(ed. Niall McDevitt)

‘I don’t read books.’ – David Cameron

behold the Tory reader in his history books

robed as a Puritan rather than pinstriped in City suit

praying for a plague to fall on the Renaissance theatre

misunderstanding the new English

as it landed like manna

on the tongues of a race in the parted seas of Reformation

their bronze-age book was to be displaced by Shakespeare

even as the poet was translating the King James Bible, thus

evolving his people with both secular and religious verse

those early Tories refused to wash their souls at the Globe

but gnashed at the St. Paul’s Cross

medievally retarded

producing a pseudo-Isaiah called Prynne, their antidote

to poetry, who instructed them to look into the Wooden O

and behold the Devil’s Dam, the mother of Sin and Death,

hating humanism, hating humanity

to whom they would lose this intellectual fight-to-the-death,

fading from life’s pages, life’s stages, to be born in new costumes

behold the modern Tory and his ‘progressive’ Unionist allies

fulminating and judging from secular and religious pulpits,

voicing their gospels of hate via The Daily Mail, always war-drumming,

who have no culture but the Masonic lodge and golf club

today they’ve progressed to two books, the Bible and Shakespeare,

but remain incapable of Biblical or Shakespearean love

their ‘bestseller’ prophets, Jeffrey Archer and Louise Mensch,

don’t warn them they’re Goliaths not Davids, militant philistines
                                                                                            not
                                                                                      ‘The Chosen’

behold the modern Tory in his history books….

Niall McDevitt