Collage Degree

I was just blowing up a balloon when
Italy won a soccer match
and Abraham Lincoln gave a speech
concerning railroad law. Then
Chairman Meow mad a cameo appearance
on Tahitian TV to discuss Titian's
use of shadow, and naturally
an abandoned ship sank off
and on an Aleutian island.

The phone rang virtually,
and gunpowder was invented.
Milton wrote a line with
an inverted hand while
Joan of Archimedes developed
a crush on a dark-haired
Viking. Frederick Douglass
scowled, and I have no idea
what I did with the utilities bill.


hans ostrom 2015

Singing the Marine's Hymn When I Was Nine

Grades 3,4, and 5 occupied
the same room, and the teacher combined
us to have us sing "The Marines Hymn." Later,
Andre Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto"
provided a context for the experience.

The teacher didn't explain why
the Marines had occupied the Halls
of Montezuma (were they working
for Cortez?) or where the shores
of Tripoli were. Lots of Italians

had settled in Gold Rush country,
so I guessed Italy. Hey, teachers
do things to survive the teaching
because every day they have to
establish a new beach-head.

The tune seemed terribly tedious,
and it knew so: the key-change
if often a tell. Hell, yes, we
wanted to be sent on a mission:
recess.


hans ostrom 2015

Frank Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Richard Brautigan Walk Into a Bar . . .

In Tacoma, at the apocryphal corner
of Brautigan and Herbert Streets,
you may hear worms singing plaintive blues.

Turn on, tune in, drop out:
what bullshit. Nothing's that
sequential in T-Town, and Dr. Leary
was Ownership, not Labor or
Management.

It's a long way from San Francisco,
especially by dune buggy on back roads,
through the mind-fields.

Call yourself a duchess, call yourself
a duke. Nobody really gives a shit
unless you buy a round of beers
and feed the pool table. Seven-ball
in the Montana pocket off
the Portrero Hill rail. You
have to call it first.

Gore Vidal was stationed near Tacoma,
but wrote over the episode
while serving his celebrity in Italy.

Shit can get complicated real fast
is the theme of every novel,
every life.


hans ostrom 2015

People from the Sky

So many people
fall out of the sky.
They congeal and
become moving crowds
in cities,
thick and sticky
populations.

Thank you, sky,
for all the people!
yells a forlorn
figure, homeless
and friendless
in the mass.


hans ostrom 2015

The Richard Brautigan Beauty Pageant and Fishing Derby

At the Zero Annual Richard Brautigan Beauty Pageant
and Fishing Derby, held at a mezzanine level
of consciousness, some of the contestants
are wearing hip waders and nothing else.

Their fly-casts catch the ears of lascivious
men and pull them off. There is no pain.
They do grow back. What is it with (some)
men and women's breasts? The pageant's
judges, who include Baudelaire,
discuss this question at some length.
Baudelaire reads his "Giantess" poem.

The carpenter Jesus comes on stage
and sings Leadbelly's droll Titanic
song. Now "the girls," garbed efficiently
in paisley items, launch the big
production-number. They sing and they
step-dance down a terraced pyramid made
out of 1945 nickels (S.F. Mint).
The trout in the audience go wild.


hans ostrom 2015

Roof

Mist has found its night-air.
From the buzz of the plane,
we know the plane flies
circularly in clouds. Have one!
A neighbor cries, followed by
I need new strings. We are
on the roof but no closer to the sky,
buzzing toward a circular high.

"Surreal Cat," by Hans Ostrom

Once upon a whatever,
as aluminum homes and nature
flew by where my windows
used to be, what with the tornado
and all,

there was a surreal cat.
Yep, that's what I have to report.

The color of her coat
depended greatly on
the nature of the magazine
one's eyeballs were reading to one.

"I think surrealism is bullshit,"
Margo said. "I think it is life
itself," replied Joe. Neither
one of them existed.

Things fall apart. That's
not necessarily terrible. Things
stay together--not necessarily
good. As to the falcon, the falconer,
and the goddamned gyres, who knows?
Seriously, Yeats can be
a real pain in the ass sometimes.

We at the Surreal Cat Corporation
appreciate your refraining
from talk of apocalypse.

"I Wonder What Your Latitude Is Tonight," by Hans Ostrom

I'm going in another direction.
But I might see you when
the Earth turns around.

The blood on my hands
(not mine by the way)
turned into foaming rainbows.

I'm now riding through the "sky":
it is so mild. And I wonder what
your latitude is tonight.




hans ostrom 2014

"The Wind Sprang Up at Four O'Clock," by T.S. Eliot

Way Past Post-Whatever

You're no frond of mine.
When I deploy an avatar,
I am no friend of me,
and yet of course I will
be online-intimate with you.

If everything were all right
off-line, online would not
be such a place of refuge.

I am not a simple man.
For I have not evolved at least
that far.I am the make-shift product
of the what-before-me-came.
I have no name.

We're out here, there isn't
any map, and our compasses
have collapsed. This all to me
is good news. I understand
why you think otherwise.

I am no friend. I am no
fiend. That said I listen.


hans ostrom 2013

At Lake Polyester

I was fly-casting aspersions

into the fetid waters

of Lake Polyester when

a squad of bankers

bum-rushed me

and knocked me about.

“Stay off our land, drifter,”

they said. I let them say

it twice more, for practice,

and then said, “This isn’t

your land, and I’m not

a drifter.” They said Oh

and ran fast to find

legal counsel. Several

women studying their

own voluptuousness

waved to me from

across the lake. Sunlight

on their curves and

globes became a

sermon, and I believed.


hans ostrom 2013

Including Styrofoam, Blender, and Bomb

A lime-green blender vomits a mixture. The party.
The shovel in the shed equals stolen property.

An image of the spider's body remains on the page
of the book that crushed the spider. Ideogram.

As you talk, I stare at your fingernails,
which gleam like oiled leaves under neon.

She refuses to sell her father's anvil.
We used to poke needles just under and through our skin:

no blood. The man looked at six tomatoes
and regretted inviting friends to dinner.

I want to fry many minnows,
she said. Many. ("She's losing it.")

A drawer is filled with electrical cords--
black, white, orange: to what end?

When he was eight years old, he struck another
child on the head with a croquet mallet. Clinically.

What do you mean the condom broke?
What do you mean what do you mean?

The manager pulled on his moist nose and said,
"We are going to have to wrap up this meeting."

Closure. There was nothing left of the car.
An undetonated rocket was found in the village.

The photograph is of a child's hat in
a mud puddle, along with a styrofoam container.

Green oil makes the puddle shine in the photo.
I don't know. Have you looked online?


hans ostrom

Some prompts for writing L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and/or surrealistic poetry

(Some prompts we used in a poetry class today, based in part on some reading we did (Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, poems by Hejinian, Bly, and Tate, among others.)

#2 was the most popular choice, followed by #4


1. Describe any ordinary task or activity—brushing your teeth, buying a cup of coffee, whatever—and interject random images, actions, or utterances to create the effect of a dream.
2. Write down memories of your life, one sentence per memory, but put them in random order. Events, images, things you said, things you heard others say, etc.
3. Think about a boring situation you had to/have to endure. Waiting at an airport. Listening to a professor. Etc. Then describe it with a list of extravagant comparisons. “Waiting at the airport is like cooking dragon-flesh with a Zippo lighter.” And the similes should be unrelated to on another; that is, you are not developing a conceit.
4. Describe a situation or an event that, as you recall it, did in fact seem surreal at the time. Try to capture that quality of surrealism.
5. Write down things (phrases, utterances, opinions) you hear quite a lot—from friends, room-mates, professors, co-workers, family, people you overhear. They should be unrelated. Don’t try to organize them.
6. Think of unrelated objects. A blender, a shovel, a book, a hubcap (e.g.). For each object, describe an action, which need not be logical. “The book ate a moth.” One description or action per object, then move on to the next object and its action.


hans ostrom

The Sheriff Has Absconded

You touch the moon on water,
a century collapses into a train
& the engine's light shines
on tracks, which ladder up
from night into a blue dawn
buttered. And now unfixed

factories march across
a plain to kidnap fugitive
workers. You're at red
rim-rock's edge, watching
all of this--you,
the emperor of images,
brewer of creosote beer,
melter of topaz, escaped
sheriff.



hans ostrom 2013

"The Harlot's House," by Oscar Wilde

Bond of Union

(after M.C. Escher's Lithograph, "Bond of Union," 1956)


We first met in a vat of soup,
you and I. The bubbles entranced.
Then they turned into spongy spheres,
and the soup evaporated entirely.

More adventure: our insides--
brains and guts, bones and such--
departed. We became mere ribbons
of being, me with my sad goatee,

you with your lovely mouth
and luxuriant hair. We discovered
but one ribbon became us. So we
move cautiously now and try

not to attribute blame.


hans ostrom, 2013

Homage to Jorge Luis Borges

In a long neglected room on an upper floor of Carolina Rediviva Library in Uppsala, Sweden, on the third of March,1967, Roberto de la Costa, in search of documents describing the medical treatment of wounded Swedish soldiers at the Battle of Poltava, discovered his own last will and testament. Accompanying material alleged the will to have been dictated by him, on his deathbed, to one Maria Vibrato.

Although the sound of this name
brought Roberto De la Costa pleasure, he had not known the name
before encountering it that day in the musty room full of documents. He learned from the will that he was to accumulate a not inconsiderable
estate but to dispose of it in ways with which, in March 1967, he
did not entirely agree. Reading to the end of the will, de la Costa learned that it had been witnessed by his now deceased mother, Gloria
Martinez Sierra de la Costa.


hans ostrom 2013

Is All Beige

Is all beige, is the color
of the faces in the long-running
series, "Hollywood Exciting Series,"
with the ubiquitous directionless
lighting that is seen to come from
nowhere and everywhere: large
light bulbs, tin foil that reflects
sunlight as it is in L.A.

There is a script. There is acting.
There is a three-digit number
for the channel on which one may view
"Hollywood Exciting Series."

And we watch. Why? Well, what the fuck
else are we supposed to do,
after working in our jobs,
which are held by the suckers
in society, whereas the all-beiged
"Hollywood Exciting Series"
will make a profit for the ones
who make a profit by moving
their earlier profits into other
profit-making areas. Oh, my.

I'm not against anything.
What would be the fucking point?
I merely state. State haphazardly.
Sometimes I ask. "Are we irrevocably
fucked up?" It's not as though anyone
must answer, unless of course they're
saying something from a script,
and are being paid,
and are beige
because of the lighting
because of the because
because.


hans ostrom 2013

Fever

The old woman who slid the pan
of cookies into my brain's oven
never came back. The cookies
turned into black dots that float
across my vision. I reek of burnt
dough. I lie on my side like a

buffalo who's reading Hegel
on a parched Kansas plain.
Invisible merchants empty
microscopic vats of hot slime
on my neck, my forehead.
A thin woman with cold fingers
practices scales on my spine.

A chorus of angelic rats
prevents me from nodding off.
I raise one hand as if
to conduct their performance,
and I pass out.



hans ostrom 2013

Desire of the Keys

And the keys said,
"Let us off this metal ring.
We want to lead our
separate lives, travel
our chosen corridors,
try many locks,
and be seized
by an adventure of hands."


Hans Ostrom 2013