Showing posts with label lore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lore. Show all posts

Friday, January 10, 2025

Amerikan Cattle Drive

 In this space-open-wide, sky is burnished, air is rare, dust is unto.

Ranging earth whirls up, hooves percussing, trail's a-risin’.

And the drive is driven toward

a Chicago abbatoir at the end of the loaned prayerie.


In this wide-eyed, yippie-eye-ay, comma-space, in this spaced

TexiCaliKansas range, there is rounding, there is up,

there is longing, and there's horning.

There is brand-name-recognition

        for those steaks and roasts, those drive-in

        burgers for burghers, those leather

        shoes and boots and belts. 


The Infinite Lored Cattle Drive pours/roars on through fissures 

twixt history and mountains, unsettlers and originals

            and fishers of men and women and beasts and burdens.

Every horse has a history, every cow has a price, every

woman has an axe, every badge has a bullet, every

man has a man saying {Man, you're in my way.}


Unholster your history, it's time to ride.  Look over stampede's

boiling nation of hooves and horns.  Sunlight mounts a fence.

American women and men stand staring composed upon

a hill without a city.  See them, just west of where

they are. Now your great gathered herd

goes all to sky, and the loop of your lasso makes an {O

bury me not. . . .}, and ghost riders burst through clouds.


hans ostrom 2025

Monday, October 12, 2020

Unicorn, Sole Horn

 A unicorn 
is a sole horn
improvising freely in the mist
of a forest,
in the midst
of an old store
of lore.

A unicorn
is a horse
with a point used to anoint
a fantasy,
a something
to see in 
the mind
as unmagical
days and 
mechanized 
ways in a 
transparent maze
grind on. 


hans ostrom 2020

Monday, February 22, 2016

Clusterville

I'm living out in Clusterville. Out here
we cluster up the huts and houses, apartmental
lego-heaps, and all the rest. The clustering
seems fine. I have a job at Clusterworks.

The Clusterwork motto is
"Trust Your Clustering to Us!"
We've been trained never to omit
the exclamation point.

Believe it or not, my wife Clemithia
is a direct descendant of one
of Clusterville's founders--
Alchemia von Kluster,

who was German by birth,
Belgian by culture. A grim,
exacting gourmand, so they
say. Aggressive pacifist.

Clemithia takes after her.
I would call my spouse
an imposing figure.
You would, too.

Again by marriage I'm related to
Colonel Jean von Kluster,
who's first and last stand
occurred just outside Clusterville:
he sank his savings into
a failed jousting tournament.

Look,I'm no deep thinker, no
existentialist, anarchist,
or pub philosopher. I work in
Clusterville because that's what I do.
I like self-evident just fine.

Other people call the shots
and legions more (the sad cases)
believe they have control.

There are clusters of people,
places, and things in Clusterville.
That is all you really need to know,
amen. Come to Clusterville.
Call it home. Stay.


hans ostrom 2016