2152 after Sophie Hannah
It’s 2152 and Cumbria’s declared independence
after a campaign during which they blew
bits of Princess Eugenie all over
Lake Windermere. There’s a free market
in carcasses throttled by the latest mutant.
On Newsnight Kirsty Wark mutters from her crypt:
we may have run out of ambulances,
but at least we dodged the bullet that was Corbyn.
London’s dead have mostly been snapped up by a Russian oligarch
with a place overlooking Hyde Park
and a lifelong interest in taxidermy. Tonight he’s away to a party
where he hopes to be introduced to the late Eddie Izzard
who, despite being dead, still sits on Labour’s National Executive.
Mock The Week is seven skeletons rattling
in unison at something one of them belched
about Diane Abbott. The country’s now being led
by one of Andrew Neil’s more senior pubic lice.
On the BBC Suzanne Moore’s hair
and the new strain of bacteria
they found on Tony Parsons agree:
at least it’s not Corbyn.
Brits from the six disease ridden bits
into which the Kingdom’s now splintered
have been barred from entering Bulgaria, Guatemala, Yemen…
But news of this is drowned by Ian Hislop’s skull chuckling
at something Andrew, Duke of York,
now reincarnated as a fungus, just said about Corbyn.
Jess Phillips hasn’t blown her trombone in
a hundred and thirty two years. And Starmer’s
deported so many Jews from the Labour Party*
he’s received a congratulatory telegram from IG Farben.
He shared it just now on Twitter as proof
he’s not Corbyn.
KEVIN HIGGINS
*since he became leader of the British Labour Party less than a year ago, Keir Starmer has expelled more Jewish people from the party than all other previous Labour leader’s combined, many of them on charges of “anti-Semitism”
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). 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 was published in December by Nuascealta. Kevin’s sixth full poetry collection, Ecstatic, will be published by Salmon this summer.