Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Poetry – Kevin Higgins

    Our Posh Liberal Friends
    for Susan

    Whenever I show them the Future,
    they refuse it;
    say: this future has bad hair,
    waves its arms around too much,
    is too Jewish,
    or not Jewish enough,
    too not-a-woman,
    or the wrong sort of woman.

    This Future has a face that one day
    might raise the corporate tax rate
    by zero point five percent,
    and is a little too insistent
    that poor people be allowed live,
    give or take, as long as the rest of us.
    That sort of thing scares the people we dine with
    nights we’re not dining with you.

    I ask the barman for more finger food,
    picture the ocean raging into the restaurant,
    and them still sat there muttering at the chicken goujons:
    the people we talk to won’t vote for
    such extreme solutions. No one wants to live in Cuba,
    one of them says, as she’s washed out the door.

    I pray, when all the futures
    they’ve turned their noses up at
    are safely in the mud
    and the men in boots and leather come
    to escort us all to the Processing Centre
    in the back of a truck
    that I be shot, cleanly through the skull, at the front gate,
    so I don’t suffer their groans
    about the quality of the gruel,
    and how that last beating one of them got
    was clearly in breach of the Human Rights Act
    and worthy of a curtly worded,
    but still civil, letter to The Observer.

    Feature Image: ‘The Temple of the Liberal Arts’, by Jacques Sablet (1749-1803).

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    Presidential

    When you finish reading this poem,
    you’ll remember only
    the Black Forest Gateaux
    I bought you once.

    I had no option but to vote for
    that tax on women’s shoes
    but greatly admired the fight you put up against it;
    have kept all the press cuttings,
    especially those that took care not to mention me.

    As you, me, and the mirror know
    I’ve always been a great
    pro-choice advocate;
    that’s why I spent thirty years
    never mentioning the issue.

    When I stop talking
    all you’ll remember is
    the Black Forest Gateaux
    I bought you once.

    When I signed this bill to keep
    what we did to the children secret,
    you, me, and my bodyguards know
    how vehemently I’m against it.

    Trick is: what to remember
    and what not,
    because of a Black Forest Gateaux
    I ordered you once.

    The history books are littered with
    shit I voted for but was against
    in the restaurant afterwards,
    as I eyed the Black Forest Gateaux
    and thought of you.

    And as I explain at length in my book
    ‘The Art of Statecraft’,
    when the Fourth World War descends
    and the division bell rings,
    I’ll have no alternative but to leap up –
    with nothing in my heart but peace –
    and, at best, abstain.

    As you’re vapourised
    you’ll remember nothing
    but the Black Forest Gateaux
    I fed you once.

  • Poetry – Kevin Higgins

    Tribute Acts

    Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
    There is always a committee of three.
    The gravity in the room is such
    they struggle to manoeuvre
    the enormity of their serious
    faces in the door.

    Except in the TV version,
    there is hardly ever a microphone.
    Though they will usually give you
    a glass of water and, if you ask,
    tea in a slightly chipped cup.

    The better quality of witch hunt
    will provide you with a plate
    of sandwiches which, these days,
    would likely include
    coeliac and vegan options.

    One member of the panel interviewing you
    is always a man with a shaky voice
    who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing.
    His wife thinks he’s at the garden centre.

    Another is a woman trying
    on a posh accent for size
    who looks like she’s dreaming
    of killing you
    in some way that would give her
    special pleasure.

    It is written,
    somewhere deeper than law,
    that no such committee
    shall ever be constituted
    unless it contains
    at least one ex-hippy.

    There is always the moment
    when a pile of typed pages emerge
    from an already opened envelope,
    and one of them asks you:
    how, then, do you explain this?

    And the three of them sit there,
    pretending it’s a real question.

    And you realise this committee is history
    paying you the huge compliment
    of making you (and people like you)
    the only item on the agenda;

    that in asking you about what you said,
    did, or typed on the mentioned dates,
    they reveal themselves
    like the black tree at the bottom of the garden
    that only shows its true self in winter.

  • Poetry – Luke Stromberg

    The First Obscenity

    Before we turned our eyes from nudity,
    Or banished certain words, death was the first
    Obscenity—the one from which the rest,
    In time, would find their way. The first
    To make a joke of life. The first
    To show us what may come of children’s games:
    A skull left caked in mud, the slicing rain.
    What is a rude word if not a reminder
    Of the grave in which one’s coffin will be lowered?
    An old man’s kiss upon a young girl’s navel
    Would not be possible if not for death.

    Dressed up in our Sunday best, our deaths
    Seem almost hypothetical. They’re not.
    Plastic surgeons, age-defying creams,
    Air-brushed waistlines on the cover of Cosmo—
    These prove our distaste. Death’s in the ghetto.
    But only look out past your green kept lawn,
    And there it is, unfazed, a grinning fact.

  • Poetry – Kevin Higgins

    The Joke
    after Walter Benjamin

    A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
    donated by a casino owner who knows people
    with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
    because it was the only available metaphor for hair
    was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
    against an old coat with holes in it.

    The barrel of waste was trailing
    histrionically among professors emeritus
    whose brains were in the process of being dismantled
    by lethargy and time, and among those
    who, as and when the stock market permits,
    take a year off to celebrate their dividends
    by doing good works among brown people in far countries
    not lucky enough to have stock markets or dehumidifiers.
    Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste
    made the raging boil on the nation’s privates
    way too obvious, and hoped by throwing
    the old coat over it they could again
    forget it was there.

    The barrel of waste said the old coat couldn’t deliver
    on the promises he wasn’t making,
    and maintained good leads among morticians,
    pimps, and police informants
    and had the total bastard vote
    ninety nine percent sewn up –
    in essence everyone except the late John DeLorean
    and perhaps Alan Dershowitz.

    There was a minority faction who wanted the boil
    on the nation’s privates given free antibiotics, lanced
    with a big needle imported from Sweden
    and then cauterised. But most people found
    though they were in favour, in their hearts,
    of lancing the boil,
    in practice they were for
    allowing the boil to grow redder, angrier, more toxic
    under the old coat with holes in it.

    So the minority extremist faction
    who wanted the thing treated
    were sentenced to the echo chamber
    to argue about whether the old coat
    with holes in it really
    was the lesser evil.

    The midwife of history,
    grown bored with the year twenty twenty,
    had decided to play one of her jokes.

  • Poetry: Ernest Hilbert

    Spolia Opima

    Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,
    Shed their imperial haute couture—
    Already in sweatpants, they hail their cabs

    Behind the Grand Palais before
    Applause dies down inside around
    The vacant runway. Afternoon sunlight’s

    Lambent overhead on friezes of Lutetian Limestone.
    Violinists grimace at their scores—
    Haydn, Hollywood, the B’s and Broadway hits,

    Rehearsal house-lights hard above,
    Rosin fine as cocaine settling on the boards.
    They’re not arrogant. They’re bored.

    They’re paid to make the beauty go.
    Why else? We all make beauty pay.
    Gourmands’ are all aglow as it arrives— 

    Voila, another flambé. Cherries, drenched
    In century-old brandy, burn like coals.
    The waiter itches to check his phone. He grins.

    I’m given to hyperbole, I know,
    But something’s got to me. It’s all around.
    You have to learn to make it pay you back.

    The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
    Into the restaurant. The manager’s
    Frantic, alone today. The line’s

    Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
    Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
    Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.

    I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
    It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
    In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.

    The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
    The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
    Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?

    Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
    Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
    Here, drip some in my drink. See this?

    Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.

     

    Crypt

    The cities burn above me as I sleep.
    I’m walled by trophies looted long ago
    Along the routes of conquest, centuries

    Of funereal remains, gold that’s dimmed
    By dust and bound by web, as valueless
    As the dirt that slowly takes it back again.

    I wake and wonder where I am. I move
    My arm and bottles clink. I raise my head
    Enough to see I must have drunk them all.

    I’m underground. I know because the light
    That works like stars in chinks is far
    Above me. Even in this dusk I find

    There’s something left inside a bottle here.
    Sitting up, I take a swallow and get it down
    Before I choke, and spit out warm urine.

    I half-remember falling off the edge
    Of the world. Then nothing else. I barely breathe,
    The air’s so thick and sapped of oxygen,

    A gas of churned-up worms and sporous loam.
    I want to learn the way back up. I try
    To name the things I see—sextants, I-Phones.

    An avian chorus summons me. What years
    Have gone? I fall toward sleep again. The soil becomes
    A lake that’s darker than the night. My dreams

    Are long as centuries, of wars and new words,
    All telling me “you are gone,” but I’m still here,
    Curled up, and cold, in my crown of amethyst.

     

    Apollinaris, Medicus Titi Imperatoris hic Cacavit Bene

    I check my e-mail. There’s nothing there for me.
    I check the wall. Not much, some recipes
    I’ll never cook, some boasts, some oaths, some jokes,
    Advice, little different from graffiti

    Scrawled on Roman stone two thousand years ago,
    Small bursts of unofficial human hopes,
    And on we go, unchanged, forever griping
    Era to era—it’s almost comforting—

    Election slogans packed in ash at Pompei,
    Billboards on the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek,
    Winged lions tagged on the Great Enclosure,
    Signs of the Khufu Gang left in Giza,

    So many words, like air exhaled to air,
    Like tiny helium hearts escaping
    In a delirium of approval up a wall,
    Or displeased emperor’s thumb aimed down.

     

    Visit Ernest Hilbert

  • Poetry: Mischa Willett

    Medea’s Hymn
    from Ovid

    O guardian of the dark, keeper of creeping
    shadows, o night I’m standing in…
    And you, timid stars, who wait for her arrival
    to shine…

    And you, Hecate, Hecate, Hecate,

    who knows and keeps the herbal secrets,
    the potion’s potency, the rites of sorcery…
    And you, Earth, who grows the elements,
    you world of winds and waters, you gods
    of woods and watchers of the dead, I need
    you all.

    It is through your power that I have reversed
    the river’s current as the mute banks gaped.
    Haven’t we stilled the trashing seas,
    convened councils of clouds, bagged and shook
    out the very winds? With words I’ve split
    a writhing serpent, drawn down boulders,
    plucked an oak as easily as a flower. I can
    shake the very mountains and open
    the mouth of the ground in a groan. The shades
    I can make walk from their tombs. Even you,
    noon, I can drop in this stream like a white pebble.
    The sun, my grandfather’s carriage,
    I can sing pale. I can staunch the wound
    even of pink dawn.

    But it is you, who, helping me,
    tarnished the bronze of the bulls and bent
    their necks to plow. And you who tangled
    the serpent’s scions and saved my Jason
    in the ring. And it is you who, singing
    through him, put that watchful and wise
    beast to his first sleep, and so brought
    the golden fleece—power of powers—
    to Greece.

     

    In a Dark Wood

    Why am I so jealous of the duck
    That has been swallowed by the wolf?
    Because he has slippers
    and a peg on which to hang his coat
    and a rug on which to place the slippers?

    In the same way, I wish I was the bunny,
    always, but especially in Spring,
    because I think of his hook,
    and the tree he’s in
    and the snow outside
    and all the hawks he doesn’t
    hear hunting, until he does.

     

    The Holding Pattern
    “Just then a plane jumped up and ripped the sky to shreds”
    -K. Vonnegut

    The F-12 fighter jet jumps
    through a hole in the wall
    at the café, at the museum, at the lunch
    I am enjoying, at the moment
    I am thinking of saying the bit about
    my animal’s charging hard
    and my man’s restraining grip—
    the whip he uses to keep
    the beast at bay—
    how his forearms tire, how
    his fingers ply at the leash.

    The line was its own pastiche
    of images—the broken clause, dramatic
    pauses meant to make the thing sound
    ex temporae—like I hadn’t come
    up with it the day before, like I
    hadn’t been dying to say it for its sharp
    “ar” sound from “hard” and how that slammed
    into “charged” and made the thing
    sound sexed and desperate, as indeed,
    I meant it.

    This before the razor-winged marten
    whose dive-bomb corkscrew threw an element
    of reverie into an afternoon I’d mapped
    out as heartful, profound, became
    in the turn, her bright laughing’s
    little explosions on the ground.

    Feature Image: J. M. W. Turner’s Vision of Medea (1828).

  • Homage to Henry Kissinger

    When Henry Kissinger again fails to die

    Another tree in the Central Highlands loses all its leaves
    A girl sits on a visiting diplomat’s lap
    Someone organises a Nelson Rockefeller look-alike party
    which Henry Kissinger attends
    An election result somewhere is declared null and void for its own good
    An interrogating officer switches on the electricity
    A government spokesman interrupts his denial to wish Dr Kissinger well
    Another tin of Heinz baked beans is sold in China
    and the CEO personally thanks Henry Kissinger
    A ginger cat named Agent Orange leaps down off the garden wall
    A baby slides from the womb with a surprise third arm

    When Henry Kissinger again fails to die:
    A ginger cat named Agent Orange leaps back onto its garden wall
    A government we didn’t like is overthrown in a military coup,
    welcomed by the European Union
    A hut is set on fire for the greater good,
    the European Union calls for an inquiry
    Someone dies of politically necessary starvation
    but that someone is never Henry Kissinger
    A bomb is dropped on someone whose name you’ll never have to pronounce
    because it’s not Henry Kissinger

    For its birthday, a baby gets Spina bifida
    A Bengali family have all their arms sawn off.
    Fifty bodies topple into the sea off Indonesia
    but none of them are Henry Kissinger
    Each time Henry Kissinger again fails to die

  • Poetry – Kevin Higgins

    After Recent Unfortunate Results

    Next election onwards,
    there’ll be a second vote for those
    who turn up with, under their arm,
    a print copy of one of the larger newspapers
    and answer a few unobtrusive questions
    to prove they’ve consumed it correctly.

    A third for those who also present receipts
    that show they’ve dined sufficiently
    in restaurants with at least four stars,
    and a note from the maitre d
    that they know their way around the cutlery.

    A fourth for the lucky few in possession – to boot –
    of a ticket for one of those pampering spas
    at which one temporarily discards
    worldly things to have one’s darker parts
    irrigated of all subversive thoughts.

    So when all’s said and counted,
    people who shouldn’t matter
    can go back to not mattering.

  • Poetry – Oliver Tickell

    Five Poems

    trampled, rain-sodden the leaves
    brown, green, yellow and
    a crimson gilded

    wings flapping to the wind
    above the trees
    the joy of the storm pigeon

    juicy and sharp
    the first few blackberries
    summer’s sweetness yet to come

    bounteous blackberries along the brook
    warm and sweet they meet my lips

    purple stained, thorn pierced
    still my hands reach out for more
    juice-swollen berries

     

    Oliver Tickell is a writer, journalist, poet, and former editor of The Ecologist, living near the river Thames in Oxford