A Tory in Avalon

A Tory in Avalon is missing for 24 hours
but in the rock’n’roll bubble, no one
thinks anything of a locked cubicle.
Great musicians, groupies, journalists
move onto the next, powdering noses
in celebration and jubilation, amid
the real ales and popular songs
that are the apex of English culture.
No one imagines that rigor mortis
is setting in behind a plastic door
or that an ex-Tory is decomposing
even in the fields of Elysium.
(Anway, better him than Thom Yorke.)
He takes no air. The air is taken back.

Irish poet Niall McDevitt confronts the taboo subjects of unemployment, alienation, poverty and immigration in his work. He was resident Pidgin poet/translator on John Peel’s Home Truths, and has featured in Bespoken Word, The Robert Elms Show and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.
As an activist McDevitt has campaigned to secure the future of the Rimbaud Verlaine House at 8 Royal College Street, and for the release of poet Saw Wai from Insein prison in Myanmar.
This poem is taken from a longer sequence first published at the International Times website www.internationaltimes.it
His book, b/w, is published by Waterloo Press.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter