"Question" (1922), by Langston Hughes

"Grant Park," by Langston Hughes

"The Poor," by Carl Sandburg

"God to Hungry Child," by Langston Hughes

Triviality and Guilt

I celebrate your new coiffure
and worry about the hungry and the poor
at the same time. What
good does either trivial focus or guilt
do to affect big problems? I state
the question in a homely way.

I congratulate your hips
and fret over how White Americans
will never "get it"
(until they get it).
What good? Fuckin' white people.

I remark on a grey cat's
behavior and think of
our water on fire
our air carcinogenic
our land
either flooded
or
baked
our politicians
embalmed
with corporate money,
ah, what good?

I rest my teeth
on the image of a chrome fender
and I wonder
how many bombs "we"
have dropped, on what,
on whom, and why
(why not!)
since, say,
1941. What. Good?




hans ostrom 2013

Of Poverty

“What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The “home” that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be “worked through,” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans—as a state of emergency.”

—	Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

see so many just

*
*
*
*

see so many just

i see so many just
hanging on, or not,
staggering in wind
without a coat (as
TV heads mock
people-just-getting-
by); keeping upright
in a job while worrying,
weary, ill, afraid to miss
a shift, target, quota, goal.
see so many

ground down--
and the grinders:
well ensconced with
cosmetic surgery,
lawyers, gates, and
lies. see so many:

cubes and cubes of
housing, broken street
after broken street, &
slashed by alleys. something's
coming. don't know what.
maybe just more of
same. maybe reckoning--
a gray wind chasing
indifference and evil
across a plain full
of smoldering phones
and melted ear-buds.

see something staggering
in the cold, walking past
an empty police cruiser,
strolling toward a swarming
crowd, sound of cockroach-
scuttle coming out of
speakers. and a wailing.


Copyright 2012 Hans Ostrom

the attempt becomes a gesture

the attempt becomes a gesture

the man wearing a thin sweatshirt
and no hat stands at an uncovered
bus stop in freezing rain. he isn't me.

he's trying to light a cigarette. his
attempt becomes a gesture--
ludicrous but noble, less than
tragic but not bad at all.

he's inside whatever being alive
is for him, and i'm inside what
being alive is to me. i see him
from a warm place out of the weather.

if i were like jesus i'd go to the
man and perform a miracle--
like getting that cigarette lit,
or giving him money,
or giving him my parka, or
embracing him. he might
like all of that. except for
the embrace. he might
bite my nose off for that.

i don't do any of these things,
because it's easier not to,
and it's acceptable that i
think i'm not his keeper.

at moments like these, i
think of Bukowski,
who--i gather from his
words, i never knew
the man--thought like
jesus sometimes, i mean
with a similar toughness.
tough on everybody--
including, let's say especially,
the reflective, ignoble fuckers in
warm parkas out of the
weather.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

box store

box store


a box store isn't
where they sell boxes.
it's where they sell stuff
they bought "in volume"
and marked up only as far
as the stuff would look
cheap.

i go to one of these
stores. it's where retail
items get one last chance,
like habitual felons.

i buy two bars of
Cashmere Bouquet soap
there because i need soap
and i've liked that name
for decades and it's a two-word
surrealistic poem.

the husband of the woman
in front of me in line to pay,
he's disabled. he leans on
one cart while she unloads
the other. they're around 40.
she hands him his retractable
cane, then unloads 2

rugs, 9 bags of gerbil food,
and 10 boxes of cereal.
as the cashier shoots
the items with his laser-gun,
he says to the other cashier,

"when do we get help?"
the woman in line ahead
of me to pay says, "are
you hiring?" the cashier
does not look at her and
says, "we just hired some
people. there's an application
over there." i watch

the disabled husband. he
keeps his game face. he refuses
to look ashamed. he looks
out but not down. i think
he was hurt on the job. badly.
like his leg is permanently wrong.

he still wears the jacket
with the label of his company.
his hair is neatly trimmed.

the cashier says, "will
that be credit or debit?"
the husband says, "debit."


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

The Curse of Wealth?

*
*
*
*
The Curse of Wealth?

Hear the penniless man howl
when you tell him wealth's a curse.
"Then curse me," he'll say, and
there's no argument good enough
to silence his derision. Still,

there was that rich man--he
just died--who seemed to drag
an invisible bag behind him,
full of capital, a father's
ambitions for his sons, blunt
and sharp weapons of politics,
all of it weighing so much, too much.

There was a family compound, also
a family-machinery that melted laws.
Amidst it all, the man was cursed
with living long, knowing secrets
and sin, and staying married to
noblesse oblige. He's elsewhere

now. Maybe God will have treated
him as just another soul relieved
of life, as someone blessedly
obscure. The penniless man scoffs
at such notions of tragedy and
theology, as well he might. Still,

the rich and public man knew misery,
a special kind, a gilded curse.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Wet Blanket

All right, I apologize in advance for having written a post-election, wet-blanket poem.

But I know about and contribute modestly to this place called Nativity House in Tacoma. It's basically a place for homeless and otherwise impoverished, jobless people to go during the day--to get something warm to drink and something to eat, and to find something to do--like talk, play checkers, get a bus-pass, maybe get directed to a clinic or a job or whatever. Anyway, the place is always pretty busy, but in the last few months, the clientele has doubled: just one small measure in one medium-sized city of how the mischief of Bush II, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia, AIG, Exxon, et alia, "trickles" down, in the parlance of Reaganomics.



Now, About the Poor

After the spectacle, what about the poor?
After all that money spent per vote,
what about the poor? Hey,

I saw Cable News Network
create a hologram of a news-
correspondent, which talked
about how her hologram had been
made. Her hologram and how
it was made was news delivered
by the hologram. For Chrissakes,
this is insane. It's stupidity cubed.

I'd rather they'd interviewed
a real poor person for an hour,
with no commercial break--
someone working on the edge
of exhaustion and financial
collapse every day--that
would have been a bigger
surprise than a hologram,
especially if they'd helped
the person find a better job--
real news.

The poor have been trickled
on for a long time. Trickled
is a blend of tricked and tickled,
duplicity and petty cruelty.

Hey, what was that sound?
A kind of rumble, a sort of roar?
After the spectacle,
what about the poor?

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2008