From top: Niall Stokes, editor and founder of Hot Press; the magazine endorses Ivana Bacik, Labour candidate in today’s Dublin Bay South by-election
Kevin writes:
In the 2016 General Election Hot Press also endorsed the Labour Party, who had at that stage been in government for five years, implementing austerity, attempting to impose water charges, and getting the housing crisis going. Hot Press did this on the basis that only with Labour in government would the 8th amendment be repealed. This turned out not to be the case. Labour lost all but 7 of its 37 seats and were out of government. But the 8th amendment was repealed in any case in 2018. Labour actually were in government when the 8th amendment was introduced in 1983…In this poem I pay tribute to the intellectual giant that is Hot Press Editor Niall Stokes. This poem should be read while prostrating oneself in front of a large colour photograph of Michael D. Higgins, or failing that Ruairi Quinn, preferably while naked.
Soliloquy in Voice of Ageing Rock Journalist
There I was on the meditation mat
Jackson Browne gave me to mark
the year of the rat, naked apart
from what’s left of my tremendous
hair, incantating the word
“progressive” to my holy self
and the tiny birds at
the window, who are always
my best first audience,
when the truth came to me:
no other combination of parties
can deliver the certain
(and required) surge
inwhole family suicide
among those made live in the kind of hotels
not frequented by Keith Richards,
that will occur
if this government is returned,
as it must be.
I’m most famous
for having once, allegedly,
shared a hot tub, and my thoughts
on the heroic death
of Salvador Allende,
with Ireland’s baldest
living intellectual.
I’m what happens when you take
not quite enough cocaine.
During a session at Lille’s Bordello,
I once pulled Bono’s finger;
or what I thought was
Bono’s finger.
I offer these words as evidence
that I’m not actually dead yet. Satan
be good to me and what remains
of my hair.
Kevin Higgins
RollingNews
