You're a minor Beat Movement poet
in 1961, and you get up to leave a barin Berkeley, California, but the bartender
doesn't know who you are, and he yells,
"You forgot to pay!"
No doubt you're not a minor Beat Movement
poet, and it's 2023 or 2122, and you lift
a first spoon of homemade soup
toward your mouth, but someone
raps on your door like a monstrous
woodpecker on a beetle-infested pine.
You're anybody somewhere sometime,
soaring in new love but now brought down
to sickening earth by the buckshot of
betrayal. Or required brain surgery
shunts your rolling-along-all-right life
to a rusty side-track where
you live in a fog of recovery.
Yep, life's a series of interruptions
interrupted by Death. Sometimes
the shock is so great you and your
family have to become refugees,
who huddle and pray on a rubber
boat slammed by cold waves.
hans ostrom 2023
