Cassandra Voices

Author: Kevin Higgins

  • Poem: ‘Congratulations’ by Kevin Higgins

    Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.

    One key qualification for a poet becoming a pseudo-poetic decoration for the Regime – a quality much on display this week – is to know when not to say that a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way, is exactly as terrible as it is because he/she hopes to be published in the future (or again) in the same venue, suspecting, probably correctly, he/she would be less likely to achieve such publication if he/she doesn’t keep his or her beak strategically shut on such occasions.

    Indeed, indiscreet beak-opening might make an invitation to participate in an upscale literary cabaret or two less likely. This is what it has come down to.

    As I sit/lie on what might turn out to be my death bed – I am doing everything I can to survive and haven’t at all given up hope but really have no idea if I’ll be here this time next year – I find myself laughing at the Irish poetry world.

    The phenomenon is not unique to contemporary Ireland, though its Irish branch has particular characteristics, usually involving a special relationship with NATO and the sacred 12.5% corporate tax rate. But such tendencies are spreading like an international fungus. Every part of the English-speaking world has a local variant of concern.

     

    Congratulations
    after Zbigniew Herbert

    A few will be obliterated
    but in an nice way.
    We don’t like the word censorship,
    abolished it yonks ago.
    Certain word combinations must be
    nudged to the bottom of the basket
    until after we’ve all safely
    choked to death in our dressing gowns.
    Though, worryingly,
    they always find their way back out again.

    Others, we can leave optional.
    You know the drift:
    the suffering of academics, their divorces
    after the regrettable entanglement with the student;
    how it felt to phone the crematorium
    to book a spot for their ninety five year old father.

    But for having so successfully helped it
    deny its own existence
    the regime has made you
    compulsory.

    Your personage will be strapped
    into an airplane seat, exported
    to Asia and beyond,
    like a Bangladeshi made t-shirt in reverse.

    Your metaphors and similes will be at the service
    of the International Happiness Corporation –
    Diversity Department –
    currently headquartering here for tax purposes.
    You will walk through all the right doors
    secretly wearing their logo.

    Life will be mostly festivals
    of enforced grinning,
    during which you’ll pass the hours
    counting each others’ teeth.

  • When I’m Allowed Leave The Cancer Ward

    When I’m Allowed Leave The Cancer Ward
    with thanks to Claire Higgins for four of these lines

    When I get out of here
    I plan to open a factory
    that manufactures miniature guillotines
    which will be given away gratis
    to bullied schoolchildren
    to keep hidden in their bedrooms
    until I give the signal.

    When I get out of here
    I plan to finally take that evening class
    in Industrial Espionage for Beginners
    where I’ll learn to break into laboratories
    to steal the antidotes
    to Elon Musk and
    Ursula von der Leyen.

    When I get out of here
    things will be given their proper names;
    the centre of every town re-titled
    Oppression Square, during a ceremony
    in which the Mayor (or someone prepared
    to dress up as the Mayor)
    tells the truth about who died,
    how, and why.

    Worst of all,
    I’ll start a new Irish Literary Awards
    to be held annually at an imaginary hotel.
    Categories will include: least authentic
    poetry collection, most intellectually empty
    novel, most cowardly book review,
    publisher who made the biggest
    eeijt of themselves this year,
    most over obvious networker,
    most irrelevant but self-important
    anthology,  most incestuous
    “My Books of The Year” list
    in which the author chooses
    pals who’ve all given him
    fab reviews too.

    And you’ll sit there constricting
    the exact same muscle
    Auntie Mary did when she was in fear
    someone was about to take
    the Archbishop’s name in vain.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual
    after Nazim Hikmet

    You will go far young person
    if as soon as you enter this building
    you follow standard operating procedures
    and stop thinking altogether.

    We will do the thinking for you.
    For the more intellectually curious of you
    this will be as difficult initially
    as nailing yourself to a chair.
    But the appropriate doses
    of the right sort of alcohol will ease
    you into it.

    Before long, you’ll find yourself
    not thinking a thing.
    In your lunch break, you’ll write poems
    that are secretly okay with NATO
    and won’t know where they came from.
    But we’ll know,
    and that’s all that matters.

    We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
    from which you can choose your opinions,
    which we’d like you to massage
    so they seem different at first
    but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
    For there is no opinion worth having
    that someone in here hasn’t already had.

    You will be in favour of all the right wars
    without having to sweat the niceties
    and put the appropriate flag
    on your Twitter handle
    without us ever having to mention it.

    You have no idea yet
    the thoughts we have in store for you.

    Feature Image: UCD Quinn School of Business.

  • The Candidates Explain

    The Candidate Explains
    after Charlotte Nichols MP

    I didn’t know the meaning
    of “incursion” or “dealt with”
    the negative connotation until this morning.
    Didn’t realise the possible definitions
    of “parasite”, “rubbish dump”, “bad human material”.
    Didn’t know until this morning the connotations
    of “dismantle”, “pikey”, “assimilate”.
    The negative meanings of “scum”,
    “child thief”, “branding iron”.
    Didn’t know “dirty”, “asocial”, “expel”.
    The connotations of “a people involved
    in the manufacture of human freaks.”
    Didn’t know the meaning until now
    of “Rahoonery”, “pollutant”, “Pharajimos”.
    The problematic side of those over the age of five
    being taken away and civilised.
    Didn’t know the meaning of “The Devouring”,
    “The Cutting Up”, or “behind concrete walls”.
    The negative connotation of “whoever kills one,
    shall be guilty of nothing.”
    Didn’t know the meaning of “deport”
    until I saw it done this morning,
    clean as a Police Superintendent’s signature
    or a Councillor’s campaign for re-election.

    Feature Image: Constantino Idini

     

     

     

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    Memorial to Myself

    I have been away toasting tables lined
    with the pricier variety of imbecile;
    humouring old buzzards in Aran sweaters
    and cranky caps
    until their sweaters collapsed
    threadbare off their bastard backs.
    I have cut ribbons for guys
    floating balloons across the town square
    and calling it dance.
    I have eaten with people of enormous importance
    and forgotten most of their names.

    I did not shrivel like the rest of them.
    Though they thought they had me
    I was not bought and sold at the market stall
    where you can get (third hand)
    Fianna Fail senators cheaper
    than Mayo flags two weeks after
    an All Ireland defeat.

    I am again what I was before
    and secretly always was
    though I sometimes had to hide it.
    I did not kill the dream I dreamt with those others
    not all of whom made it this far.
    Tonight I consult their ghosts.

    Feature Image: Higgins and Ivana Bacik campaigning during the 2011 presidential race.

  • Ballad of Lucy Kryton

    Ballad of Lucy Kryton

    “There will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime”, Margaret Thatcher

    The morning sun falls whitely on
    the lashes of Lucy Kryton.
    Her blondeness fully insured
    against theft, fire
    and termites. Her forehead
    the hard reality
    that care of both
    the elderly and the daft
    are best handled
    by entrepreneurs.

    Her navy dress
    an incentive scheme for foreign investors.
    Her compassion, a teenager taught failure
    to honour thy father and mother leads
    to a wet sleeping bag in a doorway
    the government won’t be
    rescuing you from. She knows
    hard cases make bad exceptions,
    of which she’ll be making none;
    that for many people in this country
    slavery and the right
    of Nigerian taxi drivers
    to marry each other
    are issues of conscience
    which transcend politics.

    Her fiscal policy is dampness moving
    down other people’s walls.
    The finest mind
    to come out of that part of Claremorris
    in a long time. Her Ireland of the future
    is an auld fella with a wig
    at Mass on a Monday
    somewhere in Mayo,

    as the evening sun bounces savagely
    off the achievements of Lucy Kryton,
    the day the laughter suddenly stops
    and she’s all that there is.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins ‘Safe to Say’

    Safe To Say

    How ghastly the day before yesterday was
    now everyone associated with it is dead.
    In the future I’ll be against
    what’s going on now.
    I’ll be on the television,
    horrified. But not yet.

    As a civilised person,
    I’m absolutely in favour of the nice policeman now,
    one hundred percent against the tear gas and dogs
    you forced him to use on you back then.

    Sometime the century after next.
    I’ll be against giving the children of Bethlehem
    something from Lockheed Martin
    to occupy themselves with for Christmas.
    Like I was against rhino-whipping the blacks
    into line in Port Elizabeth, Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg
    after it stopped happening.
    But, for now, see no alternative.

    Feature image: police dog during a demonstration in England.

  • Death by Drowning

    The Death By Drowning Of Twenty Seven Migrants
    In The English Channel on Wednesday

    It could have been twenty seven Cliff Richard fans
    who quite like that Boris Johnson really;
    twenty seven Noel Edmonds lookalikes
    whose wives stimulate themselves with The Daily Express;
    twenty seven former double glazing salesmen from Folkestone, Kent
    who blame everything on the French;
    twenty seven members of the Murdoch family
    (including Jerry Hall);
    twenty seven known business associates of the Duke of York;
    twenty seven potential Archbishops of Canterbury;
    twenty seven people with Allegra Stratton accents;
    twenty seven arthritic comedians who spent
    four years making Diane Abbot quips;
    twenty seven logical positivists
    who get their political philosophy from the tweets
    of Right Said Fred, Joanna Lumley, & David Baddiel;
    twenty seven OBEs, MBEs, and Commanders of The British Empire.

    Tragically, it wasn’t.

    Featured Image is of fencing in Calais (VOA/Nicolas Pinault).

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    This Is Not a Well Made Poem

    The well made poem puts on its dicky bow,
    walks to the top of the hill,
    and has what it calls an epiphany.

    The well made poem sees every side of the argument,
    except those proscribed by the BBC.

    The well made poem has between
    twelve and twenty five lines,
    all roughly the same length.

    The well made poem worries
    about Afghanistan (and before that
    Vietnam) only when the situation there
    might lead to the whole idea
    of the well made poem
    being vaporised
    by a device left at the side of the road.

    The well made poem plans to bury
    GK Chesterton, William Wordsworth, Sir John Betjeman
    and, eventually, Sir Andrew Motion
    under its sparkling new patio.

    The well made poem never mentions
    the puppy processing factory
    it knows you own, or your preference
    for televised inter gender wrestling.

    The well made poem believes
    nuclear weapons are necessary
    to keep poems like it safe
    from all the rough language
    gathered ungovernable at the border
    forever threatening to invade it.


    Feature Image: “Baker Shot”, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    We Lie
    after Holly McNish

    My one remaining friend,
    now I’ve plugged out my Mum,
    is in my pretend life
    because he’s willing to not notice
    what I metaphorically call
    things. Like the fact that I carry about with me,
    smiling up out of my man-bag,
    a two day dead pike
    that looks like it died
    of a personality disorder;
    had its oily head beaten in by someone
    who could take no more
    of it blathering on
    in a fake south London accent
    about how it was finking of voting
    Lib Dem, and that it heard
    the lyrics on Adele’s post-divorce album
    are surprisingly upbeat.

    My friend is still my friend
    ‘cos unlike all the ex-people
    I had to drop concrete blocks on
    he’s able to let on
    my succession of pet dead pikes
    don’t smell because his nose
    has grown so used to
    dead pike at this stage
    he’d miss it if it wasn’t
    there to block out
    the even smellier
    dead things that live
    at the bottom of my man-bag,
    the leather existence of which
    you must be prepared to deny
    even when questioned by psychiatrists,
    if you want to be my friend.