"I Want," by Fernando Pessoa

"Claire de Lune," by Paul Verlaine

⛈️ 🪕 "Riders On The Storm", performed by Foggy Mountain Spaceship

IKO IKO the DIXIE CUPS TV version

Risky, Rickety Bridge

It was a cafe in Time. It was

an evening in space. You two
met, talked and listened, heard
and spoke. Eyes seeing faces.
Nostrils noting aromas, Gestures,
shifts of bodies. Smiles, giggles,
frowns. Tendrils of thought
intertwining. The unfolding

took you to a precipice. Where
a thin, swaying bridge made
of rusty cables and gray boards
offered a way across a chasm,
a segment of two lives' times,
a space called risk.

Hans Ostrom 2025

Concerning Cardamom

 I first met it in childhood,

eating Swedish butter crescent
rolls laced with it. I called it
cardamon for years.

It's not sour or sweet or
hot or bland. Not among
the brash, ballistic, or
bombastic spices. A taste-shifter.

It comes from wee dark seeds
held in narrow, sage-green, three-
sided pods picked from low-growing
tropical plants. It cloaks sugar
in subtlety. Builds coalitions
inside pastry, pudding, or pilafs.

It attracts attention it never
demands. Cardamom allures
as it defers. Again
I move toward it with description
in hand. It dances aside, ever
out of reach. It might even grace
the taste of a peach.

hans ostrom 2025

Mahalia Jackson "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" from "Louis Armstrong at ...

THIS TRAIN - ROY ORBISON, JOHNNY CASH, CARL PERKINS, JERRY LEE LEWIS (FR...

Stax Volt Tour 1967 feat. Otis Redding, Booker T. & The MGs, Sam & Dave

"love is more thicker than forget," by e.e. cummings

Staring Becomes the Fourth Line

A corner of a ceiling:

could be in any squarish
building anywhere on Earth.

Three lines intersect, dissolve
into a point. Maybe where you
are now, you find a corner to see.

Seeing, you might get transfixed,
the familiar becoming strange.
Shade versus light. Axioms

versus wood, plaster, stone,
paint,,,, Or: just that thing
which staring or even

imaginging in darkness
can do: hold your mind, bind
it; tug, coax, seduce it. Staring,
sight becomes the fourth line.

hans ostrom 2025

Preposterous

This planet onto which women

birth us: it's lit by an explosion

we call Sun. I think about

how that statement's parts

are all unlikely. Preposterious.

As is the visual, aural sign,

"preposterous" & the systems

it belongs to. Ask why any 

of this, any of us, occurred,

and I think if we're honest,

we must confess, "We cannot

know--not ever fully, all the way."

hans ostrom 2025

"An April Day," by Joseph S. Cotter, Jr.