Poetry – Kevin Higgins

Our Posh Liberal Friends
for Susan

Whenever I show them the Future,
they refuse it;
say: this future has bad hair,
waves its arms around too much,
is too Jewish,
or not Jewish enough,
too not-a-woman,
or the wrong sort of woman.

This Future has a face that one day
might raise the corporate tax rate
by zero point five percent,
and is a little too insistent
that poor people be allowed live,
give or take, as long as the rest of us.
That sort of thing scares the people we dine with
nights we’re not dining with you.

I ask the barman for more finger food,
picture the ocean raging into the restaurant,
and them still sat there muttering at the chicken goujons:
the people we talk to won’t vote for
such extreme solutions. No one wants to live in Cuba,
one of them says, as she’s washed out the door.

I pray, when all the futures
they’ve turned their noses up at
are safely in the mud
and the men in boots and leather come
to escort us all to the Processing Centre
in the back of a truck
that I be shot, cleanly through the skull, at the front gate,
so I don’t suffer their groans
about the quality of the gruel,
and how that last beating one of them got
was clearly in breach of the Human Rights Act
and worthy of a curtly worded,
but still civil, letter to The Observer.

Feature Image: ‘The Temple of the Liberal Arts’, by Jacques Sablet (1749-1803).