Friday, February 9, 2024
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Bloomsbury Park
(September 2022)
Bloomsbury Park
isn't melting yet
in the plump heat
of London, late summer.
A locust tree
shows tendons
and bends like an
arm at the elbow.
The only birds
are pigions. Brown
plates of stone make
a center square
and we strangers
sit on black benches.
We're mostly mute.
Cornflowers persist--
the rest of the beds
are parched like a
hangover. On my way
out, one pigeon escorts
me to the gate. We say our
forms of goodbye. I wonder
if one of his ancestors
spoke to Virginia Woolf.
isn't melting yet
in the plump heat
of London, late summer.
A locust tree
shows tendons
and bends like an
arm at the elbow.
The only birds
are pigions. Brown
plates of stone make
a center square
and we strangers
sit on black benches.
We're mostly mute.
Cornflowers persist--
the rest of the beds
are parched like a
hangover. On my way
out, one pigeon escorts
me to the gate. We say our
forms of goodbye. I wonder
if one of his ancestors
spoke to Virginia Woolf.
The "melting" in the first stanza alludes to the famous/infamous Jim Webb song, "MacArthur Park," as sung-spoken by Richard Harris. "MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Beware: The Billionaire is Angry
The billionaire's enraged. Angry
with women, with labor unions, with
"woke" people (but not mad enough
to say what he means by that word).
Lava-livid with academics,
except the ones whose research
undergirds his products. He's ticked
off with a former wife and a "disloyal"
child. He's not, though, especially upset
with neo-Nazis. Meanwhile,
the fellow who bags the groceries
people buy and retrieves carts
from the parking lot in cold rain,
cheerfully greets me. We exchange
polite words and laugh. He reminds
me not to forget that he's placed
items at the bottom of the cart.
"Yesterday, two people forgot theirs,"
he cautions. He seems to like
his minimum-wage job and life
well enough not to project rage.
The angry billionaire will "earn"
14 million dollars today. My mind,
as it doesn't forget to load the under-cart
items in the back of my car, goes
to Steve, the man who bagged
the tomatoes and rice and
so on. . . . His red-bearded
face, full of good will.
Hans Ostrom 2024
Monday, February 5, 2024
Thursday, February 1, 2024
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
Tuesday, January 30, 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
Monday, January 29, 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
Sunday, January 28, 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
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