Refuge

Floriffic blossoms, heavy as toads,
bend green stems like blue notes. This
isn't paradise, only a shabby garden
beside a weary cocktail lounge on
some island somewhere. We're here
to feign the forgetting
of mainland failures, which
we blame on youth and ambition:
we have a point. These blossoms
are not cognizant of criticism
and other forms of judgery,
and that is why we like them.



hans ostrom 2015

Authorities

It's obvious the authorities
ought to be reported
to some other authorities.


hans ostrom 2015

Death to Super-Heroes

Even people over the age of 10 now
seem enthralled with "super-heroes."
I don't take this as a good sign
about our culture. I'm the guy
walking the wrong way as a stupefied
crowd staggers toward me on its way
to a movie house that's playing
"Elbow Man" or "Spandex Woman"
or whatever this week's
piece of silly junk is. I know:

I'm not supposed to "get it."
I'm demographically challenged.

Unless "Ant Man" falls
into the conical trap
of Ant Lion and gets
pulled under the dirt,
I'm not interested.

My mother and I agreed
that puppets are stupid,
and I put "super-heroes"
in that category.

Sometimes she asked new
acquaintances, "Do you like puppets?"
It's a hell of an exploratory
question when you think about it.
It isn't a question.


hans ostrom 2015

The Purge

Yeah, they brought in a tactical team,
a euphemism for heavily armed thugs.
Then said tacti-thugs swept the whole
sector, clearing out anything
they deemed lyrical. They rounded up
short poems by the thousands, arrested
anyone who wrote anything accused
of being quiet. (All poems on the page
are silent until spoken to.)

They roughed up numerous solitary
scribblers caught jotting down
juicy phrases, pithy paradoxes,
and notes on introspective matter.
Rhymes were stripped and mocked.
You can imagine who took over
after the purge. Too many poets
have a weakness for fascism, it's true.


hans ostrom 2015

Admiration Isn't Enough

(Charleston Church Massacre, 2015)


The screen shows an interview with two Black women
who survived. One lost a son
in the massacre: "I watched him take his last
breath." The other had been ready to die; the killer
"let" her live so she could "tell the story."

The story isn't his. The story's about
an ethnic group that's suffered beyond
comprehension--and had to comprehend. That
the suffering doesn't stop is White Americans'
fault and a nation's mortal wound. Nothing
will be right until White people own up

all the way. All the way, without
deflecting, without explaining away.
I'm tired of admiring
Black people for their courage and dignity
because admiration's passive and useless.

There's such a thing as too much suffering,
by a person, by a people. There's such
a thing as moral failure--of a person,
of White Americans.


hans ostrom 2015

Old Notes

The old woman looked at the image in the
mirror and thought, "My hair is a corpse."
Lately she's regarded her memories
as notes about a forgotten novel.



hans ostrom 2015

Happy Birthday to Carter Monroe

A post by Ms. Fouquet elsewhere on the inter-webnets alerted me that it's the birthday of North Carolina poet, publisher, and sage Carter Monroe.

Here is a reading of his poem, "the two hanks":

Attention, Please

The more people there are
(more all the time)
and the more media there are
(same),
the less attention there is to go
around. Celebrity
diverts rivers of it
like golf courses in a desert.

Whole groups, cities, nations, cultures
crave attention (more than ever),
partly because of the illusion
that they may receive it. An
epidemic of narcissism expands.

We manage ourselves as commodities,
with packaging, labeling, advertising.

It is the other attention-deficit
disorder, the more harmful one.
An insatiable mass-appetite. Add
Americanness to it, and
it becomes exponentially worse.


hans ostrom 2015

Söderfors, Sweden

Söderfors, Sweden


Brown mortar, black bricks, buildings
from industry’s youth.

Two girls walk along a narrow
sandy path over the dam. Violent brown-black
water rushes through
the spillway. A sign cautions.

A gull nests in a granite slab.
(Incubation is a branch of geology.)

Reach for the black bricks—
to know them. Their texture is glass.
They were cooked to the point
at which manufacturing gives way

to beautiful compounds. Söderfors
is a silent town. Its cast-iron clock
is ornate and wrong. Bright green,

nearly lime: that used to be the color
of a rusting Saab parked all by itself.

Singing the Marine's Hymn When I Was Nine

Grades 3,4, and 5 occupied
the same room, and the teacher combined
us to have us sing "The Marines Hymn." Later,
Andre Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto"
provided a context for the experience.

The teacher didn't explain why
the Marines had occupied the Halls
of Montezuma (were they working
for Cortez?) or where the shores
of Tripoli were. Lots of Italians

had settled in Gold Rush country,
so I guessed Italy. Hey, teachers
do things to survive the teaching
because every day they have to
establish a new beach-head.

The tune seemed terribly tedious,
and it knew so: the key-change
if often a tell. Hell, yes, we
wanted to be sent on a mission:
recess.


hans ostrom 2015

The Boarding Process Is About to Begin

At this time, we would like to begin
pre-boarding, which may be be thought of
as paradoxical boarding because it is part
of the boarding process it precedes.

We would like to invite anyone
who is in deep despair to board
at this time, as well as any children
traveling with overbearing parents,
invertebrates flying alone, and good
people (there's usually at least one!).

If your carry-on item is larger
than King Henry VIII's coffin,
please let us know.

Now we incite those with no
particular status to revolt
against categories.

Thank you.

We now invite White people
who believe they are
inherently superior to lift
their arms and pretend to fly
around in front of the gate here.
Okay, that's enough.

Finally, we invite those
who are acutely or chronically
tardy to board the goddamned plane.

It is truly our pleasure to serve you:
how could that possibly be true?


hans ostrom 2015

About the Roll-Call Up Yonder

When the roll is called up yonder,
they'll mispronounce my name, or
it won't be on the list, or I
I won't hear them, or I'll be 17
again and talking to a pretty
girl, or someone will tell me
I'm in the wrong hall, or I'll
be dressed inappropriately
and sweating, or any combination
of these and other abrasions

on what ought to be the smoothest
scene in all creation. Yea,
awkwardness shall follow me
all the days of my life
and into and elsewhere, where

some angel will break decorum
and mutter to another one,
"Would you look at that one?"


hans ostrom 2015

Toes

Yes, I agree: toes
are risibly absurd.

They are pudgy, failed claws.
We encase them like jewelry,
divas, or prisoners, and let them out
for fresh air occasionally.

Their curling's an atavistic
practice that migrated
from branched communities.

When people say, "Kick up
your heels," they seem
to mean nothing.

Heel/toes, heel toes:
onward the masses walk hard
on hard urban surfaces.
It's the economy, stupid.

Our dogs is tired.
Our gods are remote.
This is the greatest age
of toenail polish.


hans ostrom 2015

Fashion District, Los Angeles

Hope Street:
End of Road Work,
One Way.
No parking--
Tow Away Zone.



hans ostrom 2015

Frank Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Richard Brautigan Walk Into a Bar . . .

In Tacoma, at the apocryphal corner
of Brautigan and Herbert Streets,
you may hear worms singing plaintive blues.

Turn on, tune in, drop out:
what bullshit. Nothing's that
sequential in T-Town, and Dr. Leary
was Ownership, not Labor or
Management.

It's a long way from San Francisco,
especially by dune buggy on back roads,
through the mind-fields.

Call yourself a duchess, call yourself
a duke. Nobody really gives a shit
unless you buy a round of beers
and feed the pool table. Seven-ball
in the Montana pocket off
the Portrero Hill rail. You
have to call it first.

Gore Vidal was stationed near Tacoma,
but wrote over the episode
while serving his celebrity in Italy.

Shit can get complicated real fast
is the theme of every novel,
every life.


hans ostrom 2015

Lima Beans

Please don't tell the Moche,
please don't tell the Spanish Viceroy,
but I've been estranged from lima beans
for quite some time. I recoiled,
regretfully, from their taste
and texture. It's hardly worth

mentioning, of course. --Except
maybe as a segue to sanguine
acceptance of other's satisfaction
with lima beans. There is

accounting for taste. It just
never adds up, is all.


hans ostrom 2015

Haypress Creek Was Other

One reason you liked hiking up
around Haypress Creek was that
the woods were of full of naturally
selected life that went about
its business independent of you.
Sure, you and the woods &
the creatures there shared
oxygen and C oh two,
and bear or deer or snake
or squirrel might get in
your sight-line and you
in theirs. The pleasure

though came from disconnection,
guarded fascination. Curiosity.
The woods were other, light, and
deeply intricate. Some shitheads

built a dam on Haypress Creek
and added miles of pipe.
Hydraulic electricity. All
things were now connected.
The shitheads had seen
to that. You never hiked up there again.
Other had been disrupted.
Absurdly, you felt ashamed
and couldn't face the woods there.
A stupid Wordsworthian emotion,
useless.


hans ostrom 2015

We've Always Had Good Answers

We've always had good answers. We know
what's best to do. We've been at war
always so have forgotten many answers.
Permanent war permanently distracts.
Plus when we use religion only
as a V.I.P. badge
and a fulcrum to extert force,
we get godlike, and you know
how that goes. Buying, also

the buying, shopping, shopping.
Quite a thing-culture, they were
may be said of us in retrospect or
now. Good answers are just lying
around all over the place like
jewels no one thinks are valuable
anymore. We just have to forget
what we know and start picking them up.
That's all? Pretty much.

hans ostrom 2015

Our Legends

Tell me your favorite legend,
and I'll tell you who you aren't.
I, too, sit outside
my legend, staring at it,
the thing I'm not.

Why do we do this
to ourselves and each other--
this creation of Impossibles
to which we then aspire
like minnows who dream
of becoming eagles
and vice versa?


hans ostrom 2015

People from the Sky

So many people
fall out of the sky.
They congeal and
become moving crowds
in cities,
thick and sticky
populations.

Thank you, sky,
for all the people!
yells a forlorn
figure, homeless
and friendless
in the mass.


hans ostrom 2015