Car Crash
A dark room with a small wooden desk, no lamp
A thick pad of paper and a typewriter, never used
Like a museum exhibit, though they aren’t allowed to gather dust
And dead flies and moths, a pack of playing cards
I never learnt to play, but still they’ve turned yellow with age
The shelves full of books, thumbed and read a million times
The pages fall out sometimes onto the slanted shelf, broken
The cascade of over-used books falling into each other
A literary car crash
The carpet burnt by years of clumsiness, dark and worn
The ceiling stained by years of nicotine, the cigarette smoker
Looking on at a world frozen, the books are the only living things
Read a million times and thumbed to death, the dirty pages blending into each other
The faces and the timeless, frozen authors and poets, trapped here forever
In the corner, a lonely television set, never used and not even plugged in
The lonesome keyboard, beaten a million times, my voice recorded
The German tongue, screamed above piano murder, the manslaughter of my violin
A cultural car crash
The curtains, white to ivory to ashen, unopened in an age
Time to let the world come in through the never-before-seen window
I sit upon the bed and watch the silhouettes gather, their vagabond army
Creeping over everything with their tired and dirty little hands
The books I’ve read to death, the literary suicide, gathering in a spot of light
Like flocking birds fleeing for the winter, their matted feathers and scabbed legs
They can’t fly anywhere, trapped here, my favourite victims, dead within the covers,
Like broken pigeons trapped within damning cages. I close the door and leave
The untouched car crash
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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