Selfie
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
George Orwell
My hair is the grass
on the local five-a-side pitch
at the end of the worst winter
since nineteen forty seven.
My eyebrows, more
than my personal groomer—
the cat— can handle right now.
My eyes are light blue jellyfish
floating in increasingly
opaque sea-water.
The fuzz up my nose,
and in my ears, that patch
of grass the university groundsman
keeps forgetting to cut.
My ears, two elderly uncles
successfully avoiding each other
at opposite ends of a wedding.
My skin, the well-thumbed book
you picked up in a charity shop,
and never got around to finishing.
In their last exam, my lungs
got fifty three per cent,
so won’t be going to university
unless I give them to medical science.
My belly is one of those small insults
you get away with
because you’ve had Champagne,
but should generally keep
itself to itself.
My penis is a vintage car
one only takes out
every so often.
My knees and ankles are machinery
made almost obsolete
by recent developments.
The crack down the gable wall
has moved and is now
within me.
Manifesto of The Last International: Address To The Men and Women of Waterlooville
with a little help from Darrell Kavanagh & Quincy Lehr
Our movement will be henceforth called
Death to Bruce Forsyth. We will abolish all
immigration controls. Burqas
will be mandatory for supporters
of West Ham United and Millwall.
We will re-appoint Lord Reith
(1889-1971) Director-General of the BBC.
There will be compulsory German lessons
for the unemployed. Sexual congress
between residents of Basingstoke
will be prohibited forthwith. The Church
of England and National Coal Board will be merged.
Public schools will be converted into saunas
for unconsenting homosexuals. Local bus services
will be replaced, as of January 2016, with sedan chairs
carried by ex-members of the newly extinguished
Confederation of British Industry.
The smoking of Slim Panatella cigars
will be compulsory for school children
from year three onwards. Each workday
will begin with the singing
of the collected works of Gary Glitter.
The capital of England will rotate
triennually between Crawley, Havant and Bordeaux.
The new twenty pound note will bear the mugshot
of the late Unity Mitford with tastefully drawn on
gunshot wound. We will declare war,
first on Tibet, then on ourselves.
Exit
for Darrell Kavanagh in his hour of need
There will be no more thunderstorms
sent across the Channel by the French,
no acid rain floating in from Belgium.
Pizza Hut will offer a choice of
Yorkshire Pudding or Yorkshire Pudding.
You’ll spend the next twenty seven bank holidays
dismantling everything you ever bought from IKEA.
The electric shower your plumber,
Pavel, put in last week will be taken out
and you’ll be given the number of a bloke
who’s pure Billericay. Those used to caviar
will have jellied eels forced
down their magnificent throats.
Every fish and chip shop
on the Costa del Sol will in time
be relocated to Ramsgate or Carlisle.
All paving stones laid by the Irish
will be torn up to make work
for blokes who’ve been on the sick
since nineteen seventy six.
Those alleged to be involved in secretly
making spaghetti bolognaise
will be arrested and held
in a detention centre near Dover. Sausage dogs
will be put in rubber dinghies
and pointed in the general direction
of the Fatherland. Neatly sliced
French sticks topped with Pâté
will make way for fried bread
lathered with Marmite.
There’ll be no more of those new
names for coffee your gran
can’t pronounce. The entire royal family
will be shipped back to Bavaria, with the exception
of the Duke of Edinburgh who’ll be given
a one way ticket to Athens. Curry
will no longer by compulsory
after every twelfth pint of Stella,
which itself will only be available
by special permission of the Foreign Office.
We’ll give India back its tea, sit around increasingly
bellicose campfires in our rusting iron helmets,
our tankards overflowing with traditional Norse mead.
Copyright © Kevin Higgins 2017
