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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Reclining
A horizontal loneliness
An archaic white fresco
Fixed above as a quaking pendulum
The voice of a god or an echo booming
As mother, as nihilist, as thunder cloud,
Dropping slick lip precipitation
Pebble drop words falling as sky
A cup swarming with meaningful nothings
With a tiny vortex writhing within
Molecular debris swimming as pins
In a cushion butterfly bombing
The trunk with deep electricity
Toxic as chemistry with the faux-Germanic
Back-handed romances and charms of
Physics.
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
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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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Glass, a lid
Slipping, a curtain of purest water
Drop
Now fainting, waking and beating
Closer growing, armoury for an apparition
Dreaming of wings, but oh,
But oh
Trail, paper
Walls are covered and so I cover
Following observant
Back in archives of interwar
My sister stood, my shadow
Overbearing and eating me
Beating with a pulse
The cave is a womb
Rounded as a core
Living reaching further back
Eat
The mud and Eden
Slowly ice white
Breathing, you can see
The clingfilm
Growing like a bulb
A world of atoms
Crushed
Oh Daffodil,
The sun is shining under smog light
And over the echo we...
Interwar
How I have my reservations
That we are ever even out
And face to face
A solid
Cold
Brick wall
And I call you
Bonn and you call me
Dead Berlin
A gathering of
Correspondence
A scattering of
Dirty nothings.
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
A blank canvas
That is me
The unmade bed
The formaldehyde
I can have it all
A pure white frame
That is me
The dissected shark
How I suffer for my art
Only just begun
The paint pallet
Untouched, until
I paint my eyes
Below the brow
A shade for an occasion
I could follow any path
Too young to fret where it leads
Against a wall, I start to sleep
Aged and flaking
That will be me
The oak tree evaporated
Set in stone, a fountain
The zest for life drying
A frame stained by hands
That will be me
The aging process
Stained in silent protest
Nearing the end
The paint flaked
Touched, until
I paint the wrinkles
Now no one wants me
A shade of white for an apparition
I regret each path
Too old to complain, a vault for a tomb
The aging process from canvas, from womb
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2008
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
I
I am disinfected, sanitised from touch and eyes
Do not hold me. I am Bakelite and you smolder
Sat solid, the wall cold against my spine. A back-rest
To concrete electrocution.
I am distilled from Suburbia and Bohemian at Brandenberg
Rigid and saturnine. Heavy lidded Lichtenstein moons
And ruby lip and cheek.
Dumb-flustered and silent rictus
Nothing changes.
II
She edges closer with ostentatious mute steps. Like a bride
And thrice as white with crimson orb flowing underneath
Her caped wings and paper hat. Tiny dragging movements
As though her legs could snap
This marionette matchstick girl unfurls her bouquet of fingers intertwined
And ruffles from her drapes fragments of paper and a tiny plastic cup
I do not notice her. The bleach sticks heavy to the throat and
She envenoms me to the core stomach
She speaks. It is static heavy and foriegn, black-lipped vowels and dull
Continuations of barely literate sounds.
My words are daggered brutes, any poetry the less of my expectations
Is instantly meaningless, crass, common, nauseous and disgusting
Her flowing prose was illegible on those lips. Sounding almost spat
I could have silenced nine decades to my two and circled her in criticism
She would never understand with her barely-English cold translations of her
Own English mother-tongue.
III
People are fascinating
Occassionally
I find I look at them and linger, I study them and calculate their complex algebras
Undoubtedly we are products of our parents and the less of us by-products
We are strings and apples and figs
The woman with her ghost-white face and dress. Her parents were too strict
You can see it in her face, how if you even turn away her eyes circle with bags
And she feels lost, she could cry a thousand summers and undoubtedly should trade my place.
As of my own parents they probably loved me too much. Sheltered me and then
Stopped abrupt as death and cyanide fizzing
Suddenly trading my lineage into friendship and smiles and no, do silence yourselves
I am a maypole and the strings circle about me
Life and ambition they feed upon me, draining me in complex nervous disorder
I am a living question mark
I can feel it
Eating below my skin.
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
I smash the windows for ways to distract from
The cell of shattered saints. A ruptured rhapsody,
Of Wednesdays red with faith.
I crash the night with my heavy doubts.
I blaze the sky with an echo
The calling of yesterday and tomorrow collapsed.
The view is stretched in devout greens and futures unfathomed. .
I am waiting. I am patient to a fault and it flaws me, it floors me.
The weight of a heavy world, an indefatigable spectator.
A sunrise, the Northern world upon Valkyrie.
Letters of indulgence and selfless ambitions for selfish occasions.
Where tomorrow waits in blood-red devotion.
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2010
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Day one passes into ten and twelve and eight-
Teen years spent by the neon glow of
Alarm clock stifled, the heavy hand, a fist
Trying to wake the awakened
But the sleepless cut the tongue, the wires
The life support system down in a blaze
Do not try to wake me when I have not slept
Scribbled down a diary entry on the back of
A calling card, a cigarette box, a prescription
Weighted down by a cup of thick black coffee
And the stale remnants of a Bloody Mary
The tick that follows tock which drives me to despair
Sat beside in thoughtlessness as I contemplate myself
The world and everything, nothing lies forgotten
Off the record, under the carpet, when you are an insomniac
You cannot sleep on anything and nothing lies dead
It just rebirths itself as you watch the minute tick
At the rate of a slothful hour, ticking and tocking
And checking the boxes, confirming, yes I have gone insane.
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Into the solar system
Outreaching myself
Intense grief, mourning
Into cake and wedding dress
Galvanized poorly, the rust
About to topple into ochre
Coated stardust glittering
As we discover the truth
Not enough good, oh but for better
For worse, for years, for a fool
Like me and her, a mirror image
A replacement, a damnation
Creeping over stocking tops
There is not enough bleach in the world
To coat the filthy soul you smuggle
Into orbit, my anger now exceeding
The speed of light, the Titanic
To the iceberg, one way trip
A government secret, a conspiracy
Anything at all to wipe away your guilt
And stardust glittering on her face
Leaving retched little Laika to
Smother in the agony of ignorance
Huddle with me for precious warmth
How I could set a man on fire
The tongue is sharp, cutting through
The web of lies, deceit, conterfeit
Forgiveness plagiarized in pamphlets
Set across the universe, the guilt
You should be feeling, burning up in Betelgeuse
Oh for heavens and constellations spell it out
Every dog has their day, but some draw the shortest of the straws
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Do silence them
Do prick the mortal flesh
Spin a web in what they bleed
And chain them to the garden gate
Maidens of the high teas
Casting a tower of pollution
The thick smoke clinging to the inside
Of a cautious lung, a war of attrition
Taking to the top, with their chains
Like ghosts in padlocks, haunting
A society plucked back into industrial revolution
Those banshee women, screaming, the shrieking sisters
The races, a parade of clockwork
Creatures in their satellite hats
Screeching heavy volumes above the roar
All of my wealth for a flood of golden horses
Garish, those colours, puce and bilious
A degradation of a rainbow, the soap box
On which they stand, force feed those demons
Chain them up and throw away their dignity, virginity
Bombing their way through London
With their Luftwaffe in petticoats and spitfires
Shooting like stars downward, terrorism
But we must remember those shrieking sisters
For they had the strength to fight
Those shrieking sisters had the right idea
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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Nathaniel Köhp Poem
Confidence fades away
Clothes to the wind
My cracking glass, the nightscape
Contorted into vixen reds and apparition dark
Seventeen
Kitsch eyes, as kitsch as a child
Crying in a kitchen scene over spilt milk
Shrinking under giant flaming wings of a morbid sun god
A flower in the rocks craving eleemosynary of sunlit droplets
Dew sticking heavy, a glue to papier-mâché the fine parasol
Poverty of any subtle scintella, a florid propinquity or velleity
Slinking into the puissant moon dust but with all the style
Of a dead inurement Sickert slick
My sui generis malapropisms
Cruel bowdlerization of a grouping wall and night
The hard outer shell of flesh
The ladybug, the thumb
The ladybird and stupid shibboleth.
_
Daffy, I said I'd write something called Bugsy :D
Copyright © Nathaniel Köhp | Year Posted 2009
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