"City of Things," by Hans Ostrom

In the city of things, people
defer to heaps, piles, and stacks
of plastic and alloyed molded
things. The people are stopped
by stacked boxes, so they go
around or give up and sit
and lie. The people agree

to purchase, to take on and put
on a quota of things, a pre-set
set of things. The people
pray to things with the aid
of Thing Preachers in thing-
choked halls and littered
amphitheaters. Austere

and escetic people are shunned,
fined, scorned, and watched.
They're forced to wear
designated denigrating things.

It's quite thing, the city
of things, where over-abundance
is unlimited, loved, and legislated.
I got cut in the city
by an angular thing
I bumped into. I said I
am sorry to the thing.


hans ostrom 2014

"Young Woman on Old Skates," by Hans Ostrom

So she nibbled at the
right-hand bit, and did not
venture to go near the house til she had
brought herself down to nine inches high.

--Alice in Wonderland


This late April day spends its last light
on a river of milky windshields
in aggravated suburban traffic.
Where did I come from that I alone,
walking, should witness this young woman
in her absurd determination? Thirteen, perhaps,

high-waisted in blue-jeans, she stands
uneasily on silver skates--bony and awkward,
a victim of legs like a young giraffe.
A hundred lavender blossoms
cover the concrete driveway where she stands;
they accumulate over the inevitable oilstain
left by a wound in the belly of her father's Ford.

Just as I walk past she finally decides
to try the skates. Now I see one hand
clutches a bunch of the fallen blossoms.
They puff out from her fist like a handkerchief.
Stiff-kneed, she scrapes forward and bends--to
do what?--to gather more blossoms.
I won't stop and embarrass us. I look back
to see several petals fall from her grasp;
her skates choose this moment to mutiny.
Her knees knock together, she surrenders
and falls carefully forward. For an instant,

her face says, "My body makes no sense at all."
Her ritual makes no sense at all.”
Her blue sweater hikes up her back; the wind roughs up her hair
like an obnoxious brother; no doubt Daddy will be
wheeling in at five-thirty-sharp to conquer
the driveway. Grimly she begins her ascent to equilibrium,
grabbing two fist-fulls of flowers.
From almost a block away I can hear her skates scrape and sing.



hans ostrom, 1977/2014

"Tame Cat," by Ezra Pound

"To Waken an Old Lady," by William Carlos Williams

"Discreet Books," by Hans Ostrom

Old books, discreet, keep what now
seems naive, quaint, or embarrassing
enclosed, hidden in stacked pages
between covers. Replayed TV episodes

lay bare what's now funny
for the wrong reasons. They
show how the writers
sank their lives into a wicked,
remunerative genre bound
to betray them as now

they sit in fine houses,
their bodies ravaged
by the stress of the Industry,
looking at the spines
of novels they've collected.

Faint noise of grandkids
splashing in the blue pool,
Hollywood hills, reaches
the interior, paid for
by residuals. It was,
it is, a living, and as Sam
Johnson said, "No one but
a block-head writes
for anything but money."


hans ostrom 2014

"Love Without Hope," by Robert Graves

"Earth Song," by Langston Hughes

"Salome," by Langston Hughes

"May," by Fenton Johnson

"Unwind My Riddle," by Stephen Crane

"The Rainy Day," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Poetry-Prompt: Writing a "Thing-Poem"

"The League of Quiet Persons (Mum Is the Word)," by Hans Ostrom