Joshua Bauscher (bow-sher) is a writer, rapper, performer, and aspiring photographer from Upstate NY. His dream is to cause a massive shift in consciousness, start a movement of love, and accelerate the awakening and higher evolution of the human species through music, the art of poetry, empathy, compassion, and meditation. In 2015 he self-published his first book of poetry, A Windborne Birthday and also had the honor of coaching the SUNY Geneseo slam poetry team for the 2015 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. When not writing, reading, making music, or taking photos, Joshua enjoys skateboarding, climbing trees, hiking, studying chess, and lucid dreaming.
“In the end we get to realize that we are all love and all one. We have purposely forgotten so that we may be overjoyed when we finally start remembering.”
Awful Sort of Beautiful
I’m hungry for the stars but my heart
is famine, its bony hands folded,
ghost of a lonely prayer buried in the bite
& swallow, empty room echo, final ebb
of a dark ripple, the way the water cradles
wasps of light in its cuts. The mouth is a flower,
the chest a boulder of marble. I want to be strong
as I wither. I want to forget, to forget I’d forgotten
and then remember and wonder who’d ever dare to let go
a dream like that? Oh joyous revolution is life, my death-
eater, the sweetest fruit hanging bitter in the bird
in the belly of the wolf whose energy will still echo morning
songs of the sun when she howls at the moon.
So wake me up, I’ll only ever be as ready
as the day I was born with history’s blood
on my body and me wailing war to be new.
Fragile flesh and bones will grow me a story,
and, momma, I’m sorry it won’t always be pretty
but if not so how would we know
we’re this awful sort of beautiful?
Dead Bird Songs
The air, electric,
endless open field,
grass eaten by muddy snow.
Single shallow puddle
fractures the ashen sky,
a red thorn floating in its middle.
The forest screams, hollow,
flutter of a thousand iris petals
wing the throat with notes
of dead flowers. Curled and fragrantless,
they rise from the lost bird’s beak.
Your name is a sea that gets swallowed.
Your life is a song he dreams of in whispers.
Miles and miles of steel and glass
piled atop concrete. Undying engine
of noise. Somewhere, one good tree.
A girl in love with light & dust,
a boy with lust for darkness & mud.
The moon star-crossed by the sun’s foolish love.
She always finds him in dreams covered in blood
and is never sure who to check for the wound.
Your song is the silence which breaks.
You’re the closest I’ve ever come to dreaming awake.
The rain on the river,
a chaos of ripples,
the shadow of a bridge
sheltering a cliff of calm waters.
The warm chill of standing in a storm untouched.
The loom of the mountain,
dark evergreens and grey skeletons
asleep for the winter, cold as stone.
Shiver of slow winds creaking through timbers.
On a branch the dead bird sings
an old song of survival.
The sea gets swallowed, the silence spits you
back into the ink. It is endless,
raging black ocean pouring out of you,
electric, a breaker in the sky on fire,
and a single red thorn
floating in the middle.
