"The News from Inside"

Inside me, still,
lurks the baby who could walk
but chose not to
(wanting instead to stand up,
hands grasping the rail
of what they called a play-pen)
and to watch. It seems

I was born wary
and passively resistant.
And that's who I stayed.
In the 17th month, I walked
because, having watched them,
I noted that they
seemed to want me to walk.

Inside me, I don't
contain multitudes,
and Walt Whitman can
go fuck himself. Inside me
there's the DNA of a woman
living in Africa
160,000 years ago:
it's inside you, too.

And then inside there there's
a few people who worked like dogs
but not as hard as slaves. Maybe
a failed preacher, certainly
a Skid Row drunk, and possibly
the funniest patient in what
they called a mental ward.

Inside me, I think it's
population: 12. Or so.
But no apostles. In there,

an old non-descript tree
finally gives up, accepts
a lightning-smash, explodes,
and falls. Deer, squirrels,
owls, a cougar, a bear,
and maybe some hiker with
a bandana tied around
dirty hair mark
the arboreal collapse,
but, god damn it,
there's never a Zen monk
around when you need one.
And Walt Whitman
can go fuck himself.

Inside me, there's
a startling, a chronic
mild terror--maybe because
at month 15 or so,
I learned from informed
intuition that very little
in this life-thing makes sense.


hans ostrom 2015

"Literary Criticism"

Today we shall define literary criticism
as the art of constructing a weak
but elaborate foundation
to support a simple but heavy opinion.

Sooner or later, that
which seemed new, brave, and rigorous
will collapse under the weight
of the opinion and

because of the weakness.
The opinion shall remain,
functioning mostly
as a grave-marker,

for--just over there!--
shall have arisen
an impressive new structure
to which the flocks are flocking.


hans ostrom 2015

"The Pascaline"

Have you seen the Pascaline?
Nor have I. It must have been fine.
It was a calculator from
the 17th century, built
by the legendary Blaise Pascal,
who even with a friend (Fermat)
also certainly found a math
to figure the odds of a roll
of the die. Later,

he invented Pascal's Wager,
a thought-gamble in which
you must choose to bet (get
this) on whether God exists.
Is the smart money
on yea or nay?

Pascal's Pensées persist.

Black dots on white cubes
tumble in my untidy mind.
I really hate Las Vegas,
the true ghastly capital
of the USA, and I really
would like to say I've
seen a Pascaline. But I can't
say that I have.


hans ostrom 2015

"The Superb Owl"

(super bowl)


What is this superb owl
that everyone's talking about?
It sounds fantastic. I would
like to watch it, to see it glide
in moonlight across
a clearing, alighting in a grove.

Well, yes, of course, we may hold
a superb owl press-conference
and attend superb owl parties!
I don't yet know what in particular
the superb owl even better
than other owls I've seen.
I will not quit until I find out.

In the meantime, let be known
that near barns and in woods,
in city parks and gullies,
on plains and in mountains,
I am a fan of the superb owl,
its perfect wingspan cutting
silently, like longing,
through the air.


hans ostrom
copyright 2015

"Exculpatory"

Not that you asked, but I like
the word exculpatory.
Its syllabation, to be more
or less precise.

The syllables make me think
of frogs croaking avidly,
singing exculpatory!
but never in unison,
for croaking is a kind of chaos,
free-form pond-jazz,
musical theater of
puffed-up slick lawyers
raising evidentiary objections to a judge:
the moon, which reflects a hidden law.

Syllables, a pond, the murky,
mucked up border between water
and land, frogs, moonlight--yes,
an excellent grouping
to host in my mammalian cranium
tonight as I scribble and scrawl
a way through
the dim light of my obscurity
to which I have been no not
syllabled but sentenced.


hans ostrom 2015

"Simon on the Bus"

Well, if the voices start,
Simon thinks, and they surge
and urge like sounds of a quarreling choir,
I'm gonna entertain 'em,
treat 'em as my cousins
at my hallucinated picnic,
which is as real as the rain
on the street out there.

Trying to lock them out
has worn me out, he thinks.
So does trying to select
a leading voice. That kind
of thing and thinking gets me kicked off
buses. Sometimes I feel

my mind my brain want,
oh want to produce an opera
all by themselves
without the help of
pill-wielding psychiatrists
who around me
seem to lose their sense of humor.
Oh I entertain them, it does
seem, though. They should be paying me,
at least my fare there; and back.



hans ostrom 2015

"Pandora Protests Just Enough"

Right--as if evil weren't in the world
already. You fucking gods are such liars:
okay, that isn't news. But
your lack of imagination?

"Yeah, we kept evil in a box,
but then we gave the box to this lady,
who went and opened it." That
is some weak shit.

So, look, either Prometheus
was evil for stealing your little
torch, or you are evil for torturing
him, or both. Ergo, evil pre-dates me.

It's your world. We just live in it.
The truth is the box was empty
until I started picking up beautiful
things and putting them inside.


hans ostrom 2015

"How You Represent Yourselves"

...And here they had thought all along
that what they must not try to represent
was God. No images of God!
they told each other in many
languages, from many faiths
and points of earthly view.

It turns out that God
(named differently by different
faiths) later told them
in a Godly language, Go ahead
and try to image me. I can
be God right in front of you
all day long, and night, and you'll
never no not ever image me
accurately.

And God added, for God can
and will add, I have seen
what you produce, all that crap,
and what bothers me is how
you represent yourselves.
Yourselves you do not represent
imaginatively. And you never
no not ever seem to weary
of killing each other,
mechanically, habitually,
routinely. Killing is
a representation, apparently,
of what and whom you aspire to me.

God suggested, You must ask
yourselves what is wrong
with you; ask continually.
Do not ask me. Represent yourselves
more imaginatively.


hans ostrom 2015
#BlackLivesMatter

"Judged"

To be seen
was to be judged.
To be heard
was to be judged.
To be silent
was to be judged--

judged for seeming
to withdraw from judging.
Thus silence seemed preferable.

To try to perform any task
was to be judged.
To prefer not to try
was to be judged and
to be forced
to try, then judged.

To conform was to be judged.
Not to conform, the same.

Every so often in this climate
thick with judgment, one
of the judges might throw
some praise your way, grudgingly,
as if it were a bone to a dog.

To read was to be judged but not
effectively, for they knew not what
exactly to judge you for, quite.

Thus reading became a pleasurable,
soft fortress. To write

was to have the written judged.
Worth the risk.

Just to be and to try to fill out
your personhood was to be judged.

They taught you how to judge
yourself: oppression, swallowed
and digested.

The energy they spent on judging
and you spent reacting to and evading
judgment: incalcuable; to be judged
a misappropriation.


hans ostrom 2015

"Every Flutist"

Every flutist
owns a cloud
and keeps it tethered
to a chair
with an invisible
strand of hair.

Every flutist
hides a whisper
in the basement
of a melody
and a sigh
in the cambrium
of a tree.

Every flutist
scribbles
a prescription
on the air
with a certain
enigmatic flair.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Bookstore on Maui"

If you'd prefer to paw
through and gaze at used books
when you're on Maui, drive
or cycle past the smoke-stacks
of the sugar-plant between
cane-fields. On a wire

above a frail, dignified
wooden church, a night heron
in daylight may be studying
the water in the irrigation ditch.

Further on down the road,
in an old house belonging to
the Maui Friends of the Library,
you'll meet a modest, musty
buffet of books, 25 cents
a piece. Yes, there was a
church, without a steeple,
and here are the books.
Where are the people?

They're working, of course.
That sugar-factory, e.g.
Others are on beaches
and in bars, in shops and
cars. They're in the swelling,
lengthening anacondominiums,
eaters of capital, another
invasive species. And

people are also home in studio
apartments and tired bungalows,
recovering from double-shifts
in which, in some capacity,
they served touristic whims.

The books are on vacation,
away from the people. The shelves
are a residential hotel for words.
You stop by to say hello.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Recent Storms"

The man in Maui said the recent storms
had ripped away sand and shortened beaches.
We were looking at one of the beaches.
It was narrow all right.

In what's called the distance, a humpback
whale lifted itself up, curved, went
back under, flipping its tail
in so doing: a thick, black Y.

Not incidentally at all,
a minah bird hopped onto grass
carrying a dead dragon fly.
The bird swallowed it,

taking the bulbous head first.
It stretched tall to get it all
down the pipe and expressed
liquid defecation in a quick

Latinate stream onto green.
We live inside a multitude
of dynamic systems, the man
said. He was homeless, and two

security-guards eyed him, us. That
we do, sir, I said. And
I gave him a fiver for his
journey, and everything changes form.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Eagle Musings"

That eagle likes to sit on wood,
seize it with his bladed fists.
Rotting meat's preferable to him;
it takes less tearing, saves wear

on his old yellow beak. His
eyesight's fine. He likes to read
the waters and the fields,
great stories in which food moves.

When snow comes there's not much to do
but remember and, occasionally, shriek.


hans ostrom 2015