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"Around and Around They're Dancing," by Roger Illsley

Bayou Blues

 Sulfur yellow sky

seals in obese,
humid air.

Just sitting on
our slumped porch,
us, still we sweat creeks.

A sick boat motor
coughs over there
on the bayou canal.

A sedan drives up.
Looks like a Fed car.
Our neighbors scatter

like water drops
on a griddle. We
have to breathe

this air. We have
to breathe this
here hot, wet air.

hans ostrom 2023

Orb Spider In Its Nest

I saw a a dark, spotted

orb-weaver spider
suspended in the center
of its flat, woven net,
presiding over its life.

I leaned in and spoke
softly to it. The spider slowly
raised its two foremost
legs--a casual double-wave.

Like moonlight glowing
on an old eucalyptus tree,
like an unsheltered man
sleeping on a city grate,

the spider and its awareness
cannot affect the future.
They're almost nothing,
just like me. And yet the
spider and the man and
the glowing tree, and just one

night's moonlight should
count as crucial. They exist
& their gestures suggest we
should care.

hans ostrom 2023

Photo: spotted orb-weaver spider. © Oct

Interruptions

You're a minor Beat Movement poet

in 1961, and you get up to leave a bar
in Berkeley, California, but the bartender
doesn't know who you are, and he yells,
"You forgot to pay!"

No doubt you're not a minor Beat Movement
poet, and it's 2023 or 2122, and you lift
a first spoon of homemade soup
toward your mouth, but someone
raps on your door like a monstrous
woodpecker on a beetle-infested pine.

You're anybody somewhere sometime,
soaring in new love but now brought down
to sickening earth by the buckshot of
betrayal. Or required brain surgery
shunts your rolling-along-all-right life
to a rusty side-track where
you live in a fog of recovery.

Yep, life's a series of interruptions
interrupted by Death. Sometimes
the shock is so great you and your
family have to become refugees,
who huddle and pray on a rubber
boat slammed by cold waves.

hans ostrom 2023

Love and Toilet Paper

Somebody once asked Johnny Cash

what the secret to a successful marriage
was--his second had worked out well.

In his tremulous baritone,
Johnny answered, "Two
bathrooms." Once upon

an era, a lucky couple had two
bathrooms, one downstairs,
one upstairs, where bedrooms

were. One night around midnight,
the husband noticed the upstairs
bathroom had no toilet paper.

He trudged downstairs
to where a storeroom lay,
and where an awakened cat

looked at him the way a general
looks at a private. The man
apologized to the furry general,

fetched rolls of toilet paper,
and took them upstairs.
In the morning, the wife said,

"I noticed you got us some toilet
paper in the middle of the night.
That is love," she added.

hans ostrom 2023

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