The Sound-Track Goes with the Screen

They moved me to a different office
again. Nothing personal, although
they must admit I've been an unyielding
piece of grit (I said grit) in the academic
machine. Sometimes a crow

comes to the ledge outside the small
wood-framed window, three brick
stories up. Crows always know
where I am. This one looks like
a private investigator.

The office doesn't have a door.
I put up a three-panel screen
instead.  Film noir. It suggests
I can tell fortunes during office hours.
The other people up here aren't

in my department; rather, I'm
not in theirs.  What is my department?
In this tepid exile, I seem to thrive.
I prepare for class, read, write poems,
eat bananas, look online for art,

music, Oakland Raiders updates,
and arcane information. Lately
I've been listening to the wind's
long moans in the duct system.
The sound track goes with the screen.



hans ostrom 2017

Unhappy Teriyaki

Perhaps I shouldn't have eaten at
the "Unhappy Teriyaki." For the sauce
was morose, the service glum. Clientele:
numb. It was as if we all were extras

in a black-and-white film, waiting
for the star to come in out of the
fake rain playing a humorless,
wandering anti-hero. Short handsome

zero. Even if it wasn't as if that,
I tell you only the rice looked upbeat.
Songs of lamentation emerged
from the kitchen. A percussion-section

warms up in my orchestra pit.


hans ostrom 2015

Edge Noir

They were good, the film-noir movies.
They're like a simple but important meal
cooked well. The noir of life

(and remember that noir is full of light),
however, often lurks around edges. So

you are sitting at a kitchen table,
a low drop-light making your drink
of bourbon a featured performer. You
look up and see and hear a woman
talking on a telephone. She has
one of those great 1950s figures--
stylish, so the clothes still fit,
tight enough to show the goods,
modest enough to repulse
losers, no fear of an ample belly,
one knee turned slightly in.

And there's a cat. Here it comes.
It looks at you and yawns as if to
say not one goddamned thing. It is
then that you say to yourself, "I
don't know where I am or who she
is, but I like my hat, I like
the bourbon, and I just have this
feeling everything is going
to turn out fine."



hans ostrom