by Kevin Higgins

“The sky is high / We shit on earth / We look up the sky /
The earth gives birth / To our future”, Yoko Ono, Poetry (July/August 2018)

(i)

The Christmas lights which bat their eyelids
all year round on the screaming pink terracotta roof
are classy as Demis Roussos’s
ground-breaking retranslation of the Odyssey.

The gold-plated giant front gate tasteful
as the prison raps of Bill Cosby and Orenthal
James Simpson combined.

The foundation wobbly as the sestina sequence
Access Hollywood says Miley Cyrus
is currently sweating over.

The walls and internal supporting beams
solid as a verse novel by Big Bird of Sesame Street.

The water faucets in the vast bathroom
he had purpose built for himself
understated as the last line of the Haiku
Admiral Tojo wrote the morning
he was hanged.

(ii)

In cases made of teak,
behind the thickest glass
Chicago has to offer:

Ezra Pound’s raised right hand;

Weldon Kees’s obviously suicidal car keys;

Eileen Myles’s last leather jacket
but one;

the bunch of blue violets
Emily Dickinson was buried clutching;

Edgar Allan Poe’s and Charles
Bukowski’s embalmed private parts
side by side for comparison;

a stray candle from Robert Frost’s
eighty fifth birthday cake;

and several false beards
Walt Whitman allegedly wore.

(iii)

For these are the endowed halls
where poetry goes to get preserved
in the finest glitter and formaldehyde
moldy Dollars can buy.

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. 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. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. Kevin’s most recent poetry collection Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital was published by Salmon Poetry in June; one of the poems from which will feature in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4.