Untitled Poem by John Bauman

Let me put it to you like this.
It’s like this:
      (                  )

(oh, yeah. Insert a goofy sound above)

Peepers?
They put it like this:
      (                  )

(I mean “peep, peep, peep…”)

You, there!
You have to go through time
      …and, uh, space.
You have to.
No, I don’t.
I can just be here and now.
There’s no time like the present,
      for existing.
Life is cool!

What’s your name?

Um…to make a long story short:
      I was born, I did a bunch of things
      and I’m here now.


-John Bauman

Cairn of broken sticks

"Building this was exciting. It looked like a nest at first but I had this idea of an egg-shape. You can see it from the road nearby if you are lucky and perceptive and I think that if you are lucky and perceptive there should be something mysterious and a little grand waiting for you to discover. I like the moment when I see something beautiful and so strangely organized that you wonder, 'what did this? it must have been some crazy guy!' In a way I guess I am hoping that when other humans see it it may cause them to think, 'some human did that, definitely, only people are that cool... I'm a person.' I also like that this particular work had anthropomorphic overtones, it looks like a witness or a guardian."

-Jeremiah Griswold

Ninja star ferns

"So I was thinking, 'I gotta get out of my head and into my hands.' If you know what I mean. I was walking in the woods a lot anyway. This was the stuff, this was the place, the stream was filled to overflowing and rushing on by. 'I like whirlpools,' never entered my head. Its a little weird how I'm guided by whatever it is, but I have yet to actually plan any of this."

- Jeremiah Griswold

Whirlpool ferns coming from the tree

"I think I could have done more with this, I guess there is still time. I actually like working with stuff that goes away, sometimes very quickly. Seeing what I can do with what's available. I played a little with texture and color here. It was raining like hell at the time. I saw this tree which had fallen across the stream in the winter and there was this perfect yoda-hut hole in the base of it. I have been thinking about decay a lot recently, and life. The tree had died but there were these mushrooms growing out of it and beetles eating the bark, it was going back into the ground and so I guess I just went with that."

- Jeremiah Griswold

Random Access

He watched his own enormous fingers
through a magnifying lens
as they sewed,
sewed, in morning light
stitches even-spaced and fine.
One by one each little square of fabric
took its place within his quilt.

Afternoons, in a darker room,
he wrote instructions for computers
                If cursor within area numerically defined
                                then show text, “Which color?”
                                else if p = q
                                                beep
                                else, nothing
                End if.
flawless labyrinths of logic
encoded in a language he had learned
that freed him from an office man’s routine.

The pattern of the quilt equaled the pattern of his mind.
He wondered if, night after night,
you slept under his intelligent design
you could navigate your life
edit and undo
change the hue of any pixel you disliked
because you had been wrapped in random access
all the time you dreamed.


- Ron McAdow