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

Melanie-Peace Will Come According To Plan [HD]

Friday, January 26, 2024

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

Thursday, January 25, 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

Wednesday, January 24, 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

Monday, January 22, 2024

The Dreaming Mind Versus You

A squat building, five floors
tops, with a flat roof. This structure
features in recent dreams. One dream:
you live on the roof in a truck with a camper.
Another: You watch commuters
in cars compete to use an exterior
off-ramp to get off the roof.
They rage and roar as you

stand in the maelstrom. In another,
you perch alone on the roof
and stare at big leafy trees
and know you're stranded. Beyond
the trees a campus may lie--
you can't know.

The dreaming mind is mulish. It
conjures what it will and does not
serve you. You serve it. Sleeping,
you can't leave the theater 
or even close your interior eyes.

Which is only fair, as your ridiculous will
pushes your mind all day and into
night, often not wisely. On that
flat roof of a nondescript, unglamorous
building, you feel a useless,
barren loneliness. Get used to it. 
Says the dreaming mind. 


Hans Ostrom 2024

Bing Crosby - Send In The Clowns (Parkinson, August 30th 1975)