Showing posts with label social class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social class. Show all posts

Thursday, April 29, 2021

Back at Your Place

when you're nobody special,
no one in particular besides 
your particular self, with those
eyebrows of yours and memories
of a childhood pond-raft called
"Sinking Slowly," a taste 
for fried trout and boiled potatoes,
an innate attraction to women
whose figures (a euphemism)
some people called "voluptuous,"

your sad, haphazard collections
of stamps and baseball cards
(the latter cut clumsily from
cereal boxes), your affection
for a tan chenille bed-spread
(and for the term "bed-spread"),
and a relationship to books
some found overly intense, then

it's hard, when you go to school,
to work and parties, events
and protests; yes, it's difficult
to become the additional and 
enhanced other, the one you're
expected to be, a Situational
You. It is exhausting, in fact,

and back at your place, again,
resting, reading, perhaps thinking
of a voluptuous woman with
whom you engaged in awkward
discourse while inhaling her
natural and manufactured
perfumes, you might ask, 
with tiresome faux naivete, 
"Whose idea was Society,
anyway?" Anyway, you are
and shall remain, just you. 


hans ostrom 2021

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Yelling at the Opera

I think I know exactly
what happened to you.
Over many a conforming
year, you learned not to make
too much of your feelings.
CUT TO: an invitation to
the opera, where every syllable
was bellowed or shrieked,
the singers stuffed with
emotion like gowned
sausages. You felt

buffeted by melodrama,
and you thirsted for a wry
Delta blues song, oblique
and rude. Also brief. To be
trapped at the opera is no
hardship, so you would not
complain. Still it made you
want to yell. So you did,
alarming those assembled
around the intermission bar.
Someone sent for the car.


hans ostrom 2019

Monday, October 8, 2012

It Is Election Season

It is Election Season in the U.S.A.
The Right knows exactly what it hates
but not what it supports. What passes
for the Left knows exactly what
it supports but not what it opposes.
The sheer weight of cash
breaks the back of democracy's
bridge: boom--into the river.

In the meantime, no fundamentals
will change.  You could say it was
lost in the Constitution. Or later,
when railroads took over.  Or
even later, when no one listened
to Eisenhower's farewell address.
You select your starting point,
your ending, your epistemic closure.

It is lost. Those who would challenge
the fundamentals were exposed
as noble but impotent: Occupy.
Those who should be occupied
pretend to be our close personal
friends: the media. Those

who work too much for not
enough will always
and forever get The Shaft.
It is Election Season in
the U.S.A. White men
are hanging chairs from
suburban trees, a most
safe evocation of lynching,
indeed, sir. Indeed sir.


Hans Ostrom, 2012