Vibrations

The elevated train shook

and rattled his dank studio

apartment. A a cat sleeping next

to him began to buzz its own

body with purring. Indecipherable

words from a cranked up TV

next door hummed inside wall

studs and plaster-board. Somewhere

in the city, his former lover

snored, he knew, her nose

morphed into a kind of kazoo. 

He listened past the dins

and thought he heard the rustle

& tap of cockroaches & now a

furnace pipe joined the noise.

hans ostrom 2024

Silence-Management

How do you shape your silences?
What do they serve? Some
silences seem to preside
over thoughts that keep going,
keep searching for nothing
except the next object of thought.

There's the quiet in the mind
following failure, the sound
of shame and acquiescence.

Yesterday you heard a noise
that came you thought from
inside a wall. You found a silence
and leaned into it, hoping/not hoping
to hear the sound a second time.
The next day you remembered
it as a silence to savor, not as
an absence of something you sought.


hans ostrom 2019

Everything Had Its Say Today

Everything  had its say today.
Behind their branches, fir trees murmured.
Cars, as always, couldn't shut up, their
speeches dull and linear. Beams and joists
and pipes chatted, whined, and groaned
in buildings. Lots of complaining.

I kept waiting for rocks to talk.
They will one day. It takes them eons
to formulate a thought.

The sky speaks sign language,
except when lightning strikes.
Then comes that unmistakable
laughter of delighted air.

Also, sounds of screaming
and crying seemed to spring
from cages America locks children
in on borders, in jails. Yes,
weirdly, even steel and depravity
had their say today.


hans ostrom 2018

Bring in `Da Noise?

There is an excellent chance that tolerance of noise may be age-related: youth tend to be more noise-tolerant than the aging and the aged; that may be the situation. There is an excellent chance that this situation, if in fact it is the case, is ironic, for with age comes a diminishing capacity to hear, so one might think that the older one got, the more tolerant s/he would be of noise.

Of course, folks from my generation think back reflexively to all those loud concerts we blithely attended, decibels smashing into ear-drums. Huh?

I'm a wee bit surprised that, based strictly on the profit-motive, more developers don't build and "market" more houses and condominiums based on the noise-factor. There is a cornucopia of new and venerable noise-reducing and noise-eliminating products in the building trades. Of course, they add cost, but I believe a significant percentage of potential buyers would be willing to pay the extra cost for the extra silence. Quiet Estates. Come Home. . . To Silence-Ridge Properties! Wouldn't You Like to Live in Shhhhh! Towers?!

A small, quiet poem about noise, then:

I Beg Your Pardon?

It’s so noisy here, what
with automobiles, airplanes,
motors, guns, missiles, TVs,
ear-pods, crowds, amplifiCAtion, snarling
gasoline-drunk tools. The
blasting, roaring, whirring, whi-
ning, humming, droning, rum-
bling are incessant. How

funny if God were to turn out to be
slightly hard of hearing, willing
but unable to catch the melodies
of most prayers because of
these furious sounds we manufacture
all the time. How odd if God
would love to care, if it just
weren’t for the blare, the volume,
of our self-debilitating decibelity.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom