Metro, Milano

Three steps down,
and you inhale a wash
of metro exhale,
a garrulous breeze blending
smells of dirt, steel, people,
and the past. As with all metros,
even the air commutes.

Turnstiles and silly small
gates need to know about your ticket,
which gets eaten then
barfed up by something chrome.
How strange
that all the metro workers have
left these caves.

Because you think in cities
that violence whispers to everyone,
you hang back from the track
at least six strides.

The train bullies a wind
in front of it.  The car doors
hiss like bothered cats. Outflow
of guarded faces comes before
inflow of anxious faces,
and don't dare take your time,
as if it belonged to you.

How quiet the riders are.
The train does all the talking--
a recorded voice from the 1960s,
lilting and aloof. A few furtive
glances disrupt the numbed
glumness. In the caves,

a few beggars and buskers
reshape not at all the flow of torsos
and heads on legs.  Branches
of the River Metro flow against
gravity up to level, where
oceans of noise are ludicrously
loud. Below, above, it's all
a goddamned semi-efficient mess.
Take your allusions

to Plato, Styx, and Persephone
and toss them like a ticket.
Nobody cares.
This is urban business. Surplus
value rides these trains
wherever these trains ride.


hans ostrom 2018

The Shark Teeth Underground

I bought six shark teeth today.  Small ones.
Inexpensive. Also cheap, although not from
a shark's point of view. They came in a week
plastic box with a black foam mini-mattress.

They look a little like bobcat teeth.
Their color runs from taupe to blonde.

They remind me of when I bought
a chocolate-brown baby octopus
at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco,
when I was 8. These cheap,

eccentric creature keepsakes
(my mother's word) keep me going.
They symbolize a child's economy,
which dictates that all the stuff

in the world, like sticks, rocks, bones,
and bugs, is a vast, astonishing
pile of wealth. You can just pick
some of it up and have it! Holy shit!

You can even covet it and save it.
But most of it you just let go,
a re-investment in the infinite treasure.

The economies in which I've had
to participate in sell things the seem
necessary or desirable.  But almost
all these things harbor a tumor
of dullness. That's why advertising

must work so hard to distract
us from the dispirited quality
of goods and services.  As a
practical matter, the more I keep

current on child economics,
the more sanguine I am as I go
undercover into the adult,
capitalist polity. My

code-name today is Shark Teeth.
If you want to join this underground,
you're already a member, and remember:
the wealth we explore, the miraculous
forms that delight us--they're cool
and inexpensive, often totally free.


hans ostrom 2016