Easy to say,
you’d rather make loud love
to Lord Prescott, or have
your face smashed between
Sir Cyril Smith’s quivering cheeks
than read Tony Blair on how
the motorway to the mountaintop
he envisages lies
through the centre ground;
when you know neither
gentleman’s available, right
here right now, to take you.
We need to make voting Labour
as pleasurable
for call centre managers and
estate agents of a certain age
as lowering their roasting
menopausal testicles
into a nice cold bath.

To this end, we need a leader
with ideas thrilling as a dripping cistern,
a man (or woman) likely conceived during a Conservative Association dinner
somewhere in darkest Buckinghamshire;
who, while his or her fellow students
were thoughtlessly dancing the blues,
bravely danced the beige;
a person of exemplary character apart
from that one conviction for stealing
the brass handles off
their own father’s coffin.
We must offer hope
to those who aspire to shop
for gourmet sausage meat
at Waitrose, and not
waste time on people who perspire
as they rifle through packets
of past-their-use-by-date
picnic ham at Aldi.

KEVIN HIGGINS
- Kevin Higgins’s poetry features in the generation-defining anthology Identity Parade — New British and Irish Poets (Ed. Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010) and in the recent anthology The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems (Ed. Neil Astley, Bloodaxe, 2014). The Ghost In The Lobby (Salmon, 2014) is Kevin’s fourth collection of poems. His
blog is at mentioningthewar.
blogspot.com