PHOTONIC

PHOTONIC

by Jeremy Bauer 1350 Sadler Drive Apt. 10306 San Marcos, TX 78666 jeremybbauer@gmail.com

Acknowledgments: Poems from this chapbook have appeared in Everyday Genius, Life is precious and God and The Bible (Champion of the Couch Press), [PANK], Spooky Boyfriend, and UP.

PHOTONIC Normal Is it normal to put on a sweater only to find someone’s cut holes in the tits and poured sugar in the gas tank of my hovercraft Is it normal to see people sitting by complacent ponds and imagine an invisible hand tipping them forward or shoving them clear to the muck Is it normal that I froth at the tits when I think of you Is it normal to imagine there’s a cave somewhere with the blackest dark only I can see through and to want to live in that forever and when I leave the cave the darkness follows me as an obscuring cloud and will I be able to buy groceries still with this cloud and will people leave me alone Is it normal to wonder if we get further into space will we find a new form of cancer that’s worse than all the others on Earth and someone will say what kind of God would put cancer in space and then someone else will figure out that there really is a God and space cancer is the notrespassing sign on his bedroom door and then if we didn’t all die right away we’ll feel spiteful enough to finally work together for a higher goal of killing God and taking his bedroom for ourselves thanks mostly to the ones who were infected with space cancer but mutated instead of dying a lumpy death and so were blessed with cosmic powers like energy hiccups and chest lasers and I was the most powerfully mutated of all except you Is it normal to want the darkness of night to fall like black Tetris blocks to want darkness organized into black geometrics so I don’t have to fear its formlessness Is it normal to think back to that time in high school when I chugged a bottle of the grapest Dimetapp with cold pills and freaked as the floor sank, drawn into a black hole in the basement and where a dark wolf stood staring at me from behind dusty basement toys and thought that space was finally coming to me and think how special that is and how that thought could wrap around me in a quilt made of time and the universe, an infinite warmth Is it normal to see a bus full of kids pressing their faces to the windows and want that invisible hand to multiply to twenty and slap the windows and explode in a microsecond of light so they’ll always remember the mysterious phenomenon and have something that bonds them all together till their minds leave their bodies Is it normal that when I look at you I think of sewing our sides together and never looking at you even if you beg or maybe we start hugging and never stop and we think this hug is all the nourishment we need while we thin then decay and people will assume our skulls smiled till long after death and that seems like an alright way to go

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PHOTONIC Is it normal to feel this buzzing in my skin and know it’s my telekinesis starting and it was just a matter of time before my real power came to me to help fuck things up or really just make up for the clumsiness that ends any dream of being an origami boss Is it normal that when I see the high schoolers huffing in brown paper bags in front of my building I wonder what color of spray paint they’re using ‘cause I’ve heard silver’s good and I bet I could help them huff better and we could trade comic books and I’ll be like the cool older brother till I have to tell them they can’t huff anymore ‘cause they need a future and we’ll see who’s family and who’s getting robbed and smashed to chunky puddles behind the laundromat Is it normal to know that when I shudder or quiver at the feeling of cold existence it’s because I am pregnant with something I don’t understand but can channel without end and direct to make my world no more than an imprint like Little Boy on Hiroshima Is it normal that I wonder still what your power is and if its stronger than mine even though I know it has to be because I don’t know if it’s magnetism or gravity I’m feeling, but whatever the force, it’s suns beyond anything Is it normal to wonder if your eyes will be brown forever, when they’ll dull, when their density will finally break down into your skull and your face into the box that surrounds you Is it normal to think of this and only this for spans of time that must touch infinity in some dark and endless way that covers my body like an uncomfortable sweater and never lets me forget one of us will leave the other and I hope to everything it’s me

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PHOTONIC big baby plasma & dust indiana and the universe could no longer contain bobby knight, who was replacing bodies with black voids and infants with star clusters by the time he’d made it to the baseball diamond, he was already exploding, announcing to those gathered he was their burning bright salvation, vowing to love them to the final championship, and we vowed back, we’re with you till darkness tiny flickers of light grew mouths like pit bulls, scarring the animals and eating our hair to the scalp, curing our lice in a mean way as knight became the sun

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PHOTONIC Horses Won’t Obey Anything The penciled dawn hangs lazy, softer, mushier than a baby’s head.

Horses won’t obey anything until you can disprove their theories or cut the quanta of their hair.

The hooves sound too blue to me, taste too digital.

Daniel will never leave his native state of Earth, not while the dawn’s too busy and horse hooves are more like pink buzzings.

You oughta see me without a drink, my family sends their glows.

My lawn feels and moves like a badunkadunk, the vertigo a confusing sexy, and if you feel like an egret you should talk to your father.

She done stuck me right in the middle ‘a all of it, the green potato chip of hopeless indifference, seamless as the smell of city traffic.

Cloudy as a drought, feeling like shampoo suds, Daniel dunked on Jupiter when Saturn’s pick failed.

Jesse couldn’t tell if it was his shoes or the light he found in the precise infinite moment.

The South will rise again, so it is written, so it has been adopted by mud and grits.

Everyone could hear the moans when the cinderblocks grew cuddly.

Their eyes were blue, so when you peaked you were supposed to feel a child die and complacency and bathtubs full of mercury because there needs to be decency in the world.

Once again, with a firm taste of ketchup in my life, jump-rope dawn debated assy glows and The South, obeying baby pulls and lasso gravitations.

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PHOTONIC Backscatter at times, light seems an elemental form all its own. sometimes its state holds a liquidity, sometimes it appears part gas. light, in its far reaching and traveling nature, represents a hope that our present form is only a step in our natural progression, or ascendency. * midmorning, october 1993, my home is sold to a man who slaughtered our chickens after he’d found all their eggs, and another fed me my pet rabbit without telling me and though I never heard the screams, they’ve echoed within my body, waiting. * too often my body feels clippy yet graceful like a digital swan like the synergy between lamb and steak knife. * in the backscatter of luminous night, the universe was revealed to be a diagram of an appaloosa skull in the lite brite of a haunted attic apartment. *

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PHOTONIC darkness holds its own safety. it hides all things, and can reveal more than the brightest screen. the darkness holds an energy, realized by scared boys whose buzzards always pick in the light of day. * as my vessel reentered the atmosphere i was coming to the robotic warnings until everything started shaking so hard my head hit the floor and i was enveloped in light. * dawn, 1991, my father’s packing away the last of his things that aren’t me in Chiquita banana boxes. I run down gravel pleading something, trying to say all houses contain doors of fleshly thunder that interrupt toxic crusaders, and all houses from this point on will contain one cracked yolk of a boy dripping through the carpet, becoming the basement.

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PHOTONIC The Mists Johnny cooked the mists, clouds of deep chuckles that stayed up all night huffing gold spray paint and spending Johnny’s money on butterfly knives and glocks. Johnny went near wolf dog, turned skittery manimal always slinking to the shed behind the double wide his mother left him. He’d throw parties where his new shriveled friends brought orangehaired weed and weird pornos with names like EXXXTREME BUTTS 9 and sat giggling like elves over the outrageous sex. Johnny’s eyes turned black stagnant ponds where the worst things bred. The mists were swelling, growing with each assembly-line style cook Johnny performed.

What a Ford, what praise he deserved for ensuring the Midwest glowed—a beacon of efficiency. The mists took trophy antlers and gored the drywall, threw nail bombs at cats that wandered into Johnny’s yard.

The mists distracted people with pussy jokes while they swirled around their teeth eating rust spots into their smiles. Johnny used to have a motorcycle and a factory job. Johnny used to have wormholes in his chest, could transport you to other worlds by taking his shirt off and holding you close. One night the mists disappeared into the shed with a blowtorch.

Johnny ran from the cat-piss pyre through the hayfield to the woods behind the park. He went rabbit, hid in the moist ground. Johnny’s body was vibrating outside of time and bursting small pockets of space.

Johnny remembered welding brake pedals and his mother’s funeral. He pulled at his skin but it only came off near the sores. He thought, when you start shitting in the woods, you can never return from the world of animals.

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PHOTONIC Cluster Lately my back's been hurtin. Maybe it's all this light I've felt in stinging trickles. I think it's buildin up in there, formin somethin. I don't know what, I'm gonna need an MRI since the damn aspirin ain't workin.

1 month later...

Fuck me prickly, well I got the MRI and they found all that light, just a glowin cluster of, I don't know, either hell or heaven. When it came up on the monitor, this cluster looked like a thousand little men all hummin together, and the vibrations was what was makin my back hurt all the time.

The doctor took it out and let me keep it as a souvenir, but one day the jar it was in was just missing, and, well, now I kinda wish I woulda left it. What if it was my soul? What if it was Jesus?

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PHOTONIC Ain’t We Endless A priest, a priest, and an atheist walk into a bar.

They say to the bartender, "I'll have a beer."

The bartender says, "Oh, it's a special night. It's Wednesd'y. So that's three bucks a beer."

Priest says, "Ok'y." Priest says, "Ok'y." And the atheist says, "Ok'y."

A giraffe walks into the bar and yells, "Dickfest '93!"

Then he leaves the bar cause he's gotta go promote his event.

Bartender says, "Ok'y, whatta we have here?" And the fisherman walks up to the bar and says, "H’y, Bill." * Most of the time, I wake up covered in string.

Fishing, shoe, jellyfish with tiny dripping needles.

Like burning spaghetti. Or hell. Sometimes it's threads of gravity tying me to the bed, tripping me every time I walk to the bathroom. * Ain't we endless. Ain't ever'thing.

Ain't it always has been, will.

Just stretched out nowhere near infinite till it ain't.

Clear as math. * It’s about time I told you about my computer, here.

Built this myself. Guess you could say it’s needlepoint. I discovered this thread while sleeping.

Webs over everything, atomic filament.

No, you can’t see it. You remember noticing cat’s cradle tween buildings or people? Bananas and soccer teams? One day my face was just covered. Traced the specific glints’a light that let me see it.

Quit the factory to collect the thread. It ain’t that it won’t let me die. It’s what you learn.

You learn the commands for particle board, red squirrel, people and dust and space and light.

How to make God. You learn your own code.

All’s left’s to manipulate it.

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PHOTONIC Diary of Hunter Green #16 Dear Diary, Ooooh, man. Rory taught me this phrase yesterday. I texted him about this guy who yelled at me for stepping on his coffee and he said I shoulda told the guy to suck shit. I’ve been going nuts with it. I’ve been all, “Suck shit, you birds!” “Suck shit, you boner drones!” “Suck shit, dumptruck dick!” It makes me feel like a Johnny Cage, I don’t know why. Man. The sun looks a little brighter today. I’ve been hyped up all day. I don’t know what it is. Yeah, I’ve had some caffeine, and Dale bet me five bucks I couldn’t shotgun three Pepsis and I fuckin’ did it, but that’s not it! I just have a good feeling about today. I’m a mothafuckin’ eagle today, Diary. Fuckin’ flamin’ deer-horse with bat wings and all kinds of cool and terrifying shit. If I had to have my stomach pumped, lightning would shoot out and give everyone erections. Bad erections. Phew. I’m gonna lie down.

Bye, Diary.

P.S. I found a rap lyric in a notebook from 5th grade today. It goes, “I’m smokin’ so much pot, you’ll think your kitchen’s been robbed.” Kids are dumb.

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PHOTONIC Hovercraft on Blood Thunder rose electrically blooming on a snow-covered valley melting by the light of the eyes of dogs.

Air, smelling hot, contained itself around Ben the gardener from Michiana who strolled the summer valley where silence hung, booming.

The existence of meat in space is suggested like the Great-Lake effect and if french fries loved birds they’d ask for a bite.

The sober apple of sensitivity bleeds while pissing. The ugliness of a rose extending in bitter scents keeps extending.

Ben made an atom with the dew and a blowtorch and flossed with the subsequent Hiroshima. Jesse watched as the valley slow danced germinated and readied for its ascent.

The young, melting by the light of computers, ascend in two pieces, waiting to vibrate with The Something, waving as we’re caulked to the ground.

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PHOTONIC Cowboy Dogs I tried to fill your trailer with glass lilies but stopped, seeing the shark fetus jar. Something didn’t feel right. So I took a drink of Yoohoo infused gin and examined the fetus. It looked gummy.

It looked like it wanted teeth pressed into it and also to complete its yawn. I grabbed the green bowl from your cabinet and noticed you’ve kept everything the same and filled the bowl with my chocolate gin and set one lily afloat in the brown pool. You’ll find it between the shark fetus and that cowboy statue we got at the truck stop with chicken fingers and coffee and the crystal cherries and Jesus. I hope you remember that the best parts of life are the stupid things. I hope you still live for the dumb shit. I don’t see the dog, so I guess she got too old and those bulges were filled with millions of tiny death. In the cabinet where the bowl was you’ll find one chocolate gin recipe, titled Chocolate Pine Baron, one Cowboy Dogs recipe, and one Hulk Hogan figurine that’s been painted to look like bigfoot.

My grandpa Donald died. Beneath the shark fetus you’ll find a prayer card from his funeral and my new work number. Please call me if you have any trouble with the recipes or what sort of wars Hulkfoot would battle.

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PHOTONIC Day I died once and became a lightning storm in space where everything was nebulous and I could be too, floating freedom held back by nothing.

We are feeling creatures and most of us is invisible.

I felt like a handicapped but rolling mist ‘cause the sign said I wasn’t tall enough and I’d never be in that moment and I thought the ride man would respect me if I had something like a sweater of spiders.

I pulled my pants down, threw up my fists, and wished for something better.

It turns out I was schizophrenic the whole time so everything good that’d happened in my existence was that other brain so now I am at a loss.

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PHOTONIC I’m not sure how people see me with my shirt off.

I know the feeling when you think you’ve got something like a baseball-sized diamond but it turns out to be a million mosquito wings pasted together and you think how could reality be so cruel in its constant holograms and it answers because I can If there is a god, it’ll turn me into a beer can so I can be desperately loved.

I stubbed my toe and split open my head on the bomb shelter.

It doesn’t feel as safe as the pillow forts and cannot become a space ship capable of all sorts of deep travel.

I could have my sea and the salt of space too.

All of the sudden a knife grows legs and keeps trying to hug me.

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PHOTONIC bobby knight’s home dimension now, we got you this ring not only for your birthday, but for your safety. if you push this little bump on the side here, a laser beam shoots out and there goes his pecker. and these earrings are not really pearls. they're pretty little grenades. i'd suggest shovin one in his mouth and just watch. pop goes the watermelon. take care, cucumber. daddy loves you.

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PHOTONIC Diary of Hunter Green #11 Dear Diary, Do you ever feel like you're just waiting to maximize? Like on those old Beast Wars cartoons? Like that episode where the tiger guy's space pod got cracked and he wasn't sure if he was an Autobot or a Predacon or a snow tiger till Waspinator was threatening to kill the real snow tigers, and he was like "That's a dick thing to do. I don't feel like a dick so I must not be one of these dicks here dicking things up." Then he maximizes and Neo's all the tiger teasers.

Lately I've been thinking that everything in a person's life is just lead-up to when they maximize.

I don't know why I've been thinking that. I think it's just loneliness. I don't know. I just don't feel...it's like I'm hungry but sandwiches and microwave burritos don't help. Dale says I need a girlfriend. Mom says the same thing. Roger said maybe I don't like girls and I accidentally exhaled "hillbilly bigot" cause he’s always talking about hating gays and gets in weird hissies when Mom watches Will & Grace reruns. He said if I was gonna be like that I could leave. At the door I said to Mom, "This is why we can't have nice things." I'm not sure what that meant.

Mom told me Roger has to go in for colonoscopy tomorrow, so hopefully they'll find butt cancer and he'll die. If the world was perfect, we could use one of those machines like in Everything is Illuminated. Or whatever that Total-Recall-Jim-Carey movie is. We could use that after he died and forget Roger ever existed. That would be the best. I don’t know why everyone talks about it like I’m not interested in having a girlfriend. That would be the tits. If I had a girlfriend I probably shouldn’t say “tits.” It’d be so great if I had a girlfriend and she loved me so much and then I would be a better person from being around someone like that, cause she’d also be real cool and teach about things probably. Sometimes I love the future.

P.S. If Roger died, maybe Mom could marry a Mothman. He could teach me mind powers and I could help him revenge Richard Gere. Fuckin' up Indiana like moth gangstas. I bet he wouldn’t have driven me to trying half an ecstasy and I wouldn’t have to be afraid of having drugs in my hair. Maybe I shouldn’t say “gangstas” anymore either.

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PHOTONIC CPU To-do list: -Take out garbage -Call Walgreens clinic about debt collector calls -Pick up eggs, beer, syrup, bananas -Wash dark-delicates -Call landlord about ants and silverfish -INTERCEPT MARCUS AND THE ORION DEVICE That last one strikes me as odd because I don’t know a Marcus and don’t remember writing it on the list.

Maybe... it was a helpful prophetic ghost, or a dimensional or cosmic entity with business here but no concept of appropriate social graces, or myself, a happenstance time traveler.

These reasons I could understand.

That last one strikes me, and I bet my future self has slept with lots of women all over history, a gyrating sweat bead wetting the ribbons of time, and I wonder if da Vinci and Mona Lisa and Hitler and Shaq and Dolly Parton are my children.

But then I wonder what’s happened in the future that I would want such an escape,

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PHOTONIC but mostly I wonder what happens to my wife.

I’m cold, but I don’t think it’s because I’m still at the refrigerator.

I need to stop before I form a new, terrible reality that I can’t be certain doesn’t exist until her car pulls in the driveway and I know I can open the apartment door without disintegrating.

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PHOTONIC The Beers The Beers are gasping fish and it’s too bad about their intelligence because they are your children because sharing blood makes them so. They foam and look like my piss, sliding to me deep while feeling like dusty grays.

Bobby Knight felt peace as he chucked a White Castle at Asia over a misunderstanding.

The Beers are too smart for your evolution and will chuckle behind your back as you lift glass with both hands.

What happened to the orange groves and tarantula farms God hid by the creek You don’t need to be botherin’ wit dat chickenhead.

The grainy television of happiness is cable-ready, do not fret, you’re safe as raw chicken and hair triggers.

As Bobby Knight awoke he found himself knitting the veil of darkness that would cover the sun— it smelled of bacon grease, felt of five o’clock shadows, and within its fibers he could hear the whines of his elephantine heart.

Jesse tastes the bees of life but talking about it’s what makes them sting.

There will be a day when space comes to us and so will The Beers.

Everyone will love you when you become sticky enough to force them to.

The Beers stole your bicycle and girlfriend Patty.

The Beers smothered your cat because you said it was okay.

The Beers knitted the sweater of darkness that would fit snug around the sun— smelling of dog-carpet, feeling of a decade callous, and within its yarns you can hear the laugh track of the television of future.

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PHOTONIC Single Wide Bible In the beginning, there was the Trailer, and the Trailer was with child, and the child was the Vacuum. All things were made by the Trailer—not with hands, but by a speck of Light murmuring ascendant with Darkness. Soon, Light took Darkness from behind. Darkness confessed its wanting beneath the trampoline of creation, beneath the sleeping bags winked from infinity, and gave as it had received.

In the Trailer, babies died unfathomable, their atomic structure too close to mayo, the molecular stacks organized like chugging games. Nourishment was too far from uranium flame. The Siding once discussed with the Wallpaper how water should be created. The Trailer created coasters to save the furniture as well as the dumb.

Light and Darkness didn’t know what to do about the swingers. They didn’t know if their atomic bonds would hold and this threat to their fusion was a Jupiter red spot. The swingers’ pendulum genitals and vibrating chairs were made to contain their curious energies. With this, the Internet also squealed into existence The Trailer created the handjob out of plasma and days. With this, Light and Darkness were one again. Salvation, it is said, lies in wheels with pilot lights. It was created by the Trailer, as was the tornado that will someday end the Trailer, as was your gifted nucleus. So it is written, before the tornado, all will return to the Trailer. So shall it be, we never left.

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PHOTONIC Pony The Amish boy that always brought us homemade ice cream and potato salad when his father trimmed the horses’ hooves asked if I could help him remove his skin.

“I think I dreamed this,” I said. “Say ‘cheese.’”

I grabbed a lip with each hand, and pulled and pulled till the steaming hide was wetting the grass. Inside was a pony with a gray and spotted coat, and eyes of TV static. I didn’t want what came next in the dream to happen. I went to the house and came back with a broken bottle. The pony just stood swatting flies with its tail and never blinking. I stabbed the bottle into his neck, stood waiting for a reaction. I stabbed his ribs. I stabbed his neck again and the bottle crumbled against him and into the grass.

“Waste of beer,” I said. I went to the house and came back with a claw hammer.

The pony was bleeding, but still not moving or blinking, just swatting flies. I wished I’d gotten something with more reach. I lined up my shot and threw the hammer as hard as I could. It hit the tip of his ear and sailed on. “Damn. Waste,” I said. I went to the barn and couldn’t find the axe so I came back with an old TV. I lined up again and heaved it at his head. It bounced off his neck. The screen smashed on his hooves. More blood, but still nothing. “Look,” I said. “I know you’re not really Daniel, but I’m sorry. Maybe we could be friends.”

With a voice like God, he said, “What happened next in the dream?” “I don’t think I understand it.

It was weird.” “What happened,” he said. I looked at my hands and couldn’t understand why they weren’t shaking. I went up to the pony. Once I got my hand on his skin, I started petting him. I couldn’t look at him. I concentrated on my breathing and my shoes.

When I looked up I saw I was smearing blood all over him from one of the neck wounds.

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PHOTONIC I thought about apologizing again, but decided this was fate, and did what the dream showed I was going to do. I plunged my thumbs into the static eyes. They screamed and the pony didn’t move. The regular world seemed shadow compared to the light that grew from the eyes. I felt the light enter me, burn inside like when fire finally gets sucked into a spray paint can after it was a poor-boy flamethrower.

The light kept burning until my skin was air and I and everything was a glowing pillar, until I was the pony and the yard, the TV, the house, the barn. I was everything and all, and it burned and felt like starting over so every molecule could perfectly align.

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