Lord of the Clouds

I am the Lord of the Clouds.
The low clouds.  Fog, really.
I am the Lord of the Fog!
Well, maybe more like  a minor swamp god.
However, I have aspirations
to rise from being a sentry for stagnant water.


hans ostrom 2017

Unfinished Reading

Books you don't finish reading
are like mountains you don't
finish climbing or comparisons
like this that don't seem quite right.

They are like acquaintances who
don't become friends. (This seems
better.) You have been told or
think you see what's up ahead,
but a weariness sets in. Let

the book be great for others,
you think.  Just leave me out of it. 
I've resigned from the reading of
The Fairie Queen, Clarissa, The
Castle of Crossed Destinies, 
The Charterhouse at Parma, 
countless portly mystery novels.
I pretended to finish Paradise
Lost but, as with the film,
The Titanic, I had guessed the ending.

I forced myself to climb Mann's
Magic Mountain. It took
decades, and it wasn't worth it.

When Sam Johnson (who
said of Paradise Lost, "No one
wished it longer") got tired
of a book, he threw it across
the room. Bolder than I,
he didn't resign from reading.
He fired the book.


hans ostrom 2017

Transformation: Military; or, As You Were

The Colonel said to the Corporal,
"As you were." The corporal
obeyed and turned back into
a mountain goat from Western
North America. In his mind,

the colonel saw the youthful
goat gamboling down and up
jagged bluffs.  "I shall miss him,"
said the colonel to himself--
"such a nimble fellow, and
that odd laugh!"



hans ostrom 2017

Prism Time

Having been convicted
by light, I was sentenced
to prism. A three-year
stretch in spectral stir,
just trying to survive
in fractured colors
and rainbowed lock-up.
It made me a cold,
hard, hallucinatory man.
Prism changes you.



hans ostrom 2017

Our Task

Working in heat
mean enough
to make grass snarl
and boulders ring,
I sometimes
imagined I could not
go on. Ridiculous:

I was as far from
the tortuous labor
slaves endured
for centuries as
I was from Neptune.

Their agony is
immured, is of
the bricks forming
the foundation
of this White Supremacist
monolith now adorned
at the top by
a bloated, cadaverous
cad, multiply evil.

Our task is
to wear down
White Supremacy
and wash away
the dust and grit
the project leaves,
please.



hans ostrom 2017

Kiruna: New Year's Eve

(December 1980)

At noon there was a murky soup of light,
which darkness drank.

Iron miners cruise in large
awkward old American cars
on Kiruna's frozen streets.
The custom is for each drunk
passenger to pay a driver
to be not drunk.

Samis sell bone-handled knives
and jewelry the color of
salmon eggs.

At the New Year's party, my Swedish
cousin and I watch shadows and smudges
of the original King Kong play
on a Finnish TV station. My cousin
is blonder than Fay Wray.

Fireworks outside seem stupid because
we didn't have to wait for darkness.
At 11:00 p.m. my cousin reports
that she always cries at the stroke
of the New Year. I'm prepared,
like a Swede, when tears travel
from her eyes like small droplets
of Sami pewter.  I'm impressed

when one tear lands in her
glass of Norwegian champagne.



1981/2017 Hans Ostrom

Return to Uncleton

Return to Uncleton

His uncle had named the town Uncleton,

served as mayor for fifty years.

Except to tidy up the dog’s grave,

he goes back only for the annual

Rust Festival. He owns snapshots

of the Rust Queens and their Oxidized Courts

from the last twenty years. The lake looks

different from before and smells.

His trousers slip off his buttocks,

and teenagers laugh, their goddamned

music thumping out of cars. He’s inherited

just a pinch of his uncle’s rage

but no property. The sun off the lake

makes him scowl. Where exactly is

the dog’s grave? He remembers how,

just a pup, the little bastard nipped him.

Uncleton, O Uncleton, I hate the way you

draw me back like english on a cue ball.

Copyright 2007/2017

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.

According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished

Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at

Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German

printer presided over the marriage of Period

and Comma in his shop, located in

Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,

Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute

rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal

historicism." She argues periodically

that the semicolon should be interpreted

semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal

zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)

and second as the right and left eyes

of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply

represents "winking post-modernity"

and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,

Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,

in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"

alludes to the semicolon as "a sad

period's single tear, frozen in time

and space--a lament

for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"

Copyright 2008/2017 Hans Ostrom

And the Feelings Thus Conjured

She's dipping her hands in the paint
that neuron networks manufacture.
She's rising from sleep and adorning
the darkness with bright looping
smears her fingertips eject.

The fog shows up, a loose collection
of gray blobs held inside a pale
amorphous balloon. There is a sound
of grinding, a sound of grinding,
a grinding, a sound. She says to no one,

"Sing with me: 'I am stuck on 
the balcony of REM sleep . . .!'"
We don't have to call it anything, you
know. We can just experience it
and the feelings thus conjured,

and live an entire lifetime
there in a mind-sponsored moment.


hans ostrom 2017

The Bees Are Baking

Bees inside my head wear gold aprons
because they're baking tiny tan cookies.
Of course they buzz.  It's how they talk.
They're speaking of their relationship
to time, of how they've been bees
again and again through the ages.

I ask them a question.  Horrified,
they vanish, leaving only the pollen
of their buzzing.  Oh, well.  Their
little bee kitchen smells warm.
I put all of their cookies, which taste
of you-guessed-it, on my tongue at
once because I'm suddenly quite hungry.


hans ostrom 2017

The Ladder People

Inside birch cones
live ladder people.

They build tiny
fires and carry

hand-made ladders
to cliffs, perching

there for nights
and days, singing

to each other,
letting blue moths

alight on their hands.
These people of

the birch cones
decorate their ladders

and themselves with
paint and bits of string.

Comes a light rain.
The ladder people descend.

Comes a stiff breeze,
and birch limbs toss.

Comes regret, comes
to us, and with it

arrives a deep wish to
hear the ladder people sing.



hans ostrom 2017

Underwater History

for Don Parkerson

They're there, our oceanic blunders.
Monitor and Merrimack. Spanish galleons.
And our depravities: slave ships.

Submarines like the Thrusher
could not cope with fathoms.

Weed and coral enhance remaining
shapes. A crucifix grows ocean hair.
A doubloon swells into a rock,
and a captain's iced skull lectures to
a school of fish. Diving down,

the historian cannot afford to haul
a text. Theories don't hold oxygen. He
monitors (and merrimacks) his every
breath like a meditating monk.

What comes clear in obscure depths
is the sluggishness of history,
the persistence with which events
get devoured: how a ship only gradually
slips off the reef to ultimate depths;
how accoutrements of empire
dissolve like common soda.

Floating there, the burden of breath
on his back in steel tanks, the historian
sees small sharks swim through
portholes of a destroyer.  The broadsides
of history went unheard here. Ocean,
imbued with oblivion's appetite,
accepted all defeated ships,
all wars and atrocities, settled or not.


hans ostrom 2017

The Revision

It's the end of the semester. The last essay is due
to me, professor. He, student, misses the final class
and struggles to my office afterwards. He stands
in the doorway, exhausted, and tells me his dream:

"Somehow you'd gotten hold of my essay
before I wanted to turn it in. You assigned
it a grade of the square-root of A. Your
only comment was Very suburban. Then I
stole back the essay before you had
recorded the grade.  I put an A in
the online grading system, next to my name,
and then I watched as the essay
revised itself, prose metamorphosis."

"I'll be darned," I say.  He gives me
the essay.  I look at it.  "Well," I say,
"you'd better put your name on it"



hans ostrom 2017

Dilapidated

The syllables of this word seem
about to come undone.  Anyway,
dilapidated is best if you don't
have to live in it.  Sauntering
around the Sierra Nevada,
I liked seeing shacks that
had stopped lying to themselves.
They spoke highly of the failed,
exhausted miners who'd lived
in them. Weirder were

the cars that people had driven
or pushed into the manzanita brush.
Rust munches them even now.
Yes, and the quiet old imbibers
sitting at the Buckhorn bar,
weary feet in weary shoes
touching brass. These old folks
sipped from a shot glass; and waited.
And today I feel dilapidated.



hans ostrom 2017

Time to Retire Whiteness

“Whiteness–the whole constellation of practices, beliefs, attitudes, emotions that are mixed up in being white–is the problem. Whiteness is degraded and depraved[…] To the degree that we accept any of the meaning that the dominant society gives to whiteness, we white people are degraded and depraved.” 
― Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege





Way, way past time. Whiteness is a ghost
invented by fake science and a priori supremacist
hubris. Famous skeptic David Hume should have been
skeptical about his racism. Wasn't.  Joseph
Blumenach invented "Caucasian" out of nothing.
It is nothing.  We're all one species, obviously.
No races, but (don't take the bait) that doesn't mean we stop
confronting racism or that we aspire to "color
blindness."  If you want to get down with your
ancestry.com ethnicities, cool.  Just set that
white shell aside, if you're wearing one.
Because it's probably  made you do and think
some crazy shit. Mainly it's about people
and cultures,  growing up, recovering from historical
madness, and doing the right things.




hans ostrom 2017

recommended: Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (2010)

James Baldwin's Wisdom

Further insight, from decades past, into why and how we ended up with an insane White Supremacist as president:

Song: Solomon Fry

Solomon Fry never asked why.
He just did what he did
and said what he said.
Solomon Fry.

Solomon Fry sometimes got high.
It deepened his thoughts
about lots and lots.
Oh, Solomon Fry.

Sadly he died,
Solomon Fry,
though he lived
to be very old. 

Goodbye, goodbye,
Solomon Fry.
He died in his sleep,
we were told.

Solomon Fry never asked why.
We asked it instead.
Why is he dead?
Oh, Why did you die,
Solomon Fry?



hans ostrom 2017
(a completely fictional character, as you might have guessed)

It's Not Like the End of the World is the End of the World or Anything

Just before he went to sleep,
the world ended.  Well, began
to end: it's quite a process, after all
(and After All). He stayed awake
that night, finally slept a couple hours
as the sun rose  The wailing and yelling
coming from other abodes woke him.
He wondered if he was expected at work--
and what was in the cupboard
that might comprise supper?
It was just as he expected: even
when the world ends,
a person must plod on.


hans ostrom 2017

Considering Ear Wax

She found it necessary, apparently,
to turn away from scenes of "her"
nation's malevolent stupidity
and to consider ear wax,
which absorbs airborne particular
debris and expels it.  How,
she wondered, do the ears
know when to drive the soil-heavy
wax out of the twin tubular garages?
And could the process be applied
to the removal of a depraved president?


hans ostrom 2017

Ferocious Form

Is it art or is it nature? Yes.
Starlings' startling flock
masses, fractalates, twists,
and surges in anti-patterns.

Each bird's both medium
and member of the troupe-
image. It is a ferocity of
form, undulating in the afternoon.



hans ostrom 2017

If You Want It To Be

The moon is as big as you want it to be.
Even hope can be sad if you want it to be.

Addiction will peel your brain away. The
needle's a gun if you want it to be.

It can be early, if you want it to be.
The book is all yours, if you want it to be.

Like an avalanche, I regret everything.
This is an apology if you want it to be.

It's all a puzzle if you want it to be,
and this is a clue.  If you want it to be.




hans ostrom 2017

The Jagged and the Smooth

Jagged edges enhance smooth achievement--
sacred stuff welded to profane, country
coagulated with city. True worldliness
cancels all its memberships.


hans ostrom 2017

Aspects of Poem Repair

I took a poem into the repair shop. Got
the syntax changed, had the metaphors
rotated, tuned up the images. They also
cleaned the syllables to smooth out
the timing. Bad news, though:

they said it has a cracked narrative.
Not cheap to fix that! So do I pay
for a new one, go with an after-market
narrative, or just get rid of the damned poem?

I mean, the cost of labor alone . . . .
Still, it's been a dependable poem
up to now.  And you know, it sounds
weird, but you get attached to a poem.



hans ostrom 2017

Penelope Calliope

Penelope Calliope, a nonethelessing
kind of girl, gave it a whirl,
a yes of a dash, a now of a splash,
and did not dwell on the fact
that her days like everyone's
will frown into the past.


hans ostrom 2017

Intriguing Employment Opportunities

Lead Evaporator.
Geological Psychologist ["Rock Therapist"]
Undercover Vegan
Atheist Pastry Chef
Theoretical Maid
Workplace Boor (Trainee)
Senior Skeptic
Managing Drifter
Erotic Data Analyst.


hans ostrom 2017

Appointments in the Flatlands

In the '56 Chevrolet sedan, steel and wheels,
we barreled down and up and down three
canyons' worth of Sierra peaks. A mother,
an aunt, 2-3 kids, no seat belts, logging trucks
and steep killer drops to make it interesting.

Eight pistons pushed us through the forest.
Ma and Aunt sang folk songs in two-part
harmony, Clementine drowning and Tom
Dooley killing. I was the youngest in the car
and brooded on ghastly lyrics instead of

lightening up with the lilt. And I couldn't
sing worth a shit. If you looked close
out the window, you saw smears and blurs,
if far, you saw the forest staying still.
Breton would have envied the provincial

surrealism.  Berryman, D.D.S., soon
loomed, mustachioed. His tooth drill
was slow and sullen.  What did I know,
what did we know? Only that life
unfolds and boulders are everywhere.


hans ostrom 2017

Plain as Day

"As plain as day," they say.
That's not very plain.
Revelations of sun's light
bewilder much more than
those of the moon's, which
is plainly a universal blue kiss.




hans ostrom 2-17

Salamander Row

I'm going down to Salamander Row,
where the quick, cool creek plays jazz
of its running for ferns and moss.

I'm going down to Salamander Row
to lose my sense of loss.
Beneath overhanging branches,

the salamanders live moistly
as meditative creatures. They
aren't teachers, but I learn

from their calm there, and the
shaded ambiance of Salamander
Row creates a balm there.



hans ostrom 2017

Like a Bank Camera

She advised him: "Think
of yourself as a bank camera
and just observe." He said,
"So I'm looking for potential
robbers?" She said, "Don't
be silly--you are just looking,
observing in a detached way.
A bank camera has no emotion."
"God damn it," he said,
"I know a camera has no emotion!"
She looked at him,
but not as a bank camera would.



hans ostrom 2017

Nude Not Descending a Staircase

The nude descending a staircase
never moves--forget reaching the landing.
She stays trapped in that manic
wheatsheaf of lines and angles,
poor thing. I guess Duschamp
felt freer painting it up that way.

True, Mona Lisa is locked in, too,
except she gets to relax,
and her smile's in charge,
whereas the nude not descending
a staircase is always on call
and off balance. She has to be ready
to move, yet isn't allowed
even to get dressed.


hans ostrom 2017

White Idols

Go to Church,
vote for a White Supremacist.
Go to Church,
vote for a rapist.
Go to Church,
vote for a nihilist.
Go to Church,
vote for a polyurethane
caesar. Render
your religious values
unto him. Go ahead
and get down with
your pious bad self
and pray to a White Idol.




hans ostrom 2017

Introductory Doom

It may come rather soon,
our introductory doom,
now that the White folks,
South and Midwest,
made a sociopath a President.

He, his fatuous goons, his
enablers, apologists, and
tolerators, aren't satisfied
with their perch high up
in capitalism. Nope.

They must destroy. They
must inflict, control,
degrade. They must
torture, ruin, exclude.
They must champion

stupidity. Their politics,
religion, economics, and
culture are all hollowed out,
vibrant fiber replaced
by one form of depravity

or another. They symbolize
America. They run the nihilistic
show. They oversee crimes,
neglect, and ignorance. They
craft our introductory doom.



hans ostrom 2017

How Are You Enjoying the Dictatorship?

Oh, look, America,
at what White Supremacy made you do.
Fear of change, fear of knowledge, too.
Oh, look, White men, at what
never growing up has set loose
like a plague.
Oh, look, White women
at what the White men mean
to do with your body,
citing their whacked-out version
of Scripture. Still flying
the Confederate flag, still
proud of slavery and Jim Crow?
It's a nice way to show
you don't know right from wrong.
Oh, look, America,
at what snorting celebrity
will get you. That bloated
"billionaire" racist on top
means you've hit bottom,
where the dictator's people
will stomp you,--just their
way of thanking you for
your support.



hans ostrom 2017

Another Good Surreal Night in Paris

That one night in Paris, we searched
for a Mexican restaurant and found it.
Waitresses wore tight bluejeans and
cowboy boots. Nashville music
thumped and twanged.

It was a sincerely inauthentic place.
That made us happy. It brought to mind
California, where only geology
is originally from there.

We ate les tacos and drank Dutch beer.
Looked across a dark courtyard
and spied, two floors up in a kind
of warehouse, ballet dancers,
dozens of them. They faced
the instructor, stretched and jumped
to music we could not hear.

A fire-eater appeared in the courtyard.
He licked a long match and guzzled
fuel. Tipped his head back, roared
flame into night. We saw his small
audience gasp. Full,

we sipped our beers. Saw that the dancers
were drenched in sweat. When the man
with the oboe walked in, we knew
we weren't supposed to be surprised.


hans ostrom 1981/2017

Plain States

We drive a tan Ford in Kansas.
We're the heart of the Census.

We vote the person, also the Party.
We wash our clothes when they're dirty.

We like to shop at Walmart or Penney.
We save our money.

We like TV and ice cream.
We don't dream.

Our daughter's Mary; the boy, John.
When we fought wars, we won.

Why did you stop here, stranger?
Now you'll have to stay.  Forever.



hans ostrom 2017

They Have Their There, We Have Our Here

Back there they speak of out here.
Out here we speak of going
back there. That doesn't mean we
go. Being from out here, we will
never be from back there or welcome.
Even if we go back there, here
will hold us still.  They will always
see the out in us and the here
in how we do things.  And they will
always want everyone everywhere,
including us out here, to agree
that back there is the best. Out here
we don't see things that way.



hans ostrom 2017

Partial Report from Childhood

Heights: obviously perilous.
Snow: tedious, never
as pleasurable as they would
persuade you it is. Adults:
loud and/or tired. Family:

a pecking order and a proliferation
of comparisons. School:
40% cruelty, 50% boredom,
10% pleasure. Men: in charge,
even if no one knows why.

Women: perfumed, patient,
smarter than they act.
Girls: fascinating, mercurial.
Did I mention fascinating?

Books: reliable. The future:
an absentee landlord.



hans ostrom 2017

Eve and Adam Evicted by Landlord

So after Eve and Adam got their Know on,
God evicted them, but notice please
that Eden stayed right there, the primest
piece of real estate there ever was,
and was not, for sale. It is a glorious
space, ipso and facto. It's round and flat
and low and high and wet and dry,
packed with flora, also fauna, and
maybe, yes, a sauna, oh why not?
Can I tell you where it is and why?
Oh, I wish. Or do I? Better not to know,
perhaps, Wasn't that the lesson of
eviction? Let's  ask dove and crow.



hans ostrom 2017

Ghost Pavilion

I have been admitted to
the Ghost Pavilion,
which rises from a
plateau beyond fatalism.

There one is invited
to view reproductions
of the groups and squads
and masses of faces

one has passed by,
through, or among
in life. Students at
the Ghost Pavilion

accept that reality
exists but also learn
that anybody's perceptions
of it are little more than

a cache of roughly
recorded glimpses.



hans ostrom 2017

What a Lovely Afternoon

(acknowledging Calvin and Hobbs, and Henry C.)

What a lovely afternoon,
in spite of the fascist President
of Amerixon and his cabinet
full of rapacious rats. What
a lovely afternoon, shining
down on poverty and pain
and insufficient rain. What

are we going to do about this
fix in which science is treated
as a cartoon and hateful lore
displaces logic?  Not sure

we can do anything much
(but what a lovely afternoon)
except watch a culture try
to commit suicide and take
so many innocent people with it.



hans ostrom 2017

In Old Palm Springs

In old Palm Springs, north, just beyond
the charming attempts at glamour,
trunks of big palm trees look like
elephants' legs: parched, dermatologically
checked, and weary.  The Earth
is each palm's shoe, and all the trees
are taking a walk through space.


hans ostrom 2017

Old Fables

I prefer the older animal books for children--
the ones in which creatures act, dress,
and talk like humans but aren't cute.

In the illustrations, they still look
like creatures, seem embarrassed
by the costumes given them--

a frog in coat and vest, a fox
wearing a scarf.  But in those books
they throw themselves into the difficult

roles. I saw that in the stories, and
that's what interested me--the animals'
existential struggle with entertainment.



hans ostrom 2017

Cross-Examination Song

I have no further questions
for this witness.

He really doesn't seem
to know his business.

He said he saw the man
but changed his tale again.

Prevarication displays
symptoms like a sickness.



hans ostrom 2017

Fixated, Exasperated

I've been trying to write
about other things,
but I'm fixated on
White Supremacy, what
a deadly, depraved sink-hole
it is, how it elected a racist
rapist President, and how
White folks let it persist,
nourish it, become
zombies in its death-cult army.


hans ostrom 2017

Be Careful What

"Be careful what you wish for; you may get it."

--Old Saying, variously attributed

Be careful what you fish for. It
may catch you. Be careful who
you swish for (for whom), for
you may get swashed or even
buckled. Be careful what you
kiss for, for kissing is a kind of wish.

Be careful what you dish, no not
because you later may have to take
it, but because dishing carefully
is as we know the right thing to do.

"Be careful what you hiss for":
a feline admonition.



hans ostrom 2017