Three Poems
By Kevin Higgins.
Time Gentlemen, Please
Again your head full of novels
you’ll definitely get down on paper
one of these days. And Prague? Budapest?
Hemingway or Che? The same old questions
(only a little bit less) night after night
for years. Until all that remains
are a few old acquaintances
over hot whiskeys whispering:
“Not quite here, yet not quite there.
His life just a fence he got piles sitting on”:
as through the mild October streets
your hearse makes haste.
Manifesto
I won’t settle for
better.
I want a President
who’ll give us wars
I can be against; live
for the beauty of bombed Afghan
wedding parties justifying
everything I think.
The international banking system
now a pair of old boots
with the soles worn away;
you will listen
when I tell you:
everything is not for sale.
Even if you paid me, I’d go
nowhere.
Even My Dreams Are Mediocre
Perfection is an evening of setting off smoke alarms,
love, going upstairs to smear each other
in cat-food and curry.
“Change your life”: Rilke tells me;
incapable of this, I put on
a new pair of socks instead. My face
the poster for a failed revolution.
We end up being ruled by overly reasonable
Swedes who give me a start
your own funeral parlour grant.
One by one, the whole neighbourhood go off
in my award-winning plywood coffins.
“At last”, Mother whispers, “You’re
someone”, as I nail her into her box.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967 but grew up in Galway City where he still lives. With his wife Susan Millar DuMars, he co-organises the Over The Edge literary events in Galway. Kevin’s first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, was highly commended by the judges of this year’s Forward Poetry Prize and features in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009. A new poem of his, ‘Ourselves Again’, has been selected for inclusion in Best of Irish Poetry 2009 (Southword). His work is discussed in poet-critic Justin Quinn’s Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Thursday, October 9th, 2008.
