"Who Will Teach Us?

"Who taught you to hate yourself"
asked Malcolm X, 5 May 1962, L.A.

I for one little white boy
was taught by U.S. news-culture
(noose-culture) to be afraid of Malcolm X.

Lord, I could not muster up the fear.
Instead the face and words and name
entranced me at age eight. There
was the force, precision, and logic
of prophecy. Often I spoke
the magic words Malcolm X
and Willie Mays to the cool
hall of my mind.

Sure, maybe call it an early encounter
with charisma. But oh it has outlasted
the Kennedy charm, which seemed
like an expensive mechanism.

An imprint that remains from Malcolm X
and those times
is of a fiercely focused, dedicated
life--all the stuff of slough discarded.
He was a virtuoso of humanity.

We haven't learned yet,
especially us whites, how to take in,
accept, and struggle with such love,
such proper, unsentimental love.

For such love cuts through
the vicious, viscous lies
on which the flabby thing, Whiteness,
leans.

Who taught us never, never
to tolerate such truth?
Who taught us to fear such fearlessness,
and to hide ourselves from such seeking?
Who will teach us otherwise?



hans ostrom 2015

"Memory Unit"

In the Memory Unit, we speak
euphemistically. We
watch the very old and almost
mindless sit or lie like reptiles
that are waiting for the warmth
to come back. These wait
for the memory-sun
to unset itself.

Our uncle is among them here.
What are we supposed to say
to the past, which is absent?
What are we supposed to do
with our rage and embarrassment
before this scandal, this
crucifixion of identity?

We keep our visits short,
is what we do. For a while,
in our conveyance later, we
are as quiet as the Memory Unit.
Then someone speaks. We understand.
We speak back. We're understood.

hans ostrom 2015

"Lieutenant"

Lieutenant, lieu
tenant, boss and not-
boss, muddle-management,
point of view, of order;

quasi-commander,
ranked demander,
charged like a battery,
in charge of a corner

in the structure:
what should I do?

asks the lieu;
but only later asks

how did I get me-self
into this broken fix
of too much and not enough
responsibility?

hans ostrom 2015

"Of Bronchitis"

When you cough, the bronchia
fire yellow or green mucous-bullets
into your mouth. It isn't disgusting.

It just is, when you're ill.  
When illness appears, you push the world
away. The world seems only

too glad to go, as it has no
particular attachment to you,
and illness is boring.

Your venue's now a bed with linens,
pillows, and blankets. You feel
lucky, weak, and sad.

On the walls hang strange pictures
no one else would want. This is good!
Coughing hurts. Sleep is irascible.

Affected by bronchitis, this
segment of time is your life now.
It is not without interesting

features,
including what comes up from
lungs to visit your tongue.


hans ostrom 2015

"Place in the Space"

He needed something to take him away
From the place in the space called
His head. Not escape; no, a shift
Into a perspective that stuff didn’t
Stick to too much. Such as scenes
Of injustice (the same kinds
Of the people that were treated
As not-people are treated as not-
People today; if you, he thought,
Read, see, and listen, you will
Know this and so not deny it
I can't deny it, it sticks),
Yes, stick to too much,
Does the stuff, such as
By-now distilled toxic memories
Of personal shame and failure, failure
And shame and stupidities
And permanent confusions
But also excessively incisive
Insights (such as this whole
Fucking operation is a scam
and I must pretend it isn't).
Listlessness full of dread,
Dreadful despair result
From the sticking-to of stuff,
So now yes he need something to
Take him away from the place
In the space called who he is.


hans ostrom 2015

"Worry Wins"

I have worried about the sky,
which doesn't exist.
I've worried about rain,
which is none of my business.

I was trained to worry,
to give a shit,
as the American colloquialism goes.

Not that giving a shit
ever made me effective
at righting wrongs or lefting
righties or injecting decency
into the smug corpse called power.

Now I'm exhausted. Worry
has done won. I care in theory.
In practice I don't give a shit.
Thus I have energy to watch
the twitter-feed, and that's
about it.

It isn't relaxation. Nor
is it fatalism, for I don't
have the juice even to philosophize,
either. That's some sad shit.
Even despair is asking
too much from me. It takes
effort to give up hope.

I'm an old dog lying on a porch
in summer. I can smell
developing events, and my
neck-hairs might rise. But
I can't-won't get up
when that raccoon waddles
past the place, chirping.

Well, maybe tomorrow. Yeah,
maybe tomorrow I'll write a
letter to the editor. And send
it? Wow. Join a march? Lend my
body to a protest, scrape
together some solidarity?
Tell a racist to fuck off!
Today I can't seem to get off
my ass. The situation is
troubling. I'm worried.


hans ostrom 2015

"Beautiful in Spring"

We'll all be beautiful in Spring
in spite of how they've hated
and tried to make us hate.
Sunlight will turn green leaves
gold. It will round out our beauty,
too. The fantastic browns
of earth will enrich our context.

We'll talk superbly with one another,
sometimes without talking.
Yes, it's true: beauty's not
for the few. It's standard issue.
Let the dirty drifts and banks
of comparison melt away
to feed the flowers
we'll see and smell
no matter where we are in Spring,
when we're beautiful.


hans ostrom 2015

"Fragment," by Jessie Redmon Fauset

"They Are Up"

Strong and bold,
confident and true,
sprouts of tulip
and daffodil
poke through the well-
drained soil. One

thinks of espionage,
a listening post
gathering intelligence
from weather and sending
it to handlers underground.

Some of the sprouts
look like a green cat's
ears. They hear the jazz
of warmth. Others seem
the shape of the tip
of the trowel used
by some hulking mammal
in clothes, planting
sadly in October,
preparing the floral
resurrection grave.

hans ostrom

"Hiram Speaks of the Alleged Ghost"

Yes, I can confirm there was a ghost in that house.
We knew so the first week. Pop called
Uncle Zipp and Aunt Peach over, they
located it, grabbed it, threw it
in a steel box, and released it into the woods
a hundred miles away. Mother said,

"I'm not cleaning up after a spirit."
Pop: ". . . the rude sonofabitch."
Sally, my sister, the budding scientist,
said, "There's no such thing as a ghost,"
but didn't object to the transport
of nothing to elsewhere.

If anyone had asked me, and they didn't,
I would have said, "What's wrong with a
ghost? Let's see how it goes."
I still like to hike in those woods.


hans ostrom 2015

"I Was Sent a Link"

She texted me. I was texted.
Text Ed. Textual Education.
The text said she
was going to send me
a link.

Three days later, a single
sausage showed up in the mail.
I didn't eat it, although
it smelled okay for having
been on the road for three days.

I realized for the first time
that a sausage
could be mistaken
for a cat turd.
Some epiphanies are unpleasant.


It was a little meat-log,
an analog link, I think.

I sent her a thank-you-note.
Actually it was a "thank-you-
I-think-for-the-link" note.


hans ostrom 2015

"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