Friday, February 8, 2013
No Answer to the Ocean
It's like this, maybe: A tide comes in.
It brings things you come to believe.
There they are, objects on glassy sand.
They're what's come of all your coping.
A stone, a crab-shell, a worn piece of
wood, a string of kelp. They're no answer
to the ocean. They don't add up to a code.
You keep walking on the beach,
trying to figure things out. There's
nothing wrong with that--walking,
wondering. What are you hoping for?
Hans Ostrom
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Elvis in the Holy Land
(based on found language)
Deadline approaching
to book
Elvis tour to
Holy
Land.
hans ostrom
Deadline approaching
to book
Elvis tour to
Holy
Land.
hans ostrom
Monday, February 4, 2013
Sacramento Capitol Mall
Politicos stride like
totalitarian colonels.
Professionals lean into
conversations
about cash-flow, internal
control, and impact (a verb).
Winos stand against a wall and
shiver
their way out of hallucination,
their shirt-fronts soaked with
the Lamb's
most inexpensive blood; bums pick
through rubbish
and sleep under news; the mad
testify
to streetlights and themselves.
No one runs for office anymore
except the staffs of those who
ran before.
They govern each other and
whisper about us.
Sunlight remains democratic.
We walk in it together
between the muddy river and the
capitol.
We are lobbyist and lunatic,
accountant and pickpocket,
admin-assistant, tech-person,
plumber,
and Ph.D. student writing about
power-relationships.
I find myself wondering not at
all
about the powerful. I focus on a trembling
hand
that picks through garbage. I
fork over
a few bucks to the hand's person.
who gargles the words, "God bless you."
Somewhere there’s a
photo
of that man when he was six years
old
and squinting at the camera,
happy in a summer
in another state.
Maybe you finally come to hate
poverty
enough to pursue it as an art;
maybe a thousand left hooks in
the downtown gym
finally leave your brain fizzed
like pink champagne,
and you're on the street mumbling
to a corner man
who isn't there. Or somebody
dies, and your way
of understanding that is to let
go the things
that hint of looking forward,
including the grammar of love,
and love of self, and taking tomorrow straight.
Yeah, so, I gave him a few bucks, which
will
go for booze, not a sandwich, and I don’t
care
because it’s not my money anymore,
and as the Capitol might whisper,
it never was.
Copyright 2013 hans ostrom
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Friday, February 1, 2013
Twice-Believing Creatures
Twice-Believing Creatures
Crickets sing the word
"ceasing" electronically
in dirt and dry
stalks.
A heavy black beetle turns his
belly
to the cosmos,
plucks with his six feet
at the needles of a darkening
pine bough.
The Magician
dances out of straw. He is Dusk;
he juggles the sun and the moon
and the evening star.
Here and there a
few are alert,
some curious, some thankful--like
the deer,
weary of
swishing horseflies away
from their backsides all day and
hungry
after the heavy
afternoon;--like the raccoon,
waddling off to make a living at the pond's edge;
--and the
tireless child, the old man
who stands near his garden
listening to the corn grow,
and the woman
with her hands folded,
singing out loud to nobody.
They know that
dusk takes today's body
and brings another after an interlude
of dreaming.
They know
nothing of the sort;
they are as dubious as the light
at dusk.
They know the
world to be as new
as the note of a gnat in the ear,
as old
as the lizard's
dry smirk,
a boulder's personality, darkness.
Hans Ostrom, 2013
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Nude Up and Get in a Pile
It may have been a line
from North Dallas Forty.
Anyway, we’d quote it
at the bar and laugh.
The thing is, pre-AIDS,
you might think you
were headed home
in a silver Camaro after
the bars closed
in California’s inimitable
Central Valley. Then you might
stop at a red light, two lanes,
and two women you knew
barely might laugh, roll
down the window, and
suggest, “Follow us.”
And, wow, there you’d be,
nuded up and in, no,
not a pile, but an expansive
naked arrangement of
three or four or five.
It was a gas, a blast, a trip:
listen to the lingo change
down the ages. Olive oil
on large breasts, the
several positions, good
clean fun. Of course, in
an apartment of your brain,
you knew the party had
to end—that night; and for you;
and for a generation. Microbes,
maturity, and so on. None-
the-less: at the stop-light,
in a Camaro, a little loaded
on whiskey and weed and
maybe a line: the light,
the spark, of mischief.
Good clean fun in
an era everybody and
his mother, as we said,
would not just forget but
not know existed.
*
*
hans ostrom 2013
from North Dallas Forty.
Anyway, we’d quote it
at the bar and laugh.
The thing is, pre-AIDS,
you might think you
were headed home
in a silver Camaro after
the bars closed
in California’s inimitable
Central Valley. Then you might
stop at a red light, two lanes,
and two women you knew
barely might laugh, roll
down the window, and
suggest, “Follow us.”
And, wow, there you’d be,
nuded up and in, no,
not a pile, but an expansive
naked arrangement of
three or four or five.
It was a gas, a blast, a trip:
listen to the lingo change
down the ages. Olive oil
on large breasts, the
several positions, good
clean fun. Of course, in
an apartment of your brain,
you knew the party had
to end—that night; and for you;
and for a generation. Microbes,
maturity, and so on. None-
the-less: at the stop-light,
in a Camaro, a little loaded
on whiskey and weed and
maybe a line: the light,
the spark, of mischief.
Good clean fun in
an era everybody and
his mother, as we said,
would not just forget but
not know existed.
*
*
hans ostrom 2013
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