Author Archives: Kevin Higgins

Last night’s ‘Reeling in the Years’ on RTÉ One covered 2010, the year of the big freeze

First in a new 10-part weekly series.

Reeling In The Rhyme.

2010.

Austerity Mantra

Everything must be on the table.
Your ninety seven year old granny
is no longer cost effective, would
benefit greatly from being brought face to face
with a compassionate baseball bat.
The figures speak for themselves and will
be worse by morning. The paraplegic
in his insanely expensive wheelchair
will have to crawl as God intended.
Here are the figures that won’t stop
speaking for themselves, this is the table
everything must be on. Yesterday my name was
Temporary Fiscal Adjustment.

Tonight, the insect in the radio calls me
The Inevitable. When the economist
puts his hand up, take care not to cough.
Everything’s on the table and
the table’s tiny. I’d send you a pillow
to hold hard over the child’s face
‘til the kicking stops, but at current rates
there’ll be no pillow. I am the unthinkable
but you will think me. Pack her mouth
with tea towels, hold down firmly
your old mildewed raincoat,
‘til there’s no more breath.

Tomorrow I’ll be known as
Four Year Consolidation Package.
Lock the cat in the oven and bake
at two hundred degrees centigrade.
Tie your last plastic bag over
your own head. The figures speak for themselves
and there is no table.

Kevin Higgins

Austerity Mantra’ appeared in Kevin’s 2014 collection The Ghost In The Lobby (Salmon Poetry)

Reeling in the Years 2020 (RTÉ)

Poet Kevin Higgins and a portrait of himself by artist Chris Banahan

Kevin writes:

This poem (below) refers, at the end, to my lack, thus far of a vaccination date despite my condition

‘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.

Kevin Higgins

This evening.

At 6.30pm Irish time.

The Smurfit-Stone Corporation Endowed Professorship in Irish Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis presents the writings of Kevin Higgins  (above left) and Susan Millar DuMars.

Kevin writes

People here are MOST welcome to join the reading. It’s simple. Just click on the ‘Register me, Please!’ link below, and register. St. Louis is six hours behind Irish time. So the reading will start at 6.30pm and finish at 7.45pm (our time).

Register here.

UK Labour Party leader Kier Starmer (left) alongside former leader Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons

2152

(after Sophie Hannah)

It’s 2152 and Cumbria’s declared independence
after a campaign during which they blew
bits of Princess Eugenie all over
Lake Windermere. There’s a free market
in carcasses throttled by the latest mutant.
On Newsnight Kirsty Wark mutters from her crypt:
we may have run out of ambulances,
but at least we dodged the bullet that was Corbyn.

London’s dead have mostly been snapped up by a Russian oligarch
with a place overlooking Hyde Park
and a lifelong interest in taxidermy. Tonight he’s away to a party
where he hopes to be introduced to the late Eddie Izzard
who, despite being dead, still sits on Labour’s National Executive.

Mock The Week is seven skeletons rattling
in unison at something one of them belched
about Diane Abbott. The country’s now being led
by one of Andrew Neil’s more senior pubic lice. On the BBC
Suzanne Moore’s hair and the new strain of bacteria
they found on Tony Parsons agree:
at least it’s not Corbyn.

Brits from the six disease ridden bits
into which the Kingdom’s now splintered
have been barred from entering Bulgaria, Guatemala, Yemen…
But news of this is drowned by Ian Hislop’s skull chuckling
at something Andrew, Duke of York,
now reincarnated as a fungus, just said about Corbyn.

Jess Phillips hasn’t blown her trombone in
a hundred and thirty two years. And Starmer’s
deported so many Jews from the Labour Party*
he’s received a congratulatory telegram from IG Farben.
He shared it just now on Twitter as proof
he’s not Corbyn.

Kevin Higgins

* Kevin writes:Since he became leader of the British Labour Party less than a year ago, Keir Starmer has expelled more Jewish people from the party than all other previous Labour leader’s combined, many of them on charges of “anti-Semitism”

Getty

Kevin Higgins

Creative Writing – Induction Speech

It’s not all hanging around the college bar
pretending to be Ted and Sylvia;
or escaping to Italy with your lover,
like the Barrett Brownings;
or head-butting rivals in the green room
during what you’ll later call
your Norman Mailer phase;
or leaving your top hat behind you
in the brothel that week you thought
you were Baudelaire.

Most don’t soar
up the Times best seller list
on their way to being given
an award by Prince Edward.
Not everyone can be the next
Ocean Vuong. Or the
Ocean Vuong after that.
And critical acclaim after you’re dead
won’t buy you the tiniest
bag of Hula Hoops at Tesco’s.
You’ll likely have to diversify.

When you leave here you’ll have the ability
to lie more plausibly to detectives
and make up dossiers
about Liechtenstein’s secret
nuclear weapon’s programme.

Others of you will graduate to be entrepreneurs
who sell bags of badness, imported via Amsterdam
up other people’s orifices or stowed away
in their stomachs to emerge gloriously later,
but never use an unnecessary adjective.

At least one of you will likely become a hit woman
who always has the perfect closing line,
and be known to both victims and those
who sent you to their door as The Poet.

And a few will mature into waistcoats who get high
typing pungent updates about drunk women you spy
squatting in shop doorways
with binoculars you bought courtesy of your Writer’s
Bursary For The Partially Sighted.

Kevin Higgins

A protest over the killing of George Nkencho outside Blanchardstown Garda Station in Dublin this morning

The Case of George Nkencho

If this boy had been more prudently
dropped into life on, say, a street
with trees that throw out their annual yellow
to make a welcome parade for the sun;
had as childhood neighbours a Circuit Court Judge
whose front door had no letter box,
a Garda Chief Inspector with an opinionated
and over-confident dog;
kicked a ball up and down summer evenings,
dead apart from the occasional well behaved bee,
with the boy next door (but one) who blossomed
into a political correspondent
and now gets to make up truth,
another way would’ve been found.

But for coming at Gardaí
with a chemical imbalance,
what some people are calling
a machete
and a totally inappropriate
post code,
the only sentence
was that ethically administered,
democratically accountable,
bolt action firing squad.

The eminent and learned
bottoms we employ to sit
on the inquiry into this
need not fret the task ahead of them.
For their report is already written.

Kevin Higgins

Earlier: Meanwhile, In Blanchardstown

RollingNews

Arrivals hall at Dublin Airport last weekend 

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.

Kevin Higgins

23-12-20

RollingNews

Bono and The Edge on the Late Late Show Busk for Simon special on RTÉ 1 last Friday night

kevin Higgins writes:

I am rededicating this poem to the crawlers and sycophants who (without so much as a critical whisper) joined tax avoiding multimillionaire (and supporter of the political and economic status quo) Bono on last Friday’s Late Late Show Busk for Simon. Shane MacGowan is given special dispensation as he probably thought Bono was Engelbert Humperdinck.

My Wishes For You

That your son at Trinity College
may graduate
to become a rogue gynaecologist.
That his brother, the paediatrician,
be suspended without pay.
That your husband be caught
selling wheelchairs that don’t work
live on national radio. And the day

you discover all of the above, may
the traffic wardens, every one of them,
be East Galway Gestapo. May you lose
your winning ticket,
and the gun not go off
when it’s supposed to.

May your reflux be acid
and your bowel be cranky.
May your water forever be cloudy
and the pharmacy be shut.
May the funeral parlour
refuse you,

and the lies you told haunt you
long after the cat
has made a litter tray of your ashes.

Kevin Higgins

Pic: RTÉ

Kevin Higgins

Kevin writes:

A new poem inspired by people who claim to be all for equality but, if they live in the US, wouldn’t support [Bernie] Sanders; if they live in the UK wouldn’t support [Jeremy] Corbyn; and if they live in Ireland would never vote Sinn Féin.

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.

Kevin Higgins

President Michael D Higgins (centre) presents Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Disability Equality and Integration, his seal of office watched by Taoiseach, Micheál Martin at Dublin Castle last June

Kevin writes:

A new poem inspired by President Michael D signing the Mother and Baby Homes secrecy bill. Apart from the bit about the fourth world war, which hasn’t happened yet, it’s more or less a true story.

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.

Kevin Higgins

Previously: ‘My Department Engaged Extensively With The AG’s Office’