Stinging Fly magazine tries to get me assassinated

In a wide ranging article in the special 'In The Wake of The Rising' issue of The Stinging Fly magazine I am described as "likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland". Here I was, trying to keep a low profile and not offend anyone, and then they go and call me that. The bastards. 

Given the state of my my lungs, I had been hoping to at least live to see my fifty sixth birthday, and the 2023 celebrations to mark the centenary of Eoin O'Duffy's appointment as Garda Commissioner.

However, I now fully expect to be assassinated by some poet I've never heard of between now and next month's Cúirt Festival. In all probability I will be gunned down during the festival itself, one bright night in the House Hotel, by an insanely jealous, but little read, villanelle writer with an avant-garde haircut.

The weapon will likely be one borrowed earlier that day from an old Official IRA arms dump in the Cork North Central constituency.

"Unfashionable Ireland's dead and gone. It's buried with the Stickies' guns"

Speaking of The Sunday Independent, last Sunday the above mentioned Stinging Fly article got a mention in that paper's always hot and heavy pages. In his review, John Boland appears to take exception to the idea of me succeeding Seamus Heaney as the nation's most read living poet. I agree. It's a bloody disgrace. And a sign of the ongoing cultural decline against which men, and women, like John Boland of The Sunday Independent must continue to bravely fight the neccessary the fight.

According to his article, Boland had apparently never heard of me before, describing me as "someone called Kevin Higgins" which makes a nice change from this article which appeared in the same newspaper in October 2014. It's always good to be forgotten by people who previously seemed to know who you were. Perhaps John Boland knew who I was eighteen months ago but just doesn't know who I have become since. I often feel that way myself.

After my upcoming assassination at the end of April, I look forward to being forgotten entirely. 

UPDATE 
Garda Intelligence have been in touch to say that an online meeting of my potential assassins has in fact taken place. The usual gathering of the hairy-palmed brigade. The officer I spoke to did express some surprise though to see Mr Patrick Cotter, Director of the state funded Munster Literature Centre, openly involving himself in this sort of street level codology. I hope Mr Cotter didn't put that 'like' on there during office hours.