Best Koop Poems
The poet begins the reading
'I'm sentimental if you know what I mean.'
'Oh, that's good!'
I thought about this cuckoo hissing
At the Botanical Gardens
He'd also mediated on the stratosphere
That sponge up above
Accordingly, so did I too
Footslogging around the museum
I took a sufti at my phone by the toilets
A headline caught my attention
Liverpool to sack Jürgen Koop
Kooped up in this nightmare exhibition
We came across a giant redwood
The trunk constructed out of metal
To enlighten the children
To prepare them for the future
My son explains his steam engine
A whole troupe of burly men
Black soot and freezing cold snow
Three layers of woollen jumpers
Sod the blast pipe carbon dioxide
Your Austrian Giesl burp
There are bigger concerns
Than soil degradation
Yes, the fireman is wearing clothes
The shoveller is wearing clothes
But the driver is naked
I should’ve had a hedonistic summer, a roundup of long, sun-kissed days and even longer, undulant, kissing nights.
There are no riviera pics this year - set against the blow-out backdrop of Saint Tropez or Heraclee - with their sunlit-deliriums, cracked plaster beach bars, aromatic trailing Jasmine, lavender, umbrella pines and baking Socca.
No nights of dense, optimistic nihilism on neon-painted open-air dancefloors, or gritty, underground raves, in dark, brick-clad, light-strobed basements.
And no timeless, sun-drenched, beachside early mornings, with their moments of stillness, beauty and reprieve.
Summer feels can’t be vicarious - you have to get out there and get dirty, hmm, sandy anyway. Are there ethical implications to basking under a climate-crisis sun? Maybe, but if so, do we care?
Let’s wax poetic..
Summertime often sees us jetting off to different places.
If I could travel anywhere
let it be outer-space
not floating in darkness,
for years and years
let’s find a better way.
I’ve traveled to the moon
- on a little friction -
that isn’t even science fiction.
I’ve traveled simply by turning pages.
It didn’t take fuel and it didn’t take ages.
That was travel at the speed of thought,
but better yet, let’s travel at the speed of sight
- that’s faster than light.
.
.
Songs for this:
Relationships by HAIM
Summer Sun by Koop
Summer Girl (Bonus Track) by HAIM