Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Our Grandest Illusion


Even if what we know is incorrect,
and most of it is, 
how could it not be, 
it's knowledge: it's in there,
camped in memory, sending
smoke signals from box canyons,
tramping around neuron trails. 

The grandest illusion of all,
knowledge, freeze-dried 
in old books, hoarded like grain
and gunpowder in electronic
forts, marbled into our speech
and memories, alive in lore,
legend, lies, logos, ethos,
eros, and pathos. Still,

add it all up, and it's just 
a single torch held up
against abysmal black
darkness in a forest
no one's yet named on
one of a trillion planets. 

The one and the zero 
in binary strings: we know
everything, we know nothing,
a lot, a little bit, maybe, hard
to say, wait and see. You know?


hans ostrom 2021

Sunday, January 14, 2018

So It Goes

The scene's a blue barge
on a green river. Twilight.
Many lights on land: a
society, a world. The illusion

of a fixed place moves
away from me like a barge.
I am a point of view, a wry
observer on a river dock.

Then I am of the darkness
falling. Then I'm the
darkness itself, then
nothing, & I am not.


hans ostrom 2018

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The Breakfast Special

Some people are ordering
the Breakfast Special
because it's the best they can do.
Some people are cooking
it. It's the best they can do.
This city is a city. It's
not the best it can do. At

the same time, it doesn't
exist. No cities do. They're
just jammed together
bits and people. This
is the point where poems
get into trouble and need to
stop. It's the best they can do.


hans ostrom 2015

Monday, October 14, 2013

Happeningness

The happeningness
of reality never pauses,
"is" being a fiction,
a slice of approximation
imagined to be there
between "was" and "will be."
No wonder wonder
sometimes tires me.


hans ostrom 2013