by Kevin Higgins

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 is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. He has published five full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), & Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019). His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Kevin is a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He has facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for the past fifteen years. Kevin is the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and also teaches on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. He has published topical political poems in publications as various as The New European, The Morning Star, Dissent Magazine (USA), Village Magazine (Ireland), & Harry’s Place. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One of Kevin’s poems features in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels which is just published. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. His book The Colour Yellow & The Number 19: Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020 is just published by Nuascealta. Kevin’s sixth full poetry collection, Ecstatic, will be published by Salmon next summer.