Mount Rainier, Morning Commute

We in our wheeled box

join streams of them in theirs--
snaking lines of pale yellow
lamps and ruby red ones:
commuting traffic.

Immense, the volcano
Mount Rainier dwarfs
our rolling frenzy. This
morning the mountain
appears as a roughly sketched
triangle, all of it a back-lit
blue, two-dimensional, that

little tell-tale notch at the top
where one day, one night,
the molten inner Earth
will travel up and out,
blast ash, spew lava, rain
boiling mud on our busy silliness
down here on this plain.

hans ostrom 2025

Park and Fly

At the place with the sign that read
"PARK AND FLY" people were parking
their cars, getting out, and flying.

A lot of them roosted in trees
nearby. Up there they tore through
their baggage and briefcases,

grabbing paper, pencils, and wires
I guess to build nests with. Some
people perched on roofs

and huddled shoulder to shoulder,
cheeping or cooing. I think they
just wanted to get away from their

jobs kids pets companions husbands
wives partners televisions poverty
depression phones & asexual routines.

Anyway it was quite a thing, and it
made for an awful commute,
selfish of them really.


hans ostrom 2016

"Go to Keep Going"

Our daily, nightly migrations,
en masse metal on wheels or wings:
routine, ferocious--
such an expenditure.

If we ask ourselves
to rethink the regulated
frenzy of to-and-back
to work, we will tell
ourselves we have no choice
and mean that to be
a good reason, sensible.

Commuting, we change
ourselves together
and permanently.
No one really
recovers from it.
We go to keep going.


hans ostrom 2015

"The Trafficiad," Hans Ostrom

Re-posting one from several years ago. Dedicated to all commuters.

"People Who Must," by Carl Sandburg

bus ride

drone, smells, chatter. blurs
drone, smells. chatter. drone,
revery, comfort, pain, fear,
drone. blurs, noise, pain.
fatigue, noise, noise. chatter,
noise, fatigue. smells, smells,
smile. glance, fatigue, noise.
glance, glance, fear. pain,
smells, drone. drone, drone.
stop sudden noise. drone,
weary, glance. smells.
stop, up, smells, glance,
out. noise. fatigue.


Hans Ostrom, 2012

Rush Hour Poem

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Rush, Our

Convenience, steel, and efficiency
in automobilian form get reduced
to viscous troughs of traffic, giving
us time to work on futility, self-loathing,
and heart-attacks. Someone named it

the Rush Hour. It's when rushing ceases,
and it lasts several hours; otherwise,
it's a great name. The oligarchs prefer
that we travel this way, stopped

in vehicles built to go, sitting in a
holding-cell atop rubber tires and
with payments due. It's a great system.
It really is. And so sometimes we

lean on the horn or shout at the
windshield, our impotent spit
flying, to express sad rage or
to misbehave farcically.


Copyright 2011