We've Always Had Good Answers

We've always had good answers. We know
what's best to do. We've been at war
always so have forgotten many answers.
Permanent war permanently distracts.
Plus when we use religion only
as a V.I.P. badge
and a fulcrum to extert force,
we get godlike, and you know
how that goes. Buying, also

the buying, shopping, shopping.
Quite a thing-culture, they were
may be said of us in retrospect or
now. Good answers are just lying
around all over the place like
jewels no one thinks are valuable
anymore. We just have to forget
what we know and start picking them up.
That's all? Pretty much.

hans ostrom 2015

Our Legends

Tell me your favorite legend,
and I'll tell you who you aren't.
I, too, sit outside
my legend, staring at it,
the thing I'm not.

Why do we do this
to ourselves and each other--
this creation of Impossibles
to which we then aspire
like minnows who dream
of becoming eagles
and vice versa?


hans ostrom 2015

People from the Sky

So many people
fall out of the sky.
They congeal and
become moving crowds
in cities,
thick and sticky
populations.

Thank you, sky,
for all the people!
yells a forlorn
figure, homeless
and friendless
in the mass.


hans ostrom 2015

Apples of the Ear

The apple doesn't fall far
from the tree except in quantum summer
when Newton's head doesn't/does
exist and Atom & Eve

know what they don't know,
a good first step
into the wormhole of Paul
Gonsalvez's "Diminuendo/

Crescendo" solo at Newport,
1956, in that momentary era
wherein all the tightly knit
notes of Ellington's orchestra

became/become perfectly tart-sweet
apples in a God's-ear of time.


hans ostrom 2015

Where Did Everybody Go, Anyway?

This place got quiet all of a sudden.
People I guess are off taking photos
of their meals and posting them
on Boastface.com. Probably lots

are gathering to tweet
about comic-book heroes played
in movies by weird little
celebrities. I think

all of this is fine, just
fine. Or I don't think
it's fine. Mere opinions are
exalted on the human stage.


hans ostrom 2015

The Richard Brautigan Beauty Pageant and Fishing Derby

At the Zero Annual Richard Brautigan Beauty Pageant
and Fishing Derby, held at a mezzanine level
of consciousness, some of the contestants
are wearing hip waders and nothing else.

Their fly-casts catch the ears of lascivious
men and pull them off. There is no pain.
They do grow back. What is it with (some)
men and women's breasts? The pageant's
judges, who include Baudelaire,
discuss this question at some length.
Baudelaire reads his "Giantess" poem.

The carpenter Jesus comes on stage
and sings Leadbelly's droll Titanic
song. Now "the girls," garbed efficiently
in paisley items, launch the big
production-number. They sing and they
step-dance down a terraced pyramid made
out of 1945 nickels (S.F. Mint).
The trout in the audience go wild.


hans ostrom 2015

Aspects of the Main Stream

In the pavilions of forbidden solitude,
citizens could not escape their screens.
And tiny hovering machines
recorded what little reflection people
could manage to generate,
for thoughtfulness was deemed
counter-productive to all aspects
of the status quo. There had been no need

to prohibit poetry, improvised musics,
philosophy, and playful disquisitions
in public squares, for all of these,
including public squares, had simply
fallen out of style, and style was all.

Self-regimentation and enervated irony
(pallid sarcasms) prevailed in those days.
The cinema and its derivatives featured
chiefly "super heroes" and sequels,
categories that rose like massive
computer-generated plinths
over the tomb of imagination.


hans ostrom 2015

Emergency Music Medicine

Inspired by desperation
and a certain nausea brought on
by spectacles of hate encased
in blistered, feverish stupidity,

they started injecting
Duke Ellington's chords
directly into people's brains.
It couldn't hurt, they figured.

They brought on board
booster-shots of Bill Monroe,
Aretha, Coltrane, Rubenstein's
Chopin, and vials of other juice.

Hi-dee-high-dee hoping these
inoculations and antidotes
might re-humanize folks,
the worried inculcators

waited, seeking early signs
of logic, empathy, and wit.
I? I await reports. A bottle
of bourbon, which I haven't

touched in centuries, sits
on the battered piano,
which I have touched, pawing
ballads and blues like a badger.


hans ostrom 2015

Secret Music

The antennae of the snail receive
music as slowly as glaciers form thoughts.
Note by note, the music seeps in from
a station under the ocean.

--Whereas bumble bees jam. They
syncopate the wing-buzz rhythms
and growl lyrics into stamens.
O, sexy women, O, befuddled men,

there's music out there
few have never heard.



hans ostrom 2015

More Popular Than the Beatles

Is the Abyss a place or a route? Yes.
How's the signage there? Incidentally,
when you visit an abbey, remember to ask
to meet the Abbess, not the Abyss.

This word, abysmal, where did that
come from? From the Abyss Mall?
Over a million shops, all of them empty.
They say Jesus, he came back

from the Abyss. I guess he did.
More popular than the Beatles, for sure.



hans ostrom 2015

The Is-and-Seems Theater Presents

"Electrons will be depicted as clouds of probabilities."

--Rachel Eherenberg, Science News, 13 June 2015


Sometimes seems makes Is palatable. Other
times Is wrecks Seems and levels
dreams to rubble, a lot to be cleared.

Art and science are Seems, despite
their claims to Is. They're our
symbolic social recreation of

material Is, that mystery in
plain site which hurtles
like a meteorite. Sometimes

it seems as if we know
nothing. Even our knowing something
may lead to that conclusion.

There's a profusion of
possibilities, the immanence
of Is, the atmosphere of Be.



hans ostrom 2015

Domestication

Some animals convened and reached
a consensus: they must domesticate us.
Self-evidently mad and self-destructive
as well as hard on other species,
we bore watching. So several

kinds of wild cats, wolves, and birds
sacrificed their careers, edged close
to our encampments, caves, and migrating
groups. They showed us the rudiments
about what to feed them, how to be patient.

The closer they became to us, the more
appalled they were by our illogic,
our lying and our frenzy. Even in sleep,
we thrashed about. Plus animal-sacrifice,
so stupid. Descendants of the animals

that domesticated us still try
to educate us and mitigate
our recklessness. Because of
the stress involved, they nap
a lot and get sad.



hans ostrom 2015

Nothing But Time

Moments don't arrive.
For they've always been there,
inside the universe.
The tiniest percentage of them
are invisible arenas
available to our lives,
which pass in. And out.
All other moments lie beyond us.
There is nothing but time.


hans ostrom 2015

Honors and Awards

He's been elected to the Lizard Rock
Academy of Arts & Shit Like That.
He was awarded the Piss-Ant Prize
in Poetry from the Gout Foundation.

At Fistula University, he holds
the Flecknut Chair in Mossy Texts,
although he's never taught one
goddamned thing to anyone there.

He was elected to the Chamber
of Literary Commerce not long
after he developed a sore
on his scalp, about which

he wrote the epic poem,
Ick,in syllabics.
He will be buried, after
dying, in the Poet's Corner

of Len's Barbershop and Bait Shop
in Lugville, Nevada. I mean, this
sonofabitch is a prized poet,
lethally anthologized.


hans ostrom 2015

Roof

Mist has found its night-air.
From the buzz of the plane,
we know the plane flies
circularly in clouds. Have one!
A neighbor cries, followed by
I need new strings. We are
on the roof but no closer to the sky,
buzzing toward a circular high.

Phrasing Today

How shall we phrase this day?
It has its own rhetoric.
Our arguments are largely choral
and decorative. Vowels

of sunlight stream between
consonantal trees and bathe
guttural buildings. Sky is a blue
theme; air, a forum.



hans ostrom 2015

The Post and the Cinema

I grew up fond of the post,
its letters and envelopes,
typed script and cursive,
stamps and addresses.
Its pace of weeks and days,
years and months.
Its slow magic. Now
it labors, a harried
beast with no charm
and many enemies.
I'm used to its
alleged replacements,
but once I loved the post.

I used to fall into cinema
as if it were a liquid dream,
a pool of better reality.
Now I see through it to
the cynicism, the
racism and capital,
bad writing, bad acting,
no acting, no point.
Hollywood's a sewage-
processing plant by another
name. I like some films
all right. But I used
to love the cinema.

It's another thing
to watch, is all,
institutions altered,
dead, or dying,
drifting by like dirigibles.



hans ostrom 2015

"Early One Morning," by Edward Thomas

They Will

They will photograph themselves holding guns.
They will incorporate the national flag
into their wardrobe.
They will proclaim their faith aggressively.
They will act in contradiction to their faith.
They will not read history.
They will not read literature.
They will not consult data.
They will reject conclusions from science.
They will demand to be considered special
and may link themselves to God.

They will not understand.
They will not try to understand.
They will be tyrants in their families.
They will perceive no contradictions.
They will recoil from wit and irony.
They will mimic gestures of status.
They will threaten.
They will be particularly susceptible
to fascist appeals.
They will transmit ignorance gleefully.
They will not know how to ask good questions.
They will remain enraged by complexity
and change.
They will not change.


hans ostrom 2015

Hollywood's Not Doing it For Me

I was watching a digitalized video
of a film in which immensely wealthy
celebrities with slight builds
(made more slight by Hollywood's
emaciation-demands) were pretending
on a sound stage to be tough cowboys
or gangsters or spies or cops. It wasn't
working for me. Their acting

couldn't overcome the built-in
farce of the system that made
the product--the insincere,
serious, transparently cynical,
ghastly moving-picture factory.

I turned off the machine.

I imagined the two men
having to work a shift
building a house. That scene
worked for me. I imagined
them quitting after ten
minutes and hobbling
toward the limousine.

After that scene stopped
in my head, I went outside
and dug a hole to plant
a green-gauge plum tree in.
I was entertained.



hans ostrom 2015

The Great Photon River

I wonder about the number of electrons
in me. I know you wonder the same
about the number in you. I wonder about
their origin. And I wonder about photons:
fiat photons. Sometimes, ego

forgets to block out all transmissions
from the broader spectrum,
in which instants
you may glimpse,
I can too,

the scene that shows it's all,
including here and us, one river
of light flowing around
and through black-hole boulders
and dark-matter mountains.



hans ostrom 2015

Note to Hart Crane

"For unless poetry can absorb the machine...then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function."

--Hart Crane



As I started typing this wad of words, sir,
I received a note from "my" machine:
Your html cannot be accepted.

Afraid or not, I am
sure the machine has absorbed us.
Ever adaptable (I type this
as if I mean it), we write
from and about the technological
innards, but we be the absorbee.

Rather than building bridges,
the culture seems merely
to have outsmarted itself
in ways even a good advertising
man like yourself couldn't
have seen coming. It produces
catastrophe in a businesslike manner,
very professional.

Atlantis is a casino
and a resort, Plato
was a fascist, and the Brooklyn Bridge is
quaint, and . . . .

. . .And everything, is the problem.
Anyway, from inside, unlyrically,
some craft reports like this
about the lovely contours of the machine,
the words floating like plastic trash
on the surface of "our" seminal html. May
a brother buy a vowel? Machine says no.

hans ostrom 2015

Synesthesia

Oh, the brain is such
a busy beast, operating
on its own, only oh occasionally
letting will pretend it is a manager.

On its own, the beast
associates the Thursday word
with an aubergine purple
and velvet texture.

It links Saturday
to red, Sunday to hard
translucence, Monday to off-white
or beige, Tuesday

to blue and an upholstered feel,
Wednesday to tan and cinnamon,
a graininess. Friday: black and gray,
the vintage whimsy of

a checkerboard linoleum floor.
Brain, to what end, this
communication between strangers
in the internal jazz cafe?


hans ostrom 2015

Crow Knows Chronos

How does a crow
know when to slow
down as it flies
toward ragged-tipped trees
near Pacific?
You tell me.

And tell me this, your Majesty:
How does the eye
know when to spy
crows as they slow-
ly approach that tree,
ragged-topped next to coast?

Will you science me
when you tell me
why brain, which
is eye, which is crow,
knows crow, ocean,
and differences between?
Why brain indeed knows,
why cerebral deeds seem sane
when nothing would make
less science

to the unaccustomed crow
than eye and ragged
tree-top, ocean and black
ragged crow-wing brain?
Oh, you tell me,
oh, talk to me

using available light
and good godawful language
which crow's caw & ocean's
elasticity can soon articulate.
You science me, fathom
depths and chart crow-flight,
you all, you You, you too, O crOw.






hans ostrom 2015


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What I Miss About Sweden

Jag saknar Sverige. Have I
sentimentalized that long country?
To be sure. Still there's much
to miss specifically. How
Swedes listen and have known
silence to be a key component
of conversation. How
they're suspicious of people
who require attention and thus
of Americans. The ubiquitous

(or so it seems) aromas
of coffee and pastry and certain
spices. Small grocery stores
that sell small potatoes still
with dried mud on them. The

presence of the absence of war.
A multitude of drolleries.
Crunch of tires and boots
on snow. Bicycles through snow.
The practical national enthusiasm
for children as a protected class.

Group-thinking (but not group-
thought). The way the language
swings--no wonder that the Swedes
loved Duke Ellington. Certain shades

of yellow on large public buildings,
and of red on cottages. Order,
without mania. How light
is a Norse god. Pop music. Jazz,
blues. Cucumber sandwiches.
Herring, herring everywhere.
And the news, which is, as it
should be, presented with
suspicion and perplexity.

hans ostrom 2015

Pluto, Yes

I wonder what day it is
on Pluto. Maybe
the Plutonians have named
a blues song after the day
of the week (or corresponding
unit) that's notoriously grim,
even for a disrespected orb
barely on speaking therms
with the sun. And

everybody knows that the
Plutonian work-day is forever,
longest in the solar system,
plus no labor unions. Cold.

I say, Hey, Pluto, I'll check
with you again when it's about
noon your time, Okay, man?


hans ostrom 2015

Experimental Vulgarity

Experimental. Ex-
paramilitary. Osprey,
men, tall: say it fast.

...I meant all. Expired.
Ax-pyred. Rapier wit:
annoying as hell. Expert

in metal. What does the
experiment entail? Experimental,
imperimental. Ahem:

empirical is no miracle,
but still it can be lyrical.
Free radicals are costly;

you'll want them surveilled
and unveiled; ultimately
intimately impaled. Mostly I wanted

to question the planted
evidence by means of
experimentation, to

curate with large vulgarity
disinterested respectability,
which has always been my enemy.

Adieu! Whew! Boastily and
brashily, I wanted a clashingly
jellied up bit of jazz

so as to pazz the evening.

hans ostrom 2015

Gun in the Sky

There's a big gun in the sky
hanging over the nation.

If the nation runs,
the gun will shoot it.
If the nation doesn't run,
the gun will shoot it.

The nation hasn't been
in this situation before.

It has only heard about such
an awful thing--and scoffed at it.

Now the nation is scared. Shaking.
Pleading. Panicked.

There's a big gun in the sky
pointed down at the nation.

The gun doesn't see the nation
as human. It sees it
as an awful thing. The gun
doesn't have a conscience.

After the gun shoots the nation
and the nation starts to die,
the gun will make a joke.


hans ostrom 2015

Mind the Mind

Mind moves from manzanita
to overpopulation to
the Dreyfus Case to
accident of birth to
the poetry of Wang Wei
to heartburn to itch to
American's death-cult of racism.

Parts of mind watch other parts.
They correspond. They feud.

Why mind, why this mind, why
this mind works this way,
why questions?

are questions mind has,
moves toward, around, with.

Oh, manzanita, whispers mind,
ah accident of birth, and ohhhhhhhh,
America


hans ostrom 2015

Chicken-Killing Algorithm

1. Hear a father say, "The chickens aren't producing."
2. Surmise.
3. Look not forward to killing chickens.
4. Enter the chicken house.
5. Take a hen out of the chicken house.
6. Repeat 5.
7. Watch a father with a hatchet decapitate a chicken.
8. Watch headless chickens stride boldly, spurting blood from open necks.
9. Recoil mentally.
10. Dip chicken carcasses in hot water.
11. Inhale overwhelming wet-feather smell.
12. Pick feathers out of carcasses.
13. Become discouraged and bored.
11. Look at trees and sky.
12. Hear a father's curse-filled exhortations.
13. Surmise.
14. Continue picking feathers from carcasses until all carcasses are bald.
15. Think in terms of escape.
16. Look forward to escape.
17. Escape.


hans ostrom 2015

Quiet Whiteness

(Walter Scott, South Carolina, and uncounted others)


If you've ever asked yourself
what we did to deserve these
depraved politicians of ours,
you may have considered
genocide of the indigenous
people, slavery, Northern investment
in slavery, Jim Crow, Northern
acceptance of Jim Crow, lynching,
child labor, eugenics,
imperial lust, monopolies,
Chinese expulsion, Japanese
internment, anti-Semitism,
McCarthyism, the blasting of
air, land, water, and people.
We've done everything to deserve
the depraved, you might have thought
in a moment of clarity, or
in a moment of despair (same
difference?)

White supremacy remains robust,
is the truth. Remains robust
because of quiet whiteness:
the indifference, the privileged
numbness, of whites who know
better but cast out the knowledge
because it asks too much.
The smug passivity
of whites who won't educate
themselves. The endless string
of lame excuses, casuistry,
and weaselly rationales.

Quite whiteness likes these
politicians. Otherwise,
they would be intolerable
in 2015. So much would be
intolerable, including
quiet whiteness itself.

If you've ever asked yourself
when the white choruses will
stand up and sing, stand up and
shout, get up and make damn sure
the depravity's demolished,
maybe in a moment of clear
despair the word
(printed in white against
a black background) "NEVER,"
came to mind.


hans ostrom 2015

The Old Cloud Con

A "magician" came to town.
He explained what information was--
different, he said, from our tools,
animals, and plants. He asked

where we kept our information.
The usual places, we said:
Boxes, pockets, minds.
Oh, he said, give it to me,

and for a fee, I'll keep it
in a cloud for you!
In a cloud? we asked.
Yes, in a cloud, he said,

but for a fee! We then
kept the "magician" under
guard for a while after
that exchange because

he was so obviously a
scoundrel. Soon we let
him go, unharmed.
We gave him information
A "magician" came to town.
He explained what information was--
different, he said, from our tools,
animals, and plants. He asked

where we kept our information.
The usual places, we said:
Boxes, pockets, minds.
Oh, he said, give it to me,

and for a fee, I'll keep it
in a cloud for you!
In a cloud? we asked.
Yes, in a cloud, he said,

but for a fee! We then
kept the "magician" under 
guard for a while after
that exchange because

he was so obviously a
scoundrel. Soon we let
him go, unharmed.
We gave him information
about where to travel
from here and
options for
a new career, 

in a cloud. 


hans ostrom 2015

Kettle of Ma & Pa

Mother, gather. Father,
proffer. Mother, other.
Father, farther. Mother,
smother. Father, wrather.


Mother, feather. Father,
weather. Mother, mystery.
Father, factory. Mother,
whisper woe, Mother

know oh no. Father,
falter slow, Father
go gone. Ma, Pa,
dead, dust, as they

must, as we too must
just so very soon. And
yes, yes, the moon here
from the first, round & round.


hans ostrom 2015

The Trinity in Your Hands

Believers, bow your heads.
Worship your phone. It is all things.
Its icons bind you
to the holy trinity
of Telecommunications, Infotainment,
and Consumption.

Accept the liturgy of apps,
the dogma of fake urgency.

Believers, tap your loving phone
with humble thumbs and fingers.
Stream and text. Forward and purchase.
Your phone will go with you
where you go, amen.


hans ostrom 2015

Pavlovian Symphony

In the Pavlovian Symphony in E minor,
cello, piano, tuba, clarinet, and howls
from the conductor evoke many dogs
barking.

Then the conductor takes the baton
in his teeth and runs with it
among audience members,
who pet him. Before

the third movement begins,
he is leashed by the concert-
master and led back
to his marked spot.

Implicitly, the Pavlovian
Symphony urges listeners
to respond to their conditioning,
scratch themselves, chafe
against their finery,
and slobber tastefully.

Bravo, brava, bravissimo,
pavlovissimo!

hans ostrom 2015

Looking for Stephen Crane

"I want to know where
Stephen Crane is!" shouted
a man in the desert, which
was not obliged to reply.

"Get back in the car!" cried
a woman from a black,
courageous Buick
on a highway a few
paces away from the man.



hans ostrom 2015

"Thought Infrastructure"

They talk about the Thought Police.
But you need a Thought Fire Department,
too. Spray water on the rage. Use
a special foam for hateful thoughts.

Yeah, you need a Thought Court, too,
so one thought can sue another;
and, you know, some thoughts need
to spend some time locked up.

A Thought Sewage System to get rid
of bullshit thoughts. Thought Parks
and Recreation. And so on. You really
need to invest in your Thought Infrastructure.


hans ostrom 2015

Fyodor

Fyodor, I think we would have gotten
very drunk together, and that
wouldn't have done either of us
any good. Still searching, but
I haven't yet found any writer
more delighted than you were
to dig into the muck
of consciousness. Others may
dig boldly or conscientiously,
some timidly, but you--
you did it in your prose with glee.

When I read your novels,
I get depressed and thrilled.
I get weary and joyful.
For about 45 seconds,
I may even become Russian.

I visited a "Dostoyevsky House"
they've created on your behalf
in St. Petersburg. It wasn't
bad at all. I bought a postcard
based on a painting of you.
I never sent it to anyone. Jesus
Christ, what you would have
thought of tourists! Lord,
help me: what you would
have thought of my
calling you "Fyodor."

Tolstoy overhead everything
that was said. You
overheard everything
that went unsaid.

Your books are as modern
as Dickens' aren't. You're
a brawler in prose.
You're also dead. What a
goddamned shame. Or is it?
It's so hard to know.


hans ostrom 2015

Blues for Esther Wagner

[Esther Wagner (1928-1989) earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr. She taught at several liberal arts colleges, including the University of Puget Sound. She was a well read, generous conversationalist, colleague, and critic. She co-authored a novel, The Gift of Rome (1961) with one of her husbands, John Wagner. T.S. Eliot was a friend of her father's family, and she became friends with Erle Stanley Gardner, among other writers.]


It's too sad, darling.
But never mind, never mind.
Darling, never mind.

Let's pour a glass of sherry
and some goldfish crackers
and have a nice long chat.

Yes, we knew Eliot--Chicago.
We children referred to him
as Uncle Tom, darling--funny,
now that I think about it.

I always tell young people,
if you're sitting on a tack,
get up. This applies
to bad marriages, of course.

I'd glad you like Jarrell,
darling.. . . One encounters
ennui at mid-career. It
happened to me. If felt I'd
seen it all, read it all.
And for me, his poetry
came along at just the right time.

I don't believe in guilt,
I mean the emotion. A waste of time.
I also don't make any judgments
about people's sex lives--
consenting adults, you know,
and anyway, sex makes everyone
a little mad at one time or another.

Well, yes, it's hard to see
one's friends fall off the perch,
one by one. It's too sad. But never mind.

Get me another glass of sherry,please,
darling, and a beer for yourself--
and of course, I don't allow
beer bottles in the living room,
so do get yourself a glass.

Yes, the death's head on the ceiling,
above my bed. It's morbid to some.
Memento mori, darling.
It focuses the mind.

When I'm dying, I should like
to watch Roman Holiday
one more time. Lovely movie.

It's getting dark. And the rain.
It's too sad. But never mind,
darling. Never mind.


hans ostrom 2015

Oh, Ezra

Oh, Ezra. --With your crackpot prejudices
and loony economics: straight out of Idaho, dude.
The hick in me recognized the hick in your poetry:
all your learning didn't cover him up.

I never warmed to the picture we got
of you. It was just a picture, an ideogram
of Ezra Pound. Your poetry never warmed
to me. It stayed cold like something
made in a lab. You were a technician
with big ideas. Thomas Edison meets
P.T. Barnum and Confucius. You sold us
your patented brand of Modernism
and almost cornered the market.

Oh, Ezra. --With your rock-drill.
The exercise was more like dynamite
stuffed in drilled holes and lit:

The Cantos are great heaps
of blown up strata. I think I'm supposed
to revere your achievement, but I've
been around hard-rock mining
and know its awful secrets.

You and Frost would make great
room-mates in the Dorm of Immortality.
No end to the pronouncements,
the goddamned sagacity.
The jokes would be few and
not that funny. Plus the grudges,
the paranoia. Between you
and Robert, oh Ezra, a word-in-
edgewise would be apocryphal.


hans ostrom 2015

Feeling Bad? Try Thinking About Sex

When I get to
feeling bad,
I think about sex,
and I get to feeling better.

I was writing complex,
diffuse poetry
because I thought
I ought to. Now I think,
Why would anybody
want to do such a thing?

In a follow-up move,
I think about sex
and pass quickly through
the awful, damp wooden
tunnel of ambition
to the other side.

I've never been
a terribly chaste
person in spirit.
I'm starting
to feel sad about that fact.

So I think I'll think
about sex and come up
with some kind
of action-plan.


hans ostrom 2015

"It's Not a Competition"

It's not a competition.
It is a blues rendition
of an anthem that was
manufactured long ago.

I am in no condition
to make a sound decision
about gestures I might
make to you before you go.

Now I
see life
is a
landscape
covered
with corners.

Now I
see death
is my
corpse surrounded
by mourners.

It's not fusion. It's not fission.
It's by my own volition
that I sit and watch
the rain turn into snow.


hans ostrom 2015

"Please Rate Your User Experience"

He was asked, by a machine, to rate
his user experience. He did not rate it.
He was asked by advertising, government,
and media (which formed a single entity)
to believe what he heard, saw, and read.
He did not comply. He did read
labels on jars. He turned away.

He liked green light in corridors
as well as green corridors well lit.

He rarely mourned the loss of a
narrative thread. He thought
there was a sense in which
plots should be broken.

Where was John? Where
is John? Is his name
really John, or is it Ian
or Juan? Where is anybody?
Is this the . . .? No,
it isn't. Thinking about it,

he thought his user experience
was inconsequential. The rating-system
did not accommodate such thinking.
Meanwhile, he was trying to break
himself from the habit of thinking,
"What is to be done?"


hans ostrom 2015

"Pick Up Your Meds"

You might have to fall in love
with the names these pharmaceutical
oligopolies give to medicine--
fantastic nouns with neon
syllables like zan, zac, zole,
perc, pram, lam, and zone. Even
the oligopolies have a
med-moniker: Big Pharma.

It's the synthetic language
of weary magic-acts from last
century plus the detached
lingo of advertising that is
always floating above our heads.

We learn the names quickly when
the stuff's prescribed to us
or when we buy it on the street.
We learn them not at all when
it's not or we don't.

We go between docs and pharmacists
as mere messengers. Our bodies
wait patiently like bovines
for the med-food to be added
to our cuds. Where

science, chemistry, capital,
ailment, and diagnosis meet,
chants from a hybrid incantation
get printed
on bottles that are never clear.


2015 hans ostrom

"Don't Need It"

I'm in a meadow,
moving my hands
as if to design
and build a cabin
there. It is fun.
Good exercise.

I stop and breathe
and leave the meadow
because I do not
have to live there
and the meadow
doesn't need a cabin.

To dogs a meadow
is a gift of data.
To dogs warm sunshine
is like a god.


hans ostrom 2015

"Plenty of Enough"

He preferred disenchanted gardens,
their real dishabile.
Accepted how, without wizardry,
one seed became a huge plant
with edible stuff hanging from it:
that was plenty of enough.

If a unicorn or a nymph
should wander in
among the productive mess,
he'd offer the nymph
a sugar-pea pod
and wait for the unicorn
to generate manure.
Fertilizer, of course.

He liked to listen to bumble-bees
and watch the writhing dance of worms.


hans ostrom 2015

"Welcome to I Don't Know: Population--More Than a Few"

After traveling for decades
and imagining he was learning,
he came to the town
of I Don't Know. The

people there were too
chastened and bemused
to be more than humble.
Like him, they had enough

energy to express one,
at most two,
viewpoints per day,
and the custom

had become to follow
expressed opinions with
"That's just a guess" or
"But who cares what I think?"

Joking, of a kind,
was popular but always
rooted in absurdity,
not in superiority.

To the mechanic, he said,
"My car broke down. Can you
fix it?" She replied, "Don't know."
He said, "That is good news."


hans ostrom 2015

"Deconstructive Dialogue"

. . . And, working its long con,
Deconstruction said, The text
always contains within it its
contradictions, its demise.

The text said, What the fuck
you talking about, Jack?

The Deacon of Decon, snorting,
retorted, I am talking about
the labyrinth of language,
in which meaning is always, always,
deferred.

Except when it isn't, said the text.


hans ostrom 2015