CEREAL AFTER SEX

Have you heard of 15 items or less?

I was wide awake and dreaming in the express lane at the food store.

“That’s 15 items or less mam, can’t you read the sign? It’s all lit up there in green and white in the grocery line.”

She had more like 15 times 15 items in her cart and damn coupons on top of that. I could tell the wild-haired hippie clerkie was getting all screwed up in his mojo by her lack of consideration for the rules and etiquette of grocery shopping.

I could tell the guy ahead of me, the guy with the black plastic basket with just a few things in it, wanted to punch her in the face. I could tell he was a bit peeved with all his heavy sighing and mumblings under his breath which soon became audible to the world over the loudspeaker:

“You dumb bitch!”

So, as I said, I was wide awake and dreaming in the express lane at the food store. My life clock was on hold. I looked around and all I saw was candy bars and flustered clerkies running here and there because they looked all short-handed and stuff and I guess that was because of the wildfire and everyone on fire and dying.

So, the world stopped inside of me whilst it spun like a swarm of horny hornets all around me. I thought about the universe while I looked at chocolate bars. We know the universe is there – but where exactly is THERE. Where IS the universe? Chocolate bars with almonds. Coupon-clipping clods taking up time and space. Why am I so worn out and disheveled?

The beep, beep, beep of the checkout lanes buzzed around in my head. I was there, but I was not there. I was thinking outside of the box, I always think outside of the box, way outside of the box, because I do not like the box. The box is full of narrow-minded doinks easily swayed by false flags and idiot box propaganda. 642 channels and there is nothing on.

I waited and waited, grasping my shopping cart like a baby carriage, gently rocking the carton of organic milk and bag of donuts into a restful sleep.

I noticed how her inflated flesh was packed tightly into her polyester, frantic pants. She seemed annoyed that the clerkie wasn’t doing his job properly when he slammed her hunk of watermelon down on the counter.

“Please be careful with my watermelon! I want to speak to your supervisor!”

Are you fucking kidding me?

If it wasn’t against the law, I would have pulled up a couch and coffee table and sparked one up right then and there. But then everything is against the law, isn’t it? Slamming someone’s watermelon is a violation of someone’s rights, right? Everything is a violation except for the ones who create the code of violations and place them in our heads and warn us that they are violations.

It’s 2:06 a.m. and I cannot sleep. It’s too hot to sleep. I have words tumbling around in my head that make no sense and I need to just tap them out for right now.

529 words, no make that 531 words, no … 538 words … of blah.

I am looking at the spine of a book on one of my bookshelves: The Day After Roswell.

Turn to page 137 and the seventh sentence will be your future:

“He told the New York Times in 1955 that the nations of the world will have to unite, for the next war will be an interplanetary war.”

Just what I need, interplanetary war.
At the Speed of Mary Jane’s Insomnia

I was once told by an electric psychic that I would die in a car crash in Montana on a sweet summer day in June in the year 2013. It didn’t happen. But the light bulbs we had for dinner last night were delicious. They illuminated my guts, and she could then see what I was feeling for real as we sat across from each other at the round table with the big candle in the middle. There was a lot of crunching going on and they say that eating glass isn’t good for you, that it can cut your guts to ribbons and then you will float away to the great ZOO in the sky and hang out with the gibbons, swinging from pearly gate to pearly gate with fury motivation and momentum.

“Pass the beans. Pass the barbecue sauce. Pass the don’t you have any manners?”

The next night our neighbor from across the hall had crock-potted some brisket but apparently, he didn’t cook it right and it came out all stringy and overly wet and he pounded on our door and said he had way more than he could eat himself and so he gave us some.

“I have potatoes too. Take some. Eat them. Enjoy them.”

We had only been married for 41 days and already she was getting on my nerves. She was making me climb the walls of our small pad across from the milkshake factory in a big city far, far away from wherever you are right now, so don’t try to go there, you won’t find it. We do not live on any map or globe. I read books when she bores the hell out of me. She has a strange fascination with cheese. Every time we go to the grocery store down and around, she quickly makes for the Department of Deli to peruse the plethora of cheeses they have there. So much cheese that I can’t believe, and they all have weird names and weird shapes and there are so many I do not remember, nor have I cataloged them. She has to look them over closely; she tries to smell them through the wrapping, she shakes them like an unopened Christmas present as if some pile of diamonds was just going to come falling out and then she wouldn’t need me anymore.

The crock-potter knocked on the door again to see if we would be interested in his lemon chicken and sausage feast. The stereo was blaring, and the chick was belly dancing, and I could not hear him knocking at first until he nearly bashed in the door.

“I crock-potted some lemon chicken and sausage, and, you know me, I made too much again.”

“Come in, you know my wife the belly dancer, right?”

“Absolutely. That’s one fine belly you got there.”

She stopped dancing, turned, and jumped out the window.

“Holy belly flop!” That’s what the crock-potter said.

“Don’t worry about her; she does that all the time.”

He went to the window and sure enough saw her rolling across the small patch of lawn and then she went running around in circles and down the street.

“Where is she going?”

“I don’t know, she’s insane and we barely communicate.”

“But you’re married. Surely you have some kind of convos?”

“Nope.”

“Then why did you marry her?”

“I don’t know. She told me about a mysterious island and that intrigued me. She said she would take me there, but now I’m thinking it was all a bunch of bullshit.”

“Your apartment is small.”

“Care for a cigar?”

“Got any Pink Floyd?”

I rummaged through the record collection throwing albums here and there trying to find a Pink Floyd record.

“Nope, sorry. I must have eaten it.”

“Well, I’m going to go home then and prepare my menu for tomorrow.”

“Any ideas?”

“Tuna casserole.”

*****

I sat on the couch reading a book about antique rocking horses when she came flying in the door all sweaty and out of breath.

I looked up at her.

“What the hell is going on?”

“The world is on fire!”

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed to the window.

“Look!”

I closed my book and went to the window. It seemed absurd and impossible, but she was right. The world WAS on fire. Everywhere I looked there was burning going on. Everywhere I looked there was black smoke rising from the Earth and spiraling up toward God’s red velvet footstool. It was all orange and maniacal. It was the bombs, the bombs, the bombs, they had come raining down like a lava thunderstorm of human parking lots of lost and twisted souls.

“I’m too tired for this shit,” and I closed the curtains, went into the bedroom and closed the door.

She came knocking.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m tired. I need to rest up. Tomorrow will most likely be a pretty rough day.”

“You dumb bastard! This is hardly the time to be sleeping.”

“What do you propose I do then, eh? As if anything would even matter my dear.”

“I want a divorce!”

“Good! So do I. Now leave me be so I can get some rest.”

I heard her stomp away and then the front door slammed. It was beginning to get very hot in the room and I turned on the fan. The breeze felt like winter in Bermuda and I was hungry for pineapple. I telephoned the crock-potter.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s your neighbor.”

“Oh, hi!”

“Listen, I know the world is burning to bits and pieces, but I was wondering if you had a good recipe for glazed ham, you know, the kind where you put the round slices of pineapple on top.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I could crock-pot a ham and throw some pineapple chunks in there. Would that be OK?”

I thought about it. Damn, the apartment was getting really hot.

“Yeah, that sounds pretty good.”

“I’m excited.”

“So am I. Just don’t screw it up like you did the brisket.”

The bedroom roof caved in.
The Lonely Arcade

Photo by Mikechie Esparagoza on Pexels.com

shattered windows cry like Sunday peacocks
warning of the impending doom of glass
falling like rain
on the slaves of the night
the weary soldiers
trudging through a thick fog of poorly scented gloom,
thick like bruised syrup,
thick like hot, metal mud
clogging the valves of another heart
gasping for love –

the wind blew through the lonely arcade
dead leaves danced
against the dirty brick of store fronts
the faded head of a plastic clown,
the old paint of his face peeling away,
wobbled without notice
his wide eyes
stared off into nothingness
and I could hear him laugh at me from the inside
as I walked on by
not a charming or entertaining laugh,
but a hollow, haunting one
and it perpetuated the chill in the air,
the loneliness,
the frozen desolation –

all the shops were closed for the season,
all the gamerooms shuttered up tight
and a couple ratty kids
raced through on their bikes
their shouts
and hate-filled laughter
echoed through the walkways,
bounced off the big panes of fragile glass
and pounded against my head …
I listened
as the sound of their whirling wheels faded away
as if they had suddenly taken flight
then crashed into a cloud –

and I stuck my cold hands in my pockets
looked down at the gurgling stream
from atop a small, stone bridge
searching for a glimpse of reality
in the icy waters below
as it flowed
like thick sex and lava
tumbling over the smooth stones
and the sound
of silent cold
beat against my head
and I drew my sword
and ran it through my imagination
causing me to fall over the edge
to vanish,
to drown in the void
of an angel’s troubled and guilty soul …
Anti-Architect

Photo by Longxiang Qian on Pexels.com

At 32 you’re not 24 anymore, and at 43 you’re not 31 anymore, so said the Jack-O-Lantern out on the porch, waiting to be bashed and smashed onto Cockleberry Street … and it was the invisible night all breathing out there with a chill, I can feel it through my open window even in November to let the air and the smokestack vibes in, vodka mathematics scrawled out on the wall with some leftover charcoal from art school days. I was going to be an artist, an artist with practical purpose, so they said. I was going to be an architect, I was going to be the next Mike Brady or Art Vandelay, but I took the way of the pen and heart and withdrew from school and moved to Denver to be hip and fresh and I got all beat up and raw in Mile High Land and needed something more and so sailed off to Los Angeles … and there it was, the City of Angels, where I finally felt alive and fine and free and fucked up for nothing but savage and good purposes … and time tilts forward.

I was in Moon River, that beacon place by the water, looking down at the carpet and watching the aliens taking long, romantic walks through the shag of it all. I was all numb form the dumb of it all, out there, on the other side of Peaceful Valley where they all stare off into dead blue space or stare off into their HD telephone screens, slow-motion rolling billiards balls doing tiny, tiny knock knocks inside their brains … baa, baa, baa the sheep strum the perilous strings of a world turned upside down while praying to the idiot gods.

I watched the road for danger but there was nothing but yellow peace up there in that atmosphere where I tried to dial her love in on the universal radio … static heartbreak, scars of distance, the lake waves lapping at the shore … the watery, rhythmic shewoo, shewoo, shewoo of chilled water against sand, rock, time, darkness, bright lights … Manitowoc, Whitefish Bay, the one way, way up and the chant, rant of the green and trees and ivy and smell and mysteries that swell all along my bones and soul … lonely carpenter ant man outside wood lodge sitting in a plastic chair smoking Marlboro killers and nodding “hello” to the night guests, that swirling mouth of the desk clerk coming out in the chill just to rub my way and talk about addiction and talk about dreams and talk about life everlasting. But at the way we wage war, love doll, there will be nothing left, for we gladly fund killing and the raping of life without a tick, but ignore the wide, starving eyes of the battered and the innocent … and we sit here, and try to call ourselves, humanity???
Pink Shirts in Cuckoo Land

… it’s laughing about a pink shirt that matters

Pink shirt hanging on a rack in hot land Nashland

the mannequins greet with greater smiles than the real ones

corporate propaganda BS blurbs hanging, dangling all around the world

to coax the penniless to remain penniless, enslaved, inflamed, amazed by the threads sewn by the dead in third-world jungle towns of lumber and dirty sandwiches

tussled jungle juice at the straw hut bar

afro shot glasses watching scrambled CNN

machine gun toddies burning flags, slathering the bed bugs with flames

the world all-around a crooked mess

the hate, the slain, the empty and ignorant souls making godless claims of god

it’s all the same

from end to end of Amorika

this global force for greed

brown sewing fingertips

pin-pricked like diabetic blood

so the PR smiles drip on

the glossy lives of commercialized bliss drip on

my wife’s beautiful Sonic Ocean Water eyes drip on

and she is my sanctuary

love is thy sanctuary

family is thy sanctuary

for the world has offered so little

but yet into the world she fell like an angel

all the rest is glittery ash

it’s this bond of love that matters

it’s laughing about a pink shirt that matters

it’s collapsing all the doubts and false dreams like a circus tent, kick out the poles, let the world blow

to give of myself is all I have left

to wrap myself in and all around her

to furiously love like fire

despite the chill of the Earth

By
Aaron Echoes August