Chew Your Words

Risible syllables, oracular spectacles,
and vivid vineyard spectra: the mouth
is mouthing words like lozenges today.

The tongue's a dancing master that
undulates the floor, making phonemes
and morphemes stagger in chaography,

salubriously salivaed. Enjoy your words
today, my friends who are strangers,
inveterate re-arrangers.  Roll them

around, chew 'em up, wad them in a cheek,
let them drool out then suck them back.
Open your mouth and take a peek:

nothing there but air, ivory, red-pink
cave-walls, and that writhing slug
of a mischievous tongue:

connoisseur, conductor, meaning-
                                           making muscle.


hans ostrom 2016

"Big Ol' Teeth," by Hans Ostrom

Several decades old, he finds it hard to believe
that a dentist proposes braces for his teeth,
to make money, of course, but technically
to close up those gaps, the ones that apparently
terrify strangers (but not children or animals)
when he smiles, laughs, or snarls. For fun,

he attributes his big, relaxed teeth
and the enormous smile (quite vulgar, actually)
to a Viking heritage. He wonders if it's
a berserker's grin. Important detail:

he hadn't asked the dentist about braces,
and the teeth are in good shape. Typical.
He has always received unbidden advice
about his teeth and everything else.
(The general heading for filing
such advice is, What the fuck
is wrong with people?)

One of his aunts had teeth
behind her wisdom teeth.
He suspects something atavistic
lurks in his DNA. Sabre-tooth
cat? Hyena? Shark?

War, famine, poverty, racism, etc.
go on, so he's not about to spend
excess thought on his teeth, which
work fine, fantastic omnivore-tools.

"Do you floss with rope?" a pretty girl
once asked him at a college party.
Not a bad joke. Apparently his big ol'
teeth transfixed her, for she stared.
Her teeth were suburban straight and white,
as all Americans are supposed to be, right?

He provided deep background. "My parents
asked the dentist when I was ten if I should
have braces. But the dentist said my tongue
is too big and would just push the teeth
out again, and the gaps would come back."

"Really?" she said, attempting to look
inside his mouth, as if he were about
to run in the Derby. She was thinking
about his tongue. He was, too,
in a roundabout way.


hans ostrom 2014

When the Tongue

When the Tongue

When the tongue
touches the perfect
place linguistically
or physically:
an ecstasy,
most certainly.


—Hans Ostrom, 2012

Our Verbal Progress

I overheard a conversation between two students today. One was talking about how her cat was misbehaving, and the other was complaining about how much her dog licked her. The cat-person said, "I don't like dog-tongues. In fact, I find all tongues disgusting." I thought this was a remarkable statement, bold and fascinating.

I'm still pondering what to do with the statement, poetically or otherwise.

In the meantime, I've been thinking of "tongue" in the sense of language ("she speaks several tongues"), and that isn't a bad if old-fashioned synecdoche (if that's what it is; I often conflate metonymy and synecdoche), for although much more than the tongue is involved in speaking, the tongue is pretty crucial.


Our Verbal Progress

Before we were born,
we lived theoretically in the infinitive,
to live. Once incarnated,
we were conjugated, about
nine months after a conjugal
interaction. Conjugated:
I live, you live, he, she, it lives.

After we lived for a while,
we "used to go," "were thinking
of falling in love," "had been planning
to travel to Athens," "had once been
a highly regarded cello player,"
and so on.

Too soon we shall have used up
all occasions for needing the future
tense and shall rely on the past
tenses almost exclusively. Soon
thereafter, we will, being dead,
not require verbs, nor even pre-
positions. The infinitive to die
will house us foreover in our
re-unconjugated state, where
words spoken by tongues
shall not reach us, where we shall
exist in a state of supreme listening.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008