Agoraphobics' New Year

 

Agoraphobic New Year

published some years ago

(to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne")


Will agoraphobics please

come out and help

bring in the Year?


No, that's all right. Thanks

anyway; we can see from

here just fine!

Pretender's Odyssey

Seems like every time I tried

to pretend to be someone else,

I was just pretending to act

like someone else & I got

tired of it fast. I then returned

to pretending to be

me. Which has been very

demanding because the task

is so ill defined & yet I'm

still dedicated to it. I act

like me & then look over

to see how I'm doing &

a me is glancing over his

shoulder, smirking,  as he runs. 

Like People, We Converse

 We're conversing like people

who converse. A walking
commentary. Opinions
flourish like weeds.

"The way things should be"
and "the way things used to be"
become the engines
that drive our words. What if we
spoke of things we never speak of?--

And grandma said, "I'd like crows
to turn lake blue one year." To which
grandpa said, "I was never eager
to fall in love because I thought of
it as just another chore."

Instead we keep familiar packages
of words moving down
conversational conveyor belts.
Because we're tired. Because
we're accustomed. Because
we get together only a couple
times a year and just want
to get through the occasions safely.

Nightmare, My Visitor

 At age 4, then lasting for years,

a short nightmare came to live with me.
(Sometimes it struck just as I nodded off.)

Me, in a dark oval space--
like a hollowed out eggplant.
I touched the pliant walls & then

a dark shape like a train engine
ran over me, erased me & I
startled myself awake to stay alive.

It visited less often down the years
& finally retired. Somewhere deep
in the mind's damp stone workshop,

a laborer toils to work through
something kept secret from me.
The translation of that bedeviling

dream lies in a vault down there.
I don't miss the nightmare. But if
it came back, I'd think, "Oh, it's you."

Holding on to Warmth

(nonet form: one less syllable per line)

Wind moaned so loud I thought it was you

on your side of our bed island.
Got up--temp was way below
freezing--freezing rain on
the way. Got back in bed.
Held on to you.
on to warmth,
our warmth,
love.

hans ostrom, 2022

"A Winter Twilight," by Angelina Weld Grimké

"Christmas Eve, Nearing Midnight--New York," by Langston Hughes

Office at Night

 

image: Edward Hopper's painting "Office at Night," 1940

It's 1940, and Pearl Harbor
has yet to wake Americans up
to historical catastrophe. City lights
illuminate her, voluptuous in blue
but ignored by the pale manager
droning out his own letter, which
she typed perfectly. It's Friday,
after five. Her desk is cleared,

she's ready to slam the black
steel drawer on another week
and meet the gals for a drink,
go home, kick her black heels
off, free her body from fashion
unclip the hose and roll them
off, strip the rest, and
sink nude into hot suds.

She stares down her olive
drab boss, whose wife's holding
his dinner at home and wobbling
under a headache. The office
is running out of air.

hans ostrom 2022

For Those Who Sleep With Pain

I have to sleep with pain tonight.

It seems to love me so.
I'd like to break things off.

Between my not-quite sleeping
and not-exactly waking,
I'll stumble down an alley
in my mind to get way
from pain. I'll ask a diner line-cook
"Where's the moon tonight?"
She'll crush her smoke out
then say, "Where it's always been,
my friend, trying to get the the Earth's
attention.

                At alley's end,
I'll walk out to a loud and crashing
avenue, a city's slamming noise.

The Lady from the  Fog will walk
up--say, "Time for you to go to bed?"
And there I'll be, pain kissing me,
and hugging me, throbbing, throbbing.
I'll take some meds, which don't do much.
I have to sleep with pain tonight.
I know I'm not alone. Around the world,
millions, millions, have to sleep with pain.
We have to sleep with pain. 

Galleries of Grit

Desert winds compulsively

sculpt sand. Abstract shapes
rise up, find edges, façades,

contours--then serve up all

they are unto the sculpting force.

 

The cosmic tourists--sun and stars

and moon--oversee these galleries

of grit, where place is art.

air's genius, and illusion

of form never tires ore expires. 

hans ostrom 2022

A Real Mess

pink: wound, blossom, blouse, nipple, meat, cat-tongue

blue: jeans, eyes, ink, tattoo, smoke, bruise

brown: dirt, shoe, shit, hair, nipple, chair
red: blood, light, rose, lipstick, sign, ember

yellow: beach, hair, flame, rose, peach, corn
green: eyes, scarf, valley, mold, tree, broccoli

white: phantom-race, chalk, panties, smoke, paper, cream
black: eyeshade, ink, shoe shadow, hair, cavern

hurl it all, hurl it all I say at a canvas &
make a real mess: the world

hans ostrom 2022

Pollock

I saw an image of a Pollock

painting & thought well this is fun
& then thought no, not about
chaos but primal ordering
forces. Sky-blue is pretty
but red pulls eyes away from it
then black pulls red away &
I was satisfied. My gaze
made its way through undergrowth
in a wood, no one there to chop it down.

hans ostrom

She's Rising

She's rising in politics.

Filled with the yeast
of what they say It Takes.
Rising in politics,
for what purpose, she
doesn't know (though she
pretends to), except that
she likes being lifted
by the lifters, placed
by the placers.

She's rising in politics
toward higher office, well
above the People, whatever
they are. She speaks, she
greets, she gestures. Agrees
with certain persons, word-cuts
others. She's rising

with her husband and children,
who are photographed.
She became a politician,
a creature of seems, a
player of positions, dull
drama with consequences.

She falls in line, meets-with,
speaks--providing a mouth
for the ventriloquists. She flies
and of course, lies.

She rises, a balloon above
the people, who get smaller
  and smaller.

Hans Ostrom 2022

The Ornaments Convene

 A white angel, a black angel,

three black Santa Clauses. An angel
made of a toilet paper cylinder,
child's cardboard craft. Ornaments

made of beer-can aluminum,
glass ornaments from Aunt Nevada,
who loaded the mincemeat pie
with whiskey every year. A blue
sphere or two, survivors
from Christmases way-past
when Ma insisted on her blue tree
every year. A pink motorcycle,

a wooden elf who jumps
like a Cossack dancer
when you pull a string. A horse,
a cat, a crystal icicle. Red bird,
yellow bird, peacock. . . . This
is an annual reunion of ornaments,

who approve the minutes
from last year, chat while we're asleep,
stay cool with the LED lights
on an artificial tree;
who serve as metonyms
for clusters of nostalgia, loss,
and tattered joy. What about Jesus?
Well, he's there implicitly in
the eclectic hospitality.

hans ostrom 2022

"What Survives," by Rainer Maria Rilke

"The Spell," by Paul Verlaine

"Have Me," by Carl Sandburg

Bruno Mars, Morris Day and The Time - Tribute a Prince ||Performance in ...

Newborn

wrinkled from mother-water

eyes closed to the Mystery
old person's seaweed hair
fingers thin as tendrils
accepts odors, sounds, dry-
warmth. hears its own gurgling
cry. does it yet ask why?

hans ostrom 2022

*Henry Morgan Ostrom, born November 23, 2022

A Real Mess

pink: wound, blossom, blouse, nipple, meat, cat-tongue

blue: jeans, eyes, ink, tattoo, smoke, bruise

brown: dirt, shoe, shit, hair, nipple, chair
red: blood, light, rose, lipstick, sign, ember

yellow: beach, hair, flame, rose, peach, corn
green: eyes, scarf, valley, mold, tree, broccoli

white: phantom-race, chalk, panties, smoke, paper, cream
black: eyeshade, ink, shoe shadow, hair, cavern

hurl it all, hurl it all I say at a canvas &
make a real mess: the world

hans ostrom 2022

About the Photo

Yes, with my long legs and sturdy feet,

I strode into that arrythmic surf,
which tries to cover tracks.
It left two. Sharp ones, too.

Darling, you may wonder
who took the snapshot
and why in black-and-white.
And perhaps more existentially,

did I come back? From what?
I'd ask in my annoying way.
Did I turn left, did I turn right,
did I float out of sight or into jaws

of slashing sharks? This note
may confirm or deny uncertain
hypotheses. You know me,

I love to tease.

*note: the image is of a "found photo" posted on tumblr

hans ostrom 2022

Arlo Guthrie/I Can't Help Falling In Love With You

Keep It Simple

 "Be quick, but don't hurry." --John Wooden

At the clotted airport cafe, a holiday swarm:
the woman orchestrating sandwiches,
unrushed but quick, wears a hajib--

a scarf that finishes by falling
to the middle of her back. Forest green.
A light-gray top and elegant black

trousers accompany. Llke me,
she's part of this society, I'm equal
to her, except if I worked at

the sandwich station in this
bee-hive moment, I'd be fired,
a mercy. Something

about forest green, light gray,
and black: austere, soothing.
Evergreens, mist rising from a river.

hans ostrom 2022

My Soul's Been Working Out

My soul's been working out,

Lifting nightmares with its snout,
Swimming laps in honeyed air.
Tickling felines on a dare,
Weeping hard at news of war,
Grieving deeply to its core.

It lifts the weights of darkest doom
Jabs and punches with gray gloom.
Hikes great peaks of women's beauty,
Hauls me, tugs me to good duty.

Zen-poses til it aches,
Bellows at my fakes.
Sprints through beatitudes,
Ju-Jitzus my bad attitudes.
Wrestles with me to discern,
Spins and skates to make me learn.

Exhausted, it plops down,
Shoots me a soulful frown.

hans ostrom 2022

betweens

 waves between waves

  beats between beats
clicks between
  clicks, quicks between
slows, knows between guesses,
  yeses twixt no's,
stops between flows,
  goes birthed of pauses,
clauses out of phrases out of
  words between words,
gaps between galaxies, leaps
  between particles, articles
of faith in the face of a wraith
  hanging in the night between days.

hans ostrom 2022

Attenborough: the amazing Lyre Bird sings like a chainsaw! Now in high q...

The News from Inside

Inside me, still,

lurks the baby who could walk
but chose not to
(wanting instead to stand up,
hands grasping the rail
of what they called a play-pen)--
and to watch. It seems

I was born wary
and passively resistant.
And that's who I stayed.
In the 17th month, I walked
because, having watched them,
I noted that they
seemed to want me to walk.

Inside me, I don't
contain multitudes,
and Walt Whitman can
go fuck himself. Inside me
there's the DNA of a woman
living in Africa
160, 000 years ago:
it's inside you, too.

And then inside there there's
a few people who worked like dogs
but not as hard as slaves. Maybe
a failed preacher, certainly
a Skid Row drunk, and possibly
the funniest patient in what
they called a mental ward:
no proof of this.

Inside me, I think it's
population: 12. Or so.
But no apostles. In there,

an old non-descript tree
finally gives up, accepts
a lightning-smash, explodes,
and falls. Deer, squirrels,
owls, a cougar, a bear,
and maybe some hiker with
a bandana tied around
dirty hair mark
the arboreal collapse,
but, god damn it,
there's never a Zen monk
around when you need one.
And Walt Whitman
can go fuck himself.

Inside me, there's
a startling, chronic
mild terror--maybe because
at month 15 or so,
I learned from informed
intuition that very little
in this life-thing makes sense,
although we must pretend
that much of it does.

And Walt Whitman...
was one great self-publicist:
American, that is.