The Jackalope Wars by Jeremy Bauer

Copyright 2011: Stoked Press For information about this publication, contact Tyler Gobble at tlgobble@bsu.edu “The Hard Hurt” was previously published in The Broken Plate. Back cover image by David Morley.

∞ Please, talk about this ebook, reprint things from this ebook, be nice to this ebook. I THINK IT IS REALLY GREAT THAT YOU ARE EHOLDING THIS EBOOK.

The Birthing Throat * Divine Dog Heads * Bum Body Like Space Like Home * I’ve Been Starin’ Into Those Socket Floaters For What Seems Like Ten Deaths Or Glad I Could Be Your Anger Muse * The Thunder Crab * Hot Dead Teeth * Let’s Get Dead All Cool * The Hard Hurt

The Birthing Throat I awoke in a blanket of the blood of my dreams I have birthed a winged creature whose glory rivals Jesus and whose shining eyes resemble ancient jewels men have killed for I have birthed him from my throat in a fleshy sack filled with red, viscous fluid that puddles then burns and glows hynotic, divine He is a winged fucker He has spat in my eye and from that genesized a hundred birds, all squawking and making a terrible mess out of everything Winged creature, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve grown to have the posture of a sloth Your inebriation and fornication with man, beast, microbe, dead object constant and uncomfortable You spit eveywhere and from the globules emerge more birds and miniature supernovas that have ruined my favorite black leather boots and the computer better than I at storing my memories and processing the world 1

I wish you could talk instead of babbling in odd tongues like those Christian fanatics that get kicks from fondling rattle snakes and drinking strychnine, similar to those people that hang themselves while masturbating You’ve pissed neon stains onto my carpets and walls and bed, making it hard to fall asleep When you flap your wings in my direction it’s like snorting pure, Columbian black pepper and I sneeze ten times They say a sneeze is one-tenth of an orgasm, which makes things awkward and I run because they also refer to an orgasm as “Le Petite Mort” and so I am not sure if you are trying to kill me, though there are worse ways to die

Divine Dog Heads My hurricane is naked dripping with birds soggy with birds Teaming with white-as-angel’s-blood gulls Crying ‘cause they’re hungry Hungry for french-fried dreams and salted maritime varietals They’re dipshits Their hobbled calls for the true gleam that envelops with radiant, slobbering energy but hovers beyond any manner of vision or scope or material real They fly with the dog heads Heads of wisdom and divine luminescence But they’re all bleeding and old Wrinkled, tired muzzles Tinged with gray and white and lost love Their beaks hardly open, they creak like decrepit doors ready to fall from the hinges

Bum Body Like Space Like Home Oh man, this body of mine’s fallin’ apart like some rusted truck the roadside slowly overtakes and I think my teeth have termites or whatever ‘cause if I put a lamp in my mouth and turn it on, it would probably look like one of those star papers kids make in grade school to make their rooms look like they’re sleeping in space. I always liked those things ‘cause when you lay your head down at night and close your eyes, you can sleep anywhere, and I won’t say where I’ve chosen to go, let’s just say the scenery changes as you get older, especially ‘round those weird years before you have house payments but still sometimes I keep it in my head that I’m sleepin’ in that great Vacuum and there’s no gravity and that’s better than any mattress I ever slep’ in. I still feel my body and all its dumb hurtin’s, but before I sleep I got control over everything around me, and when you get to be my age, that’s a fleetin’ comfort you have to take a minute to enjoy.

I’ve Been Starin’ Into Those Socket Floaters For What Seems Like Ten Deaths Or Glad I Could Be Your Anger Muse

Oh baby, we should be arrested for all we been doin’ Phew! All them coppers with all their screamin’ electro-tronics and their full cheeks bearin’ they’s creep-teeth like some sort of Egyptian swarmin’ cobras and they’s venom is more of pop-shots and devil papers and those hurty-gurty bracelets that taste like fish mouths and solitary consignments Oh, Baby! Why ain’t we locked up for our movin’ plans with Arizona shakin’ so god-amn hard all those weird, dried up lizards just fall down with their mouth ribbons flick-flick-flickin’ and goin’ all glah-glah-gah-glah-la and all those vertical pupils are lookin’ our way Oh My, Baby! Why ain’t they dragged us through the gray, descrepit alleys past the night women just passin’ out the Good Times like it ain’t no thing, ‘Cause it ain’t no thing, and past the Glory Bums just living the ash life and flick-flickin’ their tonuge ribbons because they are The Laugh and they’s just livin’ how they know to live

Why haven’t they called for our white cells and our red cells to be splashed on the buildings and spat out the mouths of dignitaries on stiff, official, law-abidin’-makin’ wordplay so that they know this is serious Why aren’t the bricks and over-sized windows and fuckin’ high-filutin’ ledges and grotesque manimal statues decorated with streamers and ballooons made of our muscle meat and top-layer shreds and all the brown paper bags we’ve discarded in our lives Oh Baby, we are The Murder!

The Thunder Crab The Thunder Crab sits between The Vacuum and everything else and prefers his color to be deep-sea blue, despite haveing never been submerged. Lightning dribbles between his legs, legs that move constant and alternating and this electric sweat is his nature just as his cold breath is. The Thunder Crab at New York on no particular date and the same could be said for Detroit or Chicago or Indiana. His digestion boils outside of time and tangibility. You can hear him move, though his scuttle disturbs the air making clouds gray around him, concealing his form. This makes his eye stalks weep hail and confuses the winds, because like everyone he just wants to know. To be known. The Thunder Crab knows he should not move but just try to tell any being they shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know love or connection while they exist. Tell them to bathe in nothing and accept it and to be content soaking in a void, 7

in the Perpetual Hurt, The Hard Hurt. The Thunder Crab bleeds technology and his eggs of computers are taken by gravity and he can hug and he tries but he is alone and keeps bleeding like being gut shot and I think we all know what thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like. The Thunder Crab eats Japan on a regular basis and knows it hurts but not as much as starving to save a people who can never see him or touch his body or love his body and all he has is the smoke of the earth and the heat of stars trickling onto his back. He is real and sometimes his legs dangle into our brains and at the specific points we are almost his children and our gray wrinkles turn blue with all that the Thunder Crab is and can be and will be And this blue sometimes just takes time to sweat the real lightning from between our lobes, before they become 8

constant and alternating and of our nature just like our cold breath.

Hot Dead Teeth The Lunar Surface is crowded with the bodies of hard yearns that shuffle lifeless like babies yet to be born. The fetal line pulls the tides and the bodies dribble crystals into the waters that flicker like mosquitoes in a bug zapper. Gods don’t dream, but they look down towards the earth with red-faced sadness and pink, swollen lips, and the moon does the same thing sometimes so maybe that’s where we got it. Like we’re all moons full of hard yearns we don’t know or can’t realize but we can feel their current all over our backs and heads, traipsing up and down our spines, like these ants we can’t swat always biting between the hairs of our skin. Everyone’s striving for happiness in every way and that’s what makes our limited eternity hard and the ache is arthritic mules whose hooves need taken care of.

Let’s Get Dead All Cool Let’s get together and talk about dying like it’s real cool. Let’s burn toast on purpose and scrape off the charred toast skin and talk about burning like toast. Let’s think of ways to die like giving our bodies to help out starving bobcats or a shitload of insects or goats that don’t know better or making little fish look like big fish because they took out a whole mean-dude human or cool lady girl. Let’s practice. Let’s lay in dark rooms all Dracula in an orderly rotation and then all together or get water well over our faces and stay like that till we think we’re drowning, I mean really seeing the swirling empty void of the stagnate souls’ hangout spot and the shit’s penetrating our nostrils and we wanna cry but it would seem pointless ‘cause of all the water. Let’s do the things we’ve always wanted to do before we died like make someone feel good by fucking ‘em or doing nice things for them like doing their chores 11

or spaying their cats or weaving wicker chairs for their porch or cooking them something real nice, like the things that dont’ taste good unless they’re heated with booze or wrestle funny-headed sharks and just show ‘em who can grow teeth like soggy demons or show mandible-faces how to love with their salty hearts instead of munchy stomachs or let’s steal motorcycles and cigarettes and head out drunk on our motorpigs into the night with heads full of individual wants we’ve been too shy to want before Let’s hug caribou and if it’s a fight they want it’s a fight they’re gonna get ‘cause we don’t even need no fucking horns, man, and we’re just as stoked to see blood too, man Let’s dress up like banjos and people-drums and harmonica-mouths and six shooters and start a revolution that doesn’t leave a corn-cob-pipe-tar-spitting-triple-x-jug porch before it’s burned out How about we send electro-things into clouds to 12

conjure sky-zaps, run straight into all sorts of walls until we find a good one our smashed faces and arms and heads and nipples can just cram and crud right through, make alphabets of only pictures and not give a fuck about learning, eat calculators and jiggle real fine and low and high to perform complex equations out beaten brains just can’t do, try our damnedest to spit fire no matter how many chemicals we have to chew or throat cells turn black or singed taste buds or shy wallpapers we give crawling ulcers, find nice birds with sexy whistles, or let’s make someone feel good by fucking ‘em. Let’s get together and talk about dying like it’s real cool. Let’s get dead all cool.

The Hard Hurt My head is covered in faces. Every face is different in size, shape, color, scars, moles One exhales moths, while another is deep blue and looks at the moon phases with yearning. One is a woman with hydrangea petals for lips and fish tails for hair, and another seems to beat in a steady rhythm like anticipation drums. One is shaped like Indiana and another looks like future. I know I am dying. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slow enough to be comfortable. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what happens to me, my eyes expand and get stuck there, and I breathe heavy, deep, and fast. My lungs fill my throat and the world gets dull and tingles while my muscle strands scream at my skin mesh about their claustrophobia. My brain sits on the ceiling. Around these times I radiate The Hard Hurt that is accidental Crowds of people used to excite me. Now they seem to glob together in a monochrome drool that keeps me in my apartment for days. Japan seems like an island of dreams where all the most horrible and damn pretty things have existed and some still existing. 14

That’s the kind of place I want to live. Being in a state where everything feel like it can’t get much worse or can’t get much better feels like being stuck in a vacuum with just enough air to stay alive. I wear too many shoes. They’re all different sizes and they all talk different. Not all of them are comfortable. Like I said, these cycles feel like birds and fish and hoofed land animals are trying to cram out my chest and up my throat. I think they’re just scared. I think they mean well. I think they’ll be well.

About the Author Things were hard at the horse farm/nuclear power plant, for Jeremy Bauer. His mother eventually had five arms, not out of mutation from all substandard conditions, but out of necessity. His father fused with three horses, and though he held the glory of being the first tricentaur in existence, he was in a great deal of pain all 107 years of his blackmaned life. The cloud of Jeremy Bauer worked to help support his melting family and eventually made it to Ball State University, where he studied creative writing. He has published poetry and nonfiction in The Broken Plate and his molecules blog at ohbabyohman.blogspot.com. The family smiles often.

People Say Things About This Ebook Jeremy Bauer expresses some things that are not easy to express. Like, sometimes your brain will make you think about an intangible, horribly amazing thing, and then you have a momentary emotional reaction to the thing your brain just gave you, and then you stop moving for a few seconds while you remember that it’s not real, and you just barely imagined the whole thing. It’s those kinds of things that Jeremy Bauer likes to put in words, but he also prints his words on paper and then dips the paper in a shallow dish of his blood before he gives it to you. He has a succulent imagination and I like him lots and lots. -Joe McHugh, author of the I’m Going To Harm You Today blog Jeremy Bauer stole the spirit wolf of Ziggy Stardust. He demanded the beast take him through the bloody, meaty core of the earth to the other side of existence. He wrote love letters in his sleep, during the nightmares throughout his travel. The Jackalope Wars collects these letters, still dripping with oblique emotion, and slides them under the door to your brain. They will collect in the corners and Bauer will haunt you, reminding you there is something more to our existence, something beneath us that leaves us touched in the head and longing for human contact. -Shaun Gannon, author of Casual Glory; or Macaulay Culkin Does Nothing

People Say Things About This Ebook The poems in The Jackalope Wars are sort of violent, sort of sweet, and completely kick ass. I like Jeremy Bauer’s words a lot. He presents a little corner of Hope in a big room of Hell. I want to quote a line from the book, but I keep getting distracted by other lines. Like how he writes: “Oh Baby, we are The Murder!” And I feel like, “Yeah, I hear you.” -Peter Davis, author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, Hitler’s Mustache, and TINA In Jeremy Bauer’s The Jackalope Wars, creation is an event that is still happening all over us. And as the Gods continue shifting our atoms, the only response is war. William Carlos Williams said that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” Well, these poems are robots that have turned on the master in the sky. There is fire and blood and now my eyes contain lasers like swirling multitudes. These poems are large and they will eat you. -Daniel Bailey, author of The Drunk Sonnets and HALLELUJAH, GIANT SPACE WOLF

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