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KEVIN
HIGGINS
Kevin Higgins was born
in London in 1967 of Irish parents, but grew up mostly in Galway. He began
writing poetry in 1996. Since then his poems have appeared in magazines and
anthologies worldwide. His first collection The Boy With No Face was
published recently by Salmon.
ROOM OVERLOOKING THE LAKE
You there in the back row, third from right, class of 1975,
back when the world was busy telling long jokes
in the college bar, or chanting slogans
in support of the Bolivian Tree People
or the Mothers Of The Disappointed; the one who knew
where he was going and went, smooth
as mustard being spread across an old man’s head,
to that Civil Service pension
and all those lunch-times spent munching
onion sandwiches and watching
as the dole-queues came and went,
like weeds. The rest of us still skulking
on and off various trains, or forever crouched
behind the couch the day the rent-man came around,
and you already a man
any forty year old woman would’ve been proud
to bring home to her mother: that briefcase guaranteed
to make it through all those evening streets
and pairs of slippers to a priest one day whispering:
“ashes to ashes, dust to dust, life not changed,
merely ended.” This is what, to a man, we predicted.
Not the gin for dinner, the whiskey
across your Corn Flakes. The wife giving up on you
the day you started putting
hard-boiled eggs under the mattress
‘just to see what would happen’.
Later you looking like death cooled down
as you stood on the street corner crooning
“Love Me Tender.” And now being led
into the back of an ambulance ranting:
“long live the rotten old consensus!”, then going off through
the pale hatchet-faced afternoon
to another basket-weaving class, another game
of dominos in that room overlooking the lake.
YOUR IDEAL FRIDAY NIGHT
I hear what you say;
but as once again you sit
with your backside buried
in that chair there, your face
like months and months of pent up rain
all falling on the same day;
can you blame me for thinking,
that deep down you’d probably prefer
another evening in with the local rag:
“Man Who Once Crossed Littlehampton High Street
Did Absolutely Nothing Yesterday”:
to a hundred hot nights with Samantha Mumba;
that your ideal Friday night is watching
the mildew advance across an old coat,
as you wait for your bones
to go finally cold?
THE HISTORY OF SAD
Again listening to you tossing
real people off imaginary tower-blocks;
your tongue’s catastrophic slug-in-salt wiggle;
easy to miss what’s plain
as a knock on the door in the middle of the day:
you mad to go on carrying crippled dogs
up impossible hills, saddest man
in the history of sad.
A NEW CALENDAR
The Sunday papers and then
the packed lunch, the polished shoes
work hanging over everything, like a news
report naming a hundred and twenty different types
of tumour, tempered only by bright
intervals in the south and west.
Even your dreams, less the usual array
of dazzling blondes wandering through,
like lush metaphors for something else,
than an inexorable walk down by the hospital
past telephones ringing in empty houses.
And waking now
to an alarm angry as a black-backed jackal.
You there, with your grim cheese-slices,
your tar-like tea, not liking the look,
smell, texture or sound of anything; as outside
a new calendar’s first Monday comes,
like a dentist’s drill, screaming to a start.
copyright
© Kevin Higgins
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