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

Answer the Phone

Answer the phone. Will you please
get that? Nevermind. I'll get it!
They hung up. I don't know: the
number is blocked. This really
an insane time in telecommunication
history, isn't it? Why

don't you like to talk on the phone?
I don't understand you. What do
you mean "that part is accurate"?
Next time, you're going to answer
it. It's your phone! I'm not going
to answer it. And you owe me
an apology.


hans ostrom 2015

Horse for Sale

Good morning, horse for sale.
Hey should we shell out funds to buy
horse for sale? Let's not forestall.

Hello, horse in stall.
Your gray mouth is of soft
flannel. I guess we own

you now, horse not for sale.
You don't know we own
you, so we don't.

Shall we brush you now
and blanket you and feed
you oats? For you're

a horse for sure, a fine equine.
Not hers, not mine, not ours
Goodnight, horse your own.


hans ostrom 2015

Monday, December 14, 2015

Duke, Again

With Ellington, never
just one mood, ever
two or more.

State profoundly
something simple
but please

don't decorate.
Slip something
gut-bucket,

not quite profane
but close, into
urbane constructions.

Make smart choices.
Move efficiently
like a chess

assassin. The players
are the source:
so obvious, but

almost always
overlooked: Aristotle
understood. Remain

madly allergic
to cliche. Dodge in
and out of the fray.


hans ostrom 2015

Epistemological Hash: Sheesh

A cat for instance is routinely perplexed--
not alarmed but calmly
situated in ignorance, seeking to understand.
--Whereas humans
have evolved, so to speak, into the expectation
that they have a right to know
and understand all
in a big goddamned hurry. Often they state

that expectation with believed nonsense,
hideous lore, and all manner of bullshit.
And anyway, what if science epitomizes Zeno's
Paradox, always advancing but never
finally knowing, so that human seeking

finds that the essence of the universe
is never quite what and not really there--
not a bad prospect, if you think rationalism
sans romance is, albeit necessary, a
bit of a bore. I see
I've made quite a hash of things here.


--hans ostrom 2015

Friday, December 11, 2015

Listening to Monk


("Well, You Needn't")

Concerted jazz effort produces
a jazzerted zephyr forthwith.

No frazzling in the port, no
impertinence in the fort. A

rush of notes arranged by
practice and intuition

suggests at least a nod to
the transience of people and things.


hans ostrom 2015




Oakland Talk


Gertie Stein, Otis Sistrunk, Al Davis,
Mac Dre,Sharon Shore, Bert Camapneras,
Frank Epperson, and all, oh
where have you gone? You're hiding

in triplicate under the sun. That's
where you must to be. Oakland's changed
greatly and not at all. Always and forever
a hard place. I sat on a bench across from a bench
staked out by a homeless guy who dreamed
he was still a young man. I played

chess on my phone in Jack
London Square. What do you think
of that, Jack? After a red-headed woman
walked by and gained distance, the guy
on the bench said, in the growl of a carnival-barker,
"She's got a chin like Brunhilda!"

Neither a compliment, nor an insult:
that's Oakland talk. Silver and black,
Oakland slips out of your grasp like mercury.


hans ostrom





Death of a Myth


The Grudge Master is dead. He's grinding his axes
in Hell. He left us with nothing except our lives,
which from the first moment have not been enough
to sustain us. We're losers because we fight
to the death and then fight Death. Winners
hire people to fight on their behalf
in a fixed game.They use words like "behalf."

It is over It is over Every sign
Every signal, Every seagull and fat cow
has surrendered. We are nothing!
Therefore, celebrate. We are nothing!
Our shields are made of cardboard.
We're lost in a forest set on fire.
We desire someone to arc

her/his back, up and above us,
and come. Come for and by us and
with us. A trivial physical
apotheosis, true, but real and fierce.

We desire the sun, but someone owns
that, too (it had to happen). Ah,
put my profaned body in a cheap box,
throw a blanket in, and bury.
That's all, that's all, the myth is dead.


hans ostrom 2015




Monday, November 30, 2015

Juvenal in the Desert

Who pays for the trespasses of the satirist?
In my case, the satirist. For my imaginative
attacks, I suffer dull imprisonment
in this shabby oasis.

To their minds, I'm uncivil,
self-righteous, and worst of all,
correct. I record the bulbous
nose as bulbous, the politician
as compulsively depraved,
the dreadful poet as pitiful.
Who pities me? Here

I see melons. Leather bags of wine
and water. Camels chewing nothing,
smirking. These odd desert people
in their smelly garments who
with their brand of irony let
me know I'm free to leave at
any time. Actually, not. The
shape of women's breasts
still fascinate me. Late

in afternoons, a little drunk
(all right: a lot), I see in
warping sand a chastened city
where fools are not honored.
Are not in power.


hans ostrom 2015



Friday, November 27, 2015

Kings

In chess Hiram doesn't
like to move his White king except
for castling. Otherwise the king
sleeps, oblivious and kind, waiting
for nothing as in checkmate or
nothing as in checkmate.

The Black king, Hiram knows,
had to learn to move,
dissemble, and adapt
so as to make up for White's
eternal advantage, its
unearned, privileged edge.

In the end, both kings bore
Hiram. But the Black queen
and the White queen enchant
him, goad him into fashioning
a fantasy. He dreams of an
extravagant, satisfying threesome
with two women magically
embodied from the symbolism
of chess, fully human
and yet mythically erotic.

Yes, it's all brought to life there,
albeit in Hiram's mind,
directed by Fellini,
narrated by Nina Simone.

Sometimes chess isn't
exciting enough for Hiram.


hans ostrom 2015



Monday, November 23, 2015

The Retirement of Literature


After you teach what they used to call literature
for a long time, there are some poems and books
you don't want to teach anymore, not because
of something in them or on account of
the students but because you don't want
to submit the works to any further
analysis--by anyone, especially yourself.

You want these works to enjoy
retirement, lying in the sun,
simply existing as a collection of words
and punctuation, without a career.


hans ostrom 2015





Cows, Sun Loves You




The several stomachs of a cow brew
bilious cud out of grass and grain.
Excretion follows in due time
as cows create sweet brown mortar
that dries into thick discs.

Cattle consider and consider,
all day. They earned their Ph.D.s
in Bovinity. The sun created
them. The sun loves them.



hans ostrom 2015




Surrounding You

Fresh oxygen in cool air surrounds you
as do social contracts pulling you
into roles that weary and bore you.

Don't whine, even to no one,
you tell yourself, for you've
imported voices that force

conformity and sustain shame.
To the end, you'll be maneuvered
into doing shit you don't want to do.

Some of it may be necessary,
but not that much. Who needs
a dictator when people volunteer

to push each other around? No
wonder so many drop out any way they
can, often desperately, paced suicide.



hans ostrom 2015



Tuesday, November 17, 2015

"in unjust Spring"

(with apologies to e.e.)


"in unjust Spring
after the po-
lice state had arisen (peo-
were dis-
tracted)(fires
burned in Baltimore,well
known to be
a terribly terribly racist
city:plagued
by the pale doom of
american history.
Baltimore is all the rage
that builds up:frus-
tration & americans rather
likesitscities to die,
especially
black&brown
spaces,"
he spoke, in despair and not
knowing what else to do.



hans ostrom 2015




Collage Degree


I was just blowing up a balloon when
Italy won a soccer match
and Abraham Lincoln gave a speech
concerning railroad law. Then
Chairman Meow mad a cameo appearance
on Tahitian TV to discuss Titian's
use of shadow, and naturally
an abandoned ship sank off
and on an Aleutian island.

The phone rang virtually,
and gunpowder was invented.
Milton wrote a line with
an inverted hand while
Joan of Archimedes developed
a crush on a dark-haired
Viking. Frederick Douglass
scowled, and I have no idea
what I did with the utilities bill.


hans ostrom 2015




Excellent Persons


Like butterflies in fog, excellent persons
are often overlooked. They
perform the good and the necessary,
ameliorating cruelty,
appreciating the melody of words
like ameliorate.
\
They won't become celebrities.
Technically, they're suckers
who relinquish advantage.
They plant perennials in Fall.
They get shit done.


hans ostrom 2015



Friday, November 13, 2015

Hiram and Success


Hiram's tried success, and he's tried failure.
By a slim margin, he prefers failure,
maybe because success softened it.
Thing is, success attracts envy
like a wet towel growing mold.
Success needles you with its secret
knowledge of luck and inequality.
It demands repetition of you as it
sips a martini
and listens to "Is That All There Is?"

Failure's more authentic, says Hiram.
It's the experimenter's genial friend.
It's God's way of telling you to grow up.

Like a slim tick, shame tries to attach
itself to failure, but Hiram knows
nobody has to put up with that shit.
You own your failure; it's a sad chair
you built, and only you sit in it.
Yeah, then you do something else, go on
to another foolish errand
in an infinite universe.


hans ostrom 2015




Monday, November 9, 2015

It Equals Done


It's been done. It's all been
done. What is "it"? That's
just it. It's all been done for so
long, there's not more it,
and people madly try to make new shit,
but what they make's been done
before, so mostly what we get
is serious over-wroughting. Too

serious. Done, done differently,
"reinvented," done the old way,
the new way, the old new way,
the new old way. Done but not
really. Undone. A refusal to do:
not-doing in a way that ends up
doing it, again. It's been

nihilistically done, ground
to powder. Done in powder.
There's nothing left to be
done. But we have to something!
Let's do it!

hans ostrom 2015





Thursday, October 22, 2015

No, Chess Isn't War

Chess isn't war. It's opposite of
war. Non-violently, hands seize the medium
composing pieces, lie quietly, make
notes, or report silently on stress.

Considering chess, a mind's
distracted from plunder. Narcissism
is tucked into one corner, napping.
true, your ego might get nicked,
your imaginary status jostled.

Loss of coin? Possible, unlikely.
Otherwise, flies buzz. The worst
that can happen is that your "king,"
a figurine, must leave the checker-board
floor and stand on a table. That's it.

Chess is a minor miraculous mess
of angles invented by angels--
no, actually by thoughtful, playful
people in India and Persia. A parody
of royal courts, it's played democratically.


hans ostrom 2015




Sunday, October 18, 2015

The Chessboard

Apologies to Mr. Blake,
For heaven's sake.



Chessboard, chessboard, black and white,
In the subtle cafe light,
What Indian and Persian eyes
Fugued your fearful geometries?



hans ostrom 2015








Something It Did Not Used to Be

Especially confused by things he understands,
he finds himself in a recreated sector
of Oklahoma City called Bricktown,
which is cheek-by-jowl to Deep Deuce,
Charlie Christian's ground. Bricks

of the newly restored buildings to him
evince a muted somber red that alludes
to tragic mineral compounds
cooked hard and put up wet with mortar.

Restaurants, bars, and shops:
the holy trinity of tourism:
America, here is your culture,
kind of. He told this to nobody
but himself. And nobody
danced except in clubs, nobody
wove carpets, or improvised
sales negotiations, or read
poetry out loud. He understands
exactly why and remains puzzled.
Oh one more thing: "the martini"
had become something it did not used to be.


hans ostrom 2015



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Monday, October 12, 2015

Celebrities


CELEBRITIES IN BED

They itch, scratch, writhe, sleep, snore. Yes,
all right, sex too. Also mites. Mites are a
problem for celebrities as they are a problem
for everyone else.

CELEBRITIES IN PUBLIC

They present themselves like peacocks or rubbery statues; OR
they become sullen and withdrawn like badgers; OR both.

ATTENTION IS THE COIN OF THE REALM

Celebrities didn't invent this system, in which
attention is the coin of the realm, not money,
which is, albeit important, secondary. Celebrities
are attention-capitalists who leverage attention
to acquire more attention. Pay attention!

CELEBRITIES ON THE MOON

It was the result of a mass-expulsion.

ANGRY CELEBRITIES

The mixture of fame, money, entitlement,
indulgence, and self-loathing sometimes
explodes like a souffle.

CELEBRITIES IN THE U.S.

They are represented to us as people we imagine
ourselves being while still being ourselves,
although they know we can never be like them,
and they know why. We know why.

CELEBRITY GRAVEYARD

I asked a tombstone for an autograph.
It refused. I offered mine. It declined.

CELEBRITIES GET TIRED OF BEING CELEBRITIES

Retired from acting, Cary Grant liked to watch
TV and eat a modest meal on a TV tray at home. Greta
Garbo did not want to be alone; she wanted
to be left alone.

CELEBRITY IS A CHRONIC ILLNESS

Society suffers from celebrity.


hans ostrom 2015




Saturday, October 10, 2015

Christians and Guns

The senator called on all
Christians to arm themselves
with pistols and rifles
against something he saw in his head,
a space
also inhabited by oily sand dunes,
asymmetrical concrete blocks,
mud puddles, and small
household appliances.

And by Jesus, of course,
riding into town on a donkey,
his pistol holstered,
the rifle across his legs.

The senator can't find scripture
for his alarm, but that don't matter,
children; that don't matter.


hans ostrom 2015




Wednesday, October 7, 2015

A Night of Bluegrass

Go ahead and cut the top off-a that mountain
to get your coal, Mr. High Pockets. You
can't cut that high-pitched wail out of the air
where the mountain was
and shall ever be, in God's eyes.

And all them strings get picked and strummed,
chorded and teased, til a tune is tightly braided,
careful and true, like the long gray hair
of a matriarch reading her Bible in blue
moonlight, rocking and praying. She's

as heart-broken and reconciled as a ballad
about some young'ns gone too soon. Music
of the hills distills sadness, strains it
through an upright tradition
that Nashville goddamn tried to ruin.
But could not.


hans ostrom 2015






Friday, October 2, 2015

Concerning Doors


They're like Calvinist ministers. Merciless oak.
Posture rod-rigid. They're
like politicians; they force us to shake their hands.
They are like dancers: if they cannot swing
and sway, well hey, they would rather
fade into the wall.

They are like laws that sometimes come
between us, sometimes save us from our rage.

When a logger revs the chainsaw and draws
it across a Douglas fir, listen:
from all up and down two hundred feet
of poised timber comes the sound
of doors slamming in suburbia.

Driving the highway, you see them:
uniform, sad doors of motels,
all shut, all locked, all painted
yellow, one yellow bulb above each door.

Note that in the offices of power,
the closed doors are more powerful,
and are larger, than most walls.

In quick old comic films,
villains chased Our Silent Hero
down and across a corridor of doors.
One of the early schticks.

Swinging doors of the set of a
Western looked like a gambler's vest.
Comes the actor playing the slinger
bursting through, his spurs singing
in the sudden scripted silence
like crickets on a prairie. CUT TO:
outside: out through those weak
doors staggers a shot body, stiff
as a real door, then down the steps
and falling into dust. An
American narrative.

The last room alas is only as wide as
its door. You won't hear the pebbles knocking.



hans ostrom 2015





Wednesday, September 30, 2015

That's Right, Me & Keats


Beauty is false, and truth
can be ugly. That's some
of what we know but only
a little of what we need
to know. Keats's formulation

is beautifully circular.
Like the urn, real or
imagined, it's neither true
nor false. It just is, so
we like seeing. That's

right, John, we still like
looking at that ode.



hans ostrom 2015








Monday, September 28, 2015

Nobody Beats Tacoma


Here's how it works: Beginning as North 27th Street,
North 21st Street just gets its confidence up
when North I Street slugs it and takes over,
only to be vaporized by South Yakima Avenue,
which morphs into something called Thomson.
The streets of Tacoma are so mean they're
mean to each other. Nobody beats Tacoma. Nobody.

Seattle has forever misread the meaning of Point
Defiance. It's not a park or a peninsula,
or a place to play dress-up on your bike.
It is a destined middle finger pointed
vaguely north. Put a penny
on the railroad track down by the port,
and you might well summon Guy Fawkes,
Richard Brautigan, a Chinese laborer,
or a skeptical Puyallup woman, pre-contact.
Whoever it is will take your penny
and invest it in a cloud-cone
hovering above Rainier like the saucers
Kenneth Arnold saw. About the time

you think you have Tacoma solved,
you find yourself on a suspension-bridge,
with a dog, and the bridge starts
writhing like a boa constrictor. Then
it flaps and twists, snapping itself
free from blueprints, taking a dive
like a punch-drunk stevedore
trying to earn a buck at a smoker
in 1931. The dog lives. If you tell

the tattooed woman at the drive-in
that you ordered everything on your
burger, she will tell you, without
animus, "That is everything."
Nobody beats Tacoma. You have
to understand: Tacoma is more
than a grit city that keeps its
bourgeoisie on a leash like a pit bull.
Tacoma is a sense of humor.

Once you get that, it may take decades,
you'll understand everything. I
mean, really, after embedding
yourself in a group of eccentrics
at the Parkway, the Acme, or
the Goldfish Redux, you'll see
the folly in naming streets
and other ambitions. You'll realize
you are Nobody, the only person
ever to beat Tacoma. Good night.


2015 hans ostrom






Party of One


I walk around the city. I'm a one-person
parade. Wave to onlookers, hold to the route.
Nobody knows I'm being honored. That's okay.
I prefer it that way. I stroll proudly,
give thumbs up to stray cats, seagulls,
and insects. After it's over, I
head home. There's only so much
adulation this hero can take.


hans ostrom 2015



Running Late

Time-travel will not be impossible yesterday.
Tomorrow will purvey proper questions
about problems we shall have used-to ignore.

Time offers an infinitude of views
through which to perceive matter,
which has no purpose.

I'm leaving here to go there to buy
coffee and bread: these eleven words
and the universe predate me. I'm running late.



hans ostrom 2015






Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Murder Mystery


A certain curtain. An uncertain merchant.
Add a dead body. Subtract a dead body.
Multiply details of an atmosphere. Divide
clues. Some must be concrete, others
ethereal, and some as sodden as
milk-soaked cereal. Why

does the solver solve? That's the most
important motive. Who allowed
the murderer to become what the murderer
is? Indict them. Please

remember we are talking about language.
In a book, nobody really ever gets killed.
That's one of the great virtues of literature.


hans ostrom 2013