From a Diary of the Plague Year (13)

Sometimes I'm inside
hiding from the virus.
Sometimes I'm outside
hiding from the virus,
digging in the dirt around
fledgling vegetables
and forming flowers.

Inside or outside,
I also try to hide from
celebrities. Their faces,
peccadilloes, opinions,
and posts swarm. They're
not the norm but the fame
machine tries to make us
famished, hungry for
manufactured news

of celebs. It makes me
febrile, celebraphobic,
vised in by the virus
and the famous. I don't
know who most of them
are but must react as if I do.

Inside, old time reading
helps, hefting a book of words.
Outside, the worms and crows
and trees and fleas are not
famous and I am treated
as just another beast.


hans ostrom 2020

Anti-social non-media

holds promise. It might look like
sitting alone, phoneless and thinking,
which at least allows you
to imagine a country that has unfriended
racism, faved equity, pinned
knowledge, twanked twaddle
into truth, and stopped following.

As the media are mainly
a village of the damned celebrities,
it may be wise sometimes
to reduce the status of the spectacle
to that of an evening gnat that
passes by your eyes and ears-
a momentary minor whine.



hans ostrom 2017