, disappeared into the dark woods, forever gone.
I poked at the ashes with a stick on Christmas day. The sun was still bright, and I was still alone. Would it ever be safe to go back? Why go back? Why keep going back? This life should not be a revolving door – push in once and go through, push in again and keep going through, push, push, push, until the end is beautiful enough to stay, the day she falls in with a first airport kiss that sends rockets to space.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 