Cassandra Voices

Tag: Kevin Higgins poet

  • 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

     

     

     

  • 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.

  • 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

    The Most Risk-Taking Poet In Ireland

    My split infinitives clearly the work of a man
    who dries his clothes recklessly,
    sometimes not emptying the lint tray
    two cycles in a row.

    At the height of my experiments with formal verse
    I once drove a Ford Focus
    at a tantalising twenty nine kilometres per hour
    when the legal limit was thirty.

    During my decadent prose-poem phase
    I tiptoed past a locked apartment door,
    behind which, I’m pretty sure,
    there was an orgy going on.

    Under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
    I once took one more Paracetamol
    than I should have.

    In a rare outbreak of concrete poetry,
    I yesterday regrouted the shower tiles myself.

    Trying to mimic Rimbaud vanishing in Abyssinia,
    back when I was young and even more foolish
    than this, I once accidentally went
    to Dorset.

    My contribution to metaphor
    in the twenty first century
    is at least as important
    as the cat yawning.

    Risk, for me, is going
    to a different garden centre
    at least once every five years.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    ‘Liberals’ & ‘Death’

    Two words that strut confident of
    their own historical inevitability.
    Everyone in time meets them,
    though hopefully not both
    ringing your door bell
    the same day,
    unless your name is
    Nagasaki or Vietnam;

    or you’re the first village
    no-one’s ever heard of
    successfully abolished
    from thirty thousand feet
    by a transgender person
    pressing a button;

    or you’re the first Somali in history
    proudly turned into a pile of burning mince
    by a drone designed by a woman of colour;

    or you’re the wrong type of Australian
    whose computer told us the names
    of the obliterated
    and so can only leave prison
    in a fair-trade white cardboard box;

    or you’re me, delighted
    to expire unvaccinated rather
    than spark a diplomatic kerfuffle
    by sticking in my bicep
    something as sinister sounding as Sputnik
    without written permission from Brussels

    who’ll surely deliver
    a keynote speaker to my grave
    to thank my corpse for its contribution,
    and find a plausible way of saying:
    I’m down here, getting acquainted with the snails
    so they can be up there, polishing their idea of themselves.

    Feature Image: Original #banksy ‘Civilian Drone Strike’ in East London ahead of London arms fair opening.

     

  • My Approach to Literary Networking

    My Approach to Literary Networking
    after Francois Villon 

    Most days I’d rather be bundled
    into the courthouse between
    two hairy policemen,
    with a highly debatable anorak
    dragged over my face, and
    blamed for killing Kirov –
    the crowd lobbing big thick
    spits and battering the van
    as I’m carted off –

    or be stopped at the Canadian border
    travelling on a makey up Polish passport,
    the remnants of a Dutch industrialist
    and what I think was his second wife settled
    unhappily in my glove compartment;

    or attend my mother-in-law’s funeral
    having been fitted with a wooden nose
    because (everybody knows)
    the other one fell off due to
    third stage syphilis;

    than ghost about the joint provoking
    nods from gabardine coats
    of great import and longevity,
    grunts of approval
    from fully clothed minor male poets.

    Feature Image: Joseph Stalin and Sergei Zhadanov at the funeral of Sergei Kirov in December, 1934 (unknown author).

  • Kevin Higgins: The Happy Song of Us

    The Happy Song of Us 

    Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
    Illegal for them to lick it.
    Fine to bake granny
    a gleaming fruit cake,
    as long as you only email her
    a high resolution photo of it.
    Okay to give your son or daughter
    a bright new football.
    Illegal for them to kick it.
    Permissible to purchase for yourself
    a new set of golf sticks or a tennis racket.
    Illegal to hit anything with them
    outside the confines of your own
    downstairs bathroom.

    You can’t have a friend around for a meal
    unless both of you have been
    fitted with gum shields.
    And should you go for a socially distanced walk
    with a lover
    butt-plugs are now mandatory.

    Every living room is its own flat-pack factory
    singing the happy song of us,
    hammering together our coffins.

     

     

  • 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

    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 – 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.