- “It was an exciting time to be young.” Homer Simpson
We were busy taking control of our
cable TV accounts by signing up online,
to avail of the smallest discount in history.
I was upstairs playing with my make-your-own
Mitt Romney set. Wife was in the shed
deciding, in the end, not to have sex
with the boy who used to mow,
among other things, our lawn.
Her brother was under the duvet
breaking his own record
by, in one day, deciding to join neither
the Bolshevik Party nor the Continuity IRA.
My cousin, the footballer, was
not coming on as a substitute
in a match abandoned due to a
waterlogged pitch. Uncle,
the politician, was announcing
he wasn’t running
for Parish Council, posting
his No We Can’t speech on Youtube
for people everywhere not to listen to.
People like us - who make this
world what it, mostly, is - were busy
not letting the cat in
or accidentally
putting our drivers’ licences,
our social security cards, our lives
where we’d never find them again.
after Yehuda Amichai
Seven inches long with red, plastic handles.
It cut the cord on bales of briquettes, helped them
make good nights the sky was ice and
the wind sarcastic down the chimney.
It trimmed eyebrows; liberated
biographies of Fidel Castro and
the comedian Frankie Boyle, books on
every aspect of human psychology
from Amazon boxes. It pared toenails
of both sexes to bare essentials.
For the child whose mother rented
the flat before them, it once cut stars
from silver paper. Lately, it mostly
sliced through string
on cooked chickens; tore open
bags of cat litter. This evening
she briefly considered planting it
in the base of his neck, like the flag at Iwo Jima,
before he could wake from his nap to repeat
that thing he’d been saying all week,
on balance decided not to; instead
clipped a photograph of them
both from the local paper,
which tomorrow she’ll get
framed.
Kevin Higgins’s poetry features in the generation defining anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010) and one of his poems is included in the forthcoming anthology The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe April 2014). The Ghost In The Lobby (Salmon, Spring 2014) is Kevin’s fourth collection of poems.