Party Behaviors

 At the party, a light turned on

inside one woman and it shone

through her skin and shirt.

A man brought a private 

darkness with him. He climbed

inside it but still we heard his voice.

One person bent the air,

warping what we saw

making things seem to wiggle,

making us giggle. And some of

a verbose fellow's words became

visible and rose to the ceiling,

full of gas, helium, perhaps.

Only briefly did I become a 

turtle so as to be left alone. 

Hans Ostrom

Like a Turnip

It might start with the shriek

of a hawk or the ruining racket

of a jackhammer. Or with the low,

low flute note from a great horned

owl, or with the wail of a baby nearby. 

Anyway, a sound that seizes you,

uproots you from your moment,

like a turnip from damp soil,

and tosses you into the basket

of a different reality. Pulled

or pushed into one space

of the "real after" another,

only falsely sure we know

what's coming in the mirage's flow--

oh, such is life, life such as it is.

Hans Ostrom 2024

Vibrations

The elevated train shook

and rattled his dank studio

apartment. A a cat sleeping next

to him began to buzz its own

body with purring. Indecipherable

words from a cranked up TV

next door hummed inside wall

studs and plaster-board. Somewhere

in the city, his former lover

snored, he knew, her nose

morphed into a kind of kazoo. 

He listened past the dins

and thought he heard the rustle

& tap of cockroaches & now a

furnace pipe joined the noise.

hans ostrom 2024

At Paddington Station

At Paddington Station, in a tunnel

just off the platforms, you want to capture

images of faces & bodies with memory

not camera--the ancient pickling mode.

Impossible. Commuting workers

stride with purpose verging on menace.

Tourists--sluggish, confused, quarrelsome,

sweaty, laden. . . . The tunnel space

seems eager to ingest people (it has

seen them all already, the Alis and

the Bens, the Antonios, Angelikas,

and Vlads, the Prufrocks, Sukis,

Eriks, and Khans). Such tunnels

snake like arteries through urban

bodies, delivering toil to the maw

of the Economy, serving sweat-labor

and schticks of expertise, nutrients

of the perpetual Now. The proper

English woman's voice narrates

train-info ("with breakfast service

to Swansea"), a positive-thinking

pigeon head-thrusts into the mix,

content with crumbs. What a seething

thing is a big city, but every person

is still one person, loaded with duty,

aches, words, terrors, whole worlds

of thought hiding behind stoic faces. 

A mind among millions, holding on,

holding off insanity and defeat.

A large sign states WAY OUT. Its

message is a mirage. And so it is

if you're a certain you, you'll enter

stage-lit platorms to board a serpent-

snouted Great Wester Railway train

to Cardiff, from where you'll go to

Aberdare in search of dark grey

headstones and places where

the dead once walked, worked,

and wondered. They couldn't see

your present, the future. You can't

see their past, that present.

Ghost trains roll

by each other silently on tracks

laid down by Time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Conductors, You and I

Me and you, protons

and electrons through and 

through atoms that compose

our noses and toes. We

give off light and heat, you

know, of course you know,

oh omnivorous power plants

are we as we with our flows

of energy, heating each other

up in beds and other close

quarters, which is why

windows of cars and buses

fog up and sweat and even

trickle tears. Conductor

of electricity, today I shall try

to sluice my energy

appropriately in public and in

this wired-up, copper-webbed

abode, this wireless, fireless

cave. It's kind of exciting

to my neurons to have a bit

of lightning coursing through

what one calls one's brain,

which rewires itself in sleep to dream.

Hans Ostrom 2024

Melanie-Peace Will Come According To Plan [HD]

Will Ferrell on Navigating His Best Friend's Transition in 'Will & Harpe...

Earth: The Mad Planter

This Earth, this spinning, orbiting ball

of rock with a sizzling center--like

a weird truffle candy--seems

to want to cover itself in carbon-addicted

life: weeds, trees, vines, moss, lichen,

brush, and on and greening on. Well,

it is chilly in space, so why not grow a coat?

I love to see cracks in concrete 

become narrow weed gardens,

to see vacant city lots turn into

jungles, which people of course 

turn into dumps for paper, aluminum,

and bloody needles. And

think of the underground,

the massive, brute tangle of 

leg-sized roots under a conifer

forest, my God. Vast tendril

clusters under pastures. Can

a planet have a will? I think so:

The Earth will keep sneezing

seeds, rooting rhyzomes, 

making bulb-grenades, pulling

vines out of vines, calling 

its berserk plant-army into

peaceful, triumphant war. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Wine-Red Clouds at Twilight

Red-wine-soaked clouds

at dusk sing an intoxicated anthem

of light to summon such 

night creatures as raccoons,

bats, cats, and certain devotees

of Charles--Baudelaire

and Bukowski, those bad boys.

Sing, you wine-dark sacks 

of rain. Sing!

Hans Ostrom 2024

Unlovely Impulses

What did envy ever do for you?

Like washing wool in hot water,

it shrank your soul. Self-shrivel.

Same goes for excess pride,

the striding great inflater, which

turns you into a boastful blimp

bound to bust up on rocks. 

Then there's greed, which morphs

your hands into grasping claws,

your mind into a maniacal mouse

in a maze, addicted to cheese.

Throw them out, reduce your

inventory of unlovely impulses.

You're the shopkeeper of your thoughts

and actions. Tidy up your shelves. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

River Run Dry

 thinking of Ann Monroe

Though we may not know it then,
some goodbyes are forever. She
cried in the cafe--cold-rain Spring
day. We went to her place and made
love just one more time. Her black hair.

We drifted like untied rowboats
in a harbor. One hot Summer day,
we met to say goodbye. Decades
rolled by like freight trains, clack-clack,
on the time track. I see her

face on that goodbye day. When
both of us thought in frames of hours,
days, weeks, months. I don't recall
precisely what we said besides, "Okay,
see you later. Bye." I know neither
of us thought forever. And those decades

later, after no contact, I heard she
died. I felt like I stood on a cliff,
looking down, down, into a deep
canyon in which a river had run dry.
I wrote a note on one of those
obituary sites online. It felt like
scribbling with charcoal
on a canyon wall no one would see.

Hans Ostrom 2024

Parsonage

 Is the Self

an apparition

barely in view,

then gone, like a last

bit of mist leaving trees,

pushed by a breeze?

Is it a certainty

like a boulder that shapes

the flow of a small

creek singing, bells

in the distance ringing?

Does it simply 

seem to be,

out of necessity?

Perhaps the self's

a symbolic personage,

like a mossy-bricked

parsonage in an old village:

It stands, orienting

the town around itself,

a landmark, but not the core

of the town, nor the whole

village, no certainly

not the whole.

Hans Ostrom 2024

2024 Book & Media Awards Ceremony