Use Your Imagination

Your imagination uses you

when you use your imagination.
It's like walking a burly, leash-defying
dog. Like lecturing a cat
about excess leisure time.

Your imagination goes
where it will and then slobbers
on you. It will yawn, lick itself,
curl up, and sleep where you sleep--
and hiss if you try to move it.

hans ostrom 2024

It Is What It Isn't

It's a cocoa cacophony,
a chocolate noise.
It's a bluish red
flower, a purple poise.

It's a fanciful
thing like an
invisible ring.
It's the notion

that we might make
a forest in our minds,
go there, and wander
beneath giant trees,

if we should so please.


hans ostrom 2019

More Lies

Some more lies, then:
today in a fabricated storm,
clothes fell from the sky.
The tiniest of birds flew
through my eye into my
brain, which dreams of
the bird every night now
in jail: I am. I have been
arrested for false imaginings.
I use state-invoiced spoons
to play the bars like a xylophone
hoping someone will answer.


hans ostrom 2018

Aren't We?

Tonight the rice-marsh glows,
and rows of plum trees feed
their purple particulars. The scene
means food. Poetry and photography
will want to extract more from it,
impose more on it.  They're tools
of the greedy, insatiable grunting
wanter with the frothy name,
Imagination. No. We're not doing
that tonight. For we're satisfied.



hans ostrom 2017