Home » Poems » Best » Michael Higginbotham » Best Michael Higginbotham Poems

Best Poems Written by Michael Higginbotham

Below are the all-time best Michael Higginbotham poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

The Ivy and the Brick

It must have felt like love at first,
The clinging of the ivy vines,
Until his rich red heart had burst.

Her tendrils slaked an ancient thirst,
The tender touch for which he pined.
It must have felt like love at first.

Too guileless to suspect the worst,
She speared him with her soft green tines.
Until his rich red heart had burst.

Her coils so patiently she pursed,
He never guessed at her design.
It must have felt like love at first.

Crazed with cracks, its strength dispersed,
From end to end the wall declines
Until his rich red heart had burst.

So new to love, so poorly versed
In joy, so baffled by her signs,
It must have felt like love at first.
Until his rich red heart had burst.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Chekhov's Gun

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." -- Anton Chekhov


Chekhov declared that it's clearly imperative
That a gun given billing must duly be fired.
The bullet obligingly cinches the narrative,
Sating the thirst that the gun first inspired.

Yet the world is awash in objects inutile,
Which clog our disorderly narrative streams.
So why should a playwright adhere to so futile
A diktat pertaining to props in a scene?

Myself for example, habitually arming
The darkness that swaddles me, inkily deep,
My mind so occulted its doubly alarming
To grasp the black Kimber, now sprung from its keep.

The prop having found its way on to the stage,
My untethered demons start chorally keening,
Quite certain they know what the gun must presage:
That this is the moment that holds all the meaning.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Napoleon and Josephine

Napoleon Bonaparte.
Smaller than a popcorn fart.
Not man enough for Josephine.
You know exactly what I mean.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

The Heron

for  my Father


My father is as noiseless as the bird,
Transfixed upon his pirouetting bob,
To angle fish his self-appointed job,
He speaks with silence. It is his every word.

Mirror to him, voiceless and unstirred,
The heron stiffens, ready to make hob
Among the flitting silver swimming mob.
Beaking his prey, he leaves the water blurred.

He rises like a spirit from the lake
to seek his nest, crowning a cypress tree,
At the utmost reach of my pursuing eyes.
Dad passed today. Contented with his take,
his creel pegged out, my father sought his quay
Eternal, at a height I can't surmise.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Opium was his mind bridge
It took him down to Xanadu.
Just think what Ecstasy would do.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Prayer

"...Dominus orationem meam suscepit."


Burning his little jelly bottom raw,
He blisters in his liquid greenish poop.
He has no means to summon us at all 
To drain the acid swamp of split pea soup.
Except to scream, a peevish infant yawp,
And so he screams, until we take his goop.
We modestly subserve our son's ejecta.
Clean, dry and warm: his everyday trifecta.

He's not alone.  I've had my days of burning.
Blistered and raw, to salve my hurt I prayed
for balm from God, ultimately learning
His summit lay on far too steep a grade.
Footless in His scree, inflamed with yearning,
My wounds combusted into wrath.  I brayed
My blasphemies, then heard the Logoi fall.
I had no means to summon Him at all.

Which births a trailing thought about the sainted:
Their whispered prayers, their worshipful reclusion,
Which all the hagiographers have painted.
Don't buy it.  Souls corroded with confusion,
Their love of God with hatred wholly tainted,
And Doubt the only friend to their seclusion,
With blasphemies they burnt the fetid air.
Profanation is the purest form of prayer.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

The Candy Store

Excreted from the void and lost,
At last his consciousness clocked in,
While at a window licked with frost,
Which coyly seemed to beckon him.

The wagging of the front door bell’s
Accusatory silver tongue
Could not reverse the potent spell
Of splendors he’d been dropped among.

The faint pastels of rainbows and
the flattened hues of flowers
were no rivals to this fairyland’s
kaleidoscopic powers.

Red ropes of licorice dangled down,
impending like stalactites.
Swirled lollys looked like grinning clowns.
The bins poured out prismatic lights.

Clenching quarters in his mittens,
He walked between his private giants,
Impressed they knew a world so hidden,
Affirming thus his shrewd alliance.

Filling his hands to overflowing, 
he grandly at the front unfurled
his swag. The bell salutes his going,
a king into a smiling world.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Whomever a Woman Chooses Is King

Whomever a woman chooses is the king.
No table round will ever square the thing.
All knights have equal access to the bread,
Even the stout are adequately fed;
Each squire gets equal pay for equal knighting.

Then Guinevere unsheathes the distaff lightning,
Uncoils her hair, so lustrous and inciting,
Plumps her lips with a berry crushed and red.
Whomever a woman chooses is the king.

Pendragon is ostensibly the.King.
And normally he doesn't miss a thing.
But Lancelot is naked in his bed
And Guinevere is humping him instead.
"No man above another" has a ring.
Whomever a woman chooses is the king.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Uriah

Uriah's bowels unraveled in the sand.
He thanked God for the gift of dying for
King David, who was master of the man.
Those Hittites never seemed to know the score.
Bathsheba was the prize that David sought,
Uriah inadvertently occluding
His royal lust, so winkling out a thought,
King David killed her husband by colluding
With his generals to make the Hittite die.  
Afoam with sweat, Bathsheba grinds the King
Indecently.  Beneath a yawning sky,
Uriah's writhing in the sand and gasping,
Holding his ****ing kidney in his hand.
I've never felt more sorry for a man.

Details | Michael Higginbotham Poem

Atropos

Shears, indifferent where the fibers led,
She wielded innocent of dread,
Cutting what her sisters fed.
Slicing each fragile thread,
Thickened puddles spread,
steaming and red,
As he bled,
In bed.
Dead.





Rhymed Nonet