A Circus in Germany

A small Roma circus drags Evolution
to Bretzenheim, tacks up posters,
circles battered vans and trailers,
lets animals and children out to stretch.

A llama and two camels with flaccid humps
stand beneath a canopy, munching nothing,
about them the air of wisdom and dung.

A child rides a hippopotamus onto grass.
She looks like a wart on a planet.
The hippo becomes a gray boulder
upholstered in leather. Its teeth are
as big as my fist, its legs as long
as my fingers. How many million
years ago was it a slender fish?

Villagers cut through the park
to peer at the bestiary. a stinking
goat, smirking camels, and stunted
ponies. Children under the tiny
plastic Big Top can be heard
to scream with glee. In there
creatures and people jump through hoops.

hans ostrom
1981/20019

The Very Nowness of You

 ("The Very Thought of You," a
ballad composed by Ray Noble)


The nowness of you
in your motion and thinking,
the present rectitude of your
existence, with earrings, as
it happens (it happens)--
this is separate from our life
together. Our life together
is an invisible sculpture
representing our ideas
and memories of us. It's
exhibited in the gallery of days.
The you right-now-here is
someone and something
to be discovered, and it seems
I just discovered you one
more time. I find it quite exciting.


hans ostrom 2019

Me and Satie

For me, trying to play
one of Erik Satie's Gnossiennes
on the old scarred Chickering
is like trying to catch trout
minnows with my hands
in a river at dusk: I give up
and just admire the mercurial
flashing school of motion
in last light.


hans ostrom 2019

You Are Not My Phone

You are not my phone, she said. I
like you, yes. I love my phone. I
like you better when you're filtered
through my phone because then
you become a pleasurable meme.

She said, I live with, in, and through
my phone. Okay, he said, then, well,
maybe I'll text you sometime . . .
She replied, You mean never, not
sometime. You don't understand me
because you're not really into your
phone. Not all the way. You lack
commitment. Although he was standing

right in front of her, he texted her. She
looked at her phone, which told her
he'd written I agree--bye! She continued
to let her fingers peck at her phone
like chicken beaks. And did not look
up to see him going away.

hans ostrom 2019

The Ministry of Obvious Questions

At the Ministry of Obvious Questions,
we ask why America is still full of White Supremacists,
including a certain president. Why
can't we create shelter for homeless people
huddling in tents and doorways? Why
is medicine to expensive for working-class
people to buy? One of our favorites is
What's wrong with you people? We
believe, in other words, that it all starts
with asking the obvious questions. The
Ministry of Answers has been instructed
to remain silent. Why is that?


hans ostrom 2019

Important Reminder

It is important to remember
that at any given moment,
no one in the world (or any
world) is thinking about you.
And that is just fine.


hans ostrom 2019

Unfulfillment

unfulfillment

unfulfilament

unspool filament

unfunfillment

one full fill meant

one full fool mentor

fill fool emolument 

feel fray fragment

moonfullfilment

dune full film tent

soon full tilt sent

hollow, hollow, somewhat

almost always hollow,

do not wallow

in unfulfillment,

help is hopefully on the way

hope is helpfully on the way

hans ostrom 2019

Your Happy Day

(a spam poem)


Today is your happy
day, 1M has been giving
to you. Send me an email
for inquiries, kind
lady or sir.

hans ostrom 2019

Derelict

This place seems to be
falling apart, coming undone.
It's held together by buttons
and brackets, bolts
and rivets, screws, beliefs,
and clamps.  It's shored up
with shibboleths and superstitions.

Cracks, gaps, and rot
proliferate, plastered and painted
over with toxic residues
remaining from rabid denial
of fact, from swollen ignorance.
We get pounded from all sides
by images and sounds
of people talking and shouting
shit that makes no sense. The
general disintegration is monitored
and marketed carefully,
continuously. Now is the bright

summer of stupid authoritarians.
We who have no power or
influence fixate on fixes
that will never happen,
because they may require
evidence, discernment, and change.


hans ostrom 2019

My Song for You

Days and leeks
and mouths and years.
Ways and beams
and jaws and fears.

Wishes and misses,
fiends and trees.
Reins and stones
and cogs and bees.

This song is for you.
It's not going very well.
It's absent a message,
as you can tell.

Anyway: skunks,
aluminum, flowers.
Sadness and sneezing,
minnows and hours.


hans ostrom 2019

Briefly

Many molecules
briefly in circulation
so as to articulate
a body-plan, which is
embedded in the material
itself (which is like wood
turning itself into
a house): that's me,
temporarily.


hans ostrom 2019

Just Plain Hard

Rooted in Oklahoma's winter plains,
unleaved gray-grown trees
graduate from artery trunks
to capillary branches, final
twigs feathering into nothing.

Here people set hard faces
against hard work. At night
neon blooms, blazes--
a reward for getting through
or going to another shift.

Oklahoma, flat and difficult,
cast iron red ground:
look elsewhere for loam. This
is home if you need it to be.
Your choice, maybe.


hans ostrom 2019

Seagulls in Snow

Seagulls in snow step
with authority and bulk
like army officers
from the 18th century.

Their shrieks turn into
mad laughter that shreds
the insulated calm following
flurries. Sometimes

they sit on white
as swans float on water.
In search of food,
they chop at a drift

with heavy yellow
beaks: cutting tools.
The failure of snow
to surge, swirl, pulse,

pound, slap, and leap
like the sea soon bores
them. They jump into
wind then and glide

and fly forthrightly
back to a bay and cliffs
and the raucous, slow
riot of the shore.


hans ostrom 2019