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Ian Randall Wilson

Making Love Intellectual Property

In the middle of making love
the Beloved shouted, oh, science,
science science science.
In that moment, I thought of silver,
I thought of the meat world,
I thought of the way shadows die without smelling
and how the transition from boy
to man is often a gruff occasion
or an occasion to be gruff.

Later that night we again tried
to make action storms.
She shouted, good science I feel so good.
Like a tongue summering off Long Island,
I waited for a summons
and a civilized someone,
the love corral--
but my pleasure was damaged by distraction.
Yes, a bit of memory traffic and music music music
but the rabbit end departed me
(I know I'm not innocence diving)
and what I got was more truant words:
Science I'm hot tonight.

The best laid commotion is never feudal.
That's not helpful with the head jammed against
the headboard and the foot dipping into the ways
of things.  But fine.  I'll swear off sheep and the other
traps of silence.  Therefore literature therefore
greedy meanwhile wilderness.  Verbs are never caring
on their own.  This you this dusk
a partnership destroyed or a portal born
for conversation in a menace-filled universe?
Ask the learned wall.

 Now it's motel life and the bombing radio.
It's morning.
It's home.
It's a theology of Monday.
I have keepsake embers and the elegant bye.
Once I was the night messiah
(her words, and what are words when house lives become too public, when
after nearly reaching the top of the desire staircase the butler is showing
me to the vague outline of the door?) I'm now -- for you young screen
lovers out there still following along -- part of the oblivion crowd,
another street object lacking proper signage.
Every night I'm forced to watch
the stigmata television for news
from my nether parts.
One might hope the arc heads would go
dim, and threat
become the fabric of street and ground.
Science help me.
My hope for plot is a momentary lapse,
a gesture, something like a flower but not red,
snow where no snow
should fall, a slip of the tongue
(science help all of us, what got me in
trouble to start with),
a radiant waltzing
into the church of the visible eye.



Farm Subsidy

The herbs are dying in their plastic pots
the way my father used to work
waiting for transplantation

brown trunk stems withered
what if
from a little neglect

impossible garden out back
I grow distracted




Indian Summer

in coffee houses
out west we substitute weather
or influence from outside
listening to the wind
looking like a young virgin
looking for a young virgin
no sound

conditions become perfect
for political concerns
for fire
the first strike
the skies a red clarity

I turn my back
I desire total darkness

the wind comes up immediately after midnight
there are no solutions
they are hammering next door again




The Decay Of Probability

The first level of knowledge
in order to write the "great
poem" is to characterize its properties,
the next, the information
needed to specify a position
in a given accuracy.
Sometimes poets using these methods
spend their days plotting
data, drawing little boxes
and counting the number
of data points in each box.
Crude, yes, but for the first
time chaos is within reach
of poetic systems.
They look for poems
in flapping flags
and rattling speedometers,
searching out chaos in the
current literature.
Unexplained noise, surprising
fluctuations, regularity mixing
with irregularity -- these effects
pop up in poems from
experimentalists working with everything from
pantoum accelerators to laser sonnets.
Several experiments on josephson junction octa
rima reveal a striking noise-rise
phenomena in audiences.
But the collective is a problem--
one partner for a clean job,
the tendency toward crate mixing.

In the end, I can only conclude
the brothels of poetry are
manned by crippled pimps--
Hot doggy, I always
wanted to say that
or something like it.




The Injured, The Admired

The moment turned and I took my
road out on the act,
again pleasure borrowing there.
Much mouth and a horizon anybody,
that was me in those years.
I was a catastrophe waiting
for an aquarium,
waiting for a her
like night inside weeds,
like a terrace following up
a needle, feeling
the way an actor falls on
stage when the audience grunts.

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