Fuzz Against Junk Issue 1

Belated Impulsiveness
by Jonathan Bowman


Look poets can be happy too, not just bitch and shit.
I swear some nights the dishwasher's growl perfects
a purring Persian arch-back masterpiece
without loneliness or grief. But it's walking
to and from the beach that's hard, not a matter
of creation, but of opening one's eyes.

The world has certain ugly mirrors with gaunt eyes
when turned upon such angles, scared as shit:
the cold gesture eats itself, hardly matters
as its howls echo, disdained, perfect.
Yet when one denotes this hopeless part of walking,
they crowd around like crows, yelling masterpiece

or taking your temperature. Madmen make masterpieces
and everyone is frightened of your shapeless eyes.
What have you seen, they wonder, in your walking?
That they missed when they slept and loved and took their shits
in invisible tethered lusts which ended up being perfectly
comfortable, and baiting the night to sing moons a small matter

now? What remains of it, or will? When such matter
as makes our throat reforms without us? Masterpieces
they say, may last some years longer than the body, perfect
in the sense of their time, yet no more than I
do they resist the final gong which sings without us, shits
a final period on the song, its reverberation walking

into empty space with no one to hear it. Walking
and carelessly disappearing. The old koan: does it matter
the sound a falling tree makes or doesn't make? Just shits
and giggles then: in one's walking as one's apathy, masterpiece
might be a million things, just to do what sounds perfectly
agreeable instead of merely poetic. But how to stop the eye

from seeing all disfigured stars? What if I
want to dwell here, in this pulsing half-thought, walking
only to and from the beach, sad, yet with the perfect
moon in my pocket, the inexpressible matters
nibbled and hinted at, my own idea of a masterpiece
in the known crinkles of my hands, even if it's bullshit?

Look, just as easily, I can shit or be perfect,
but nothing describes the masterpiece quite like walking
away. And how could it matter, anyway? I am an eye.


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Jonathan Bowman is about to graduate from Naropa with a BA in Writing & Poetics. What's next? He has no idea. But he does know that he was born and raised in Austin, Texas and would like to take this chance to acknowledge the support of his family, without whom such an impractical career would be quite a bit more difficult. Also, he feels writing a miniature autobiography in 3rd person is very strange, like being a spy in the facts of his life.