Feeling Bad? Try Thinking About Sex

When I get to
feeling bad,
I think about sex,
and I get to feeling better.

I was writing complex,
diffuse poetry
because I thought
I ought to. Now I think,
Why would anybody
want to do such a thing?

In a follow-up move,
I think about sex
and pass quickly through
the awful, damp wooden
tunnel of ambition
to the other side.

I've never been
a terribly chaste
person in spirit.
I'm starting
to feel sad about that fact.

So I think I'll think
about sex and come up
with some kind
of action-plan.


hans ostrom 2015

"It's Not a Competition"

It's not a competition.
It is a blues rendition
of an anthem that was
manufactured long ago.

I am in no condition
to make a sound decision
about gestures I might
make to you before you go.

Now I
see life
is a
landscape
covered
with corners.

Now I
see death
is my
corpse surrounded
by mourners.

It's not fusion. It's not fission.
It's by my own volition
that I sit and watch
the rain turn into snow.


hans ostrom 2015

"Please Rate Your User Experience"

He was asked, by a machine, to rate
his user experience. He did not rate it.
He was asked by advertising, government,
and media (which formed a single entity)
to believe what he heard, saw, and read.
He did not comply. He did read
labels on jars. He turned away.

He liked green light in corridors
as well as green corridors well lit.

He rarely mourned the loss of a
narrative thread. He thought
there was a sense in which
plots should be broken.

Where was John? Where
is John? Is his name
really John, or is it Ian
or Juan? Where is anybody?
Is this the . . .? No,
it isn't. Thinking about it,

he thought his user experience
was inconsequential. The rating-system
did not accommodate such thinking.
Meanwhile, he was trying to break
himself from the habit of thinking,
"What is to be done?"


hans ostrom 2015

"Pick Up Your Meds"

You might have to fall in love
with the names these pharmaceutical
oligopolies give to medicine--
fantastic nouns with neon
syllables like zan, zac, zole,
perc, pram, lam, and zone. Even
the oligopolies have a
med-moniker: Big Pharma.

It's the synthetic language
of weary magic-acts from last
century plus the detached
lingo of advertising that is
always floating above our heads.

We learn the names quickly when
the stuff's prescribed to us
or when we buy it on the street.
We learn them not at all when
it's not or we don't.

We go between docs and pharmacists
as mere messengers. Our bodies
wait patiently like bovines
for the med-food to be added
to our cuds. Where

science, chemistry, capital,
ailment, and diagnosis meet,
chants from a hybrid incantation
get printed
on bottles that are never clear.


2015 hans ostrom

"Don't Need It"

I'm in a meadow,
moving my hands
as if to design
and build a cabin
there. It is fun.
Good exercise.

I stop and breathe
and leave the meadow
because I do not
have to live there
and the meadow
doesn't need a cabin.

To dogs a meadow
is a gift of data.
To dogs warm sunshine
is like a god.


hans ostrom 2015

"Plenty of Enough"

He preferred disenchanted gardens,
their real dishabile.
Accepted how, without wizardry,
one seed became a huge plant
with edible stuff hanging from it:
that was plenty of enough.

If a unicorn or a nymph
should wander in
among the productive mess,
he'd offer the nymph
a sugar-pea pod
and wait for the unicorn
to generate manure.
Fertilizer, of course.

He liked to listen to bumble-bees
and watch the writhing dance of worms.


hans ostrom 2015

"Welcome to I Don't Know: Population--More Than a Few"

After traveling for decades
and imagining he was learning,
he came to the town
of I Don't Know. The

people there were too
chastened and bemused
to be more than humble.
Like him, they had enough

energy to express one,
at most two,
viewpoints per day,
and the custom

had become to follow
expressed opinions with
"That's just a guess" or
"But who cares what I think?"

Joking, of a kind,
was popular but always
rooted in absurdity,
not in superiority.

To the mechanic, he said,
"My car broke down. Can you
fix it?" She replied, "Don't know."
He said, "That is good news."


hans ostrom 2015

"Deconstructive Dialogue"

. . . And, working its long con,
Deconstruction said, The text
always contains within it its
contradictions, its demise.

The text said, What the fuck
you talking about, Jack?

The Deacon of Decon, snorting,
retorted, I am talking about
the labyrinth of language,
in which meaning is always, always,
deferred.

Except when it isn't, said the text.


hans ostrom 2015

"Likenesses of Slave-Owners"

Thinking of, among other things, the capital
generated by slaves, I guess it's grossly
appropriate that likenesses of slave-owners
appear on U.S. money. I also guess
that for a majority, it's offensive
to make the connection and, making it,
to mention it. I see the eyes roll
and sense the bile rising. I hear
the naked emperor's entourage
rushing to defend the founding
wardrobe: Valley Forge
and the Declaration are hanging
in the closet, they assert.
Get over it, they advise.
Well, anyway, the printed faces
of slave-owners lie, tenderly
and legal, in my wallet, and
that is how it is.


hans ostrom 2015

"Our Tune Is Changing"

We're among the first
who may choose to see
ourselves as living
mosaics generated
by variations encoded
on spiral ladders.

The tiles are selected
from the meeting of all
those who met: ancestry,
which ultimately is common.
We're all commoners.

Somehow now what we know
of social construction
and what the sciences
of genetics give to us
are so much grander
than mythology, dogma,
and bigotry: all the old
hoo-ha Each of us

is a compendium of chords,
first notes of which
were played in a place
we call East Africa;
then riffed on in
the slow compositions
of migration. The
genome's home.


hans ostrom 2015

"Go to Keep Going"

Our daily, nightly migrations,
en masse metal on wheels or wings:
routine, ferocious--
such an expenditure.

If we ask ourselves
to rethink the regulated
frenzy of to-and-back
to work, we will tell
ourselves we have no choice
and mean that to be
a good reason, sensible.

Commuting, we change
ourselves together
and permanently.
No one really
recovers from it.
We go to keep going.


hans ostrom 2015

"Strawberry Thoughts"

Apple trees have strawberry thoughts.

Thunder is dissatisfied.

When he opened the closet, the clothes
got quiet all of a sudden. They had
been making jokes about him.

Seeing lightning made her think
of maps and arthritis.

Hope covers dread like a watery,
weak lotion.

Street surfaces are a genre of art.

Fog, in some instances . . .

When the water-line broke,
the fountain in the public square
went dry, and we were sad to see
how plain the fountain looked
when it wasn't wearing water.

"This poet was an undrafted free
agent coming out of college, Al."
"That's right, Bob, and look at her now."


hans ostrom 2015

Fyris River

The Fyris River
is a fine small river--
energetic and direct.

It runs through
Uppsala there
in Sweden, I want
to say, but should
instead say that
energetic
and direct humans
built Uppsala up
around the river,
which they named
Fyris. The stones

and bricks and
water and light and
birds and darkness
all seem familiar
to  each other
there in Sweden,
Uppsala, as if
they have worked
things out pretty
well. I did not

however speak to
any fish. I tried
to do so once
when I paused on
a bridge over
the Fyris on
my way to the bookstore
during Book Month.

The fish were
indisposed--reading,
perhaps, in the Fyris.



2015 hans ostrom