as published in the Summer edition of Poetry London:

 

Now I’m a hand setting the globe to spin,
finding a country, starting to zoom in
now I’m an eye. Now I’m a meteorite.
 
The scars of business corridors, the white
clay works, national parkland, estuaries.
A refinery built from Camemberts and Bries!
 
Now I’m a hand again, steadying my fall,
steering by starlight on the ground, black holes
of reservoirs, flight paths of major roads.
 
Now I’m an eye and there are never clouds
because the west wind of the Internet
blows silently down lost bus routes, birth streets,
 
the school roof still in bad need of repair,
the swing park all deserted at this hour,
which is no-hour. Now I’m the midnight sun
 
lighting the places where we’ve been and gone.
The ground comes up. A field sharpens to grain.
The trees screw into leaf. Now I’m a drop of rain.
 
Now I’m a balloon by Odilon Redon.
And now my chute snags up on power-lines.
If we looked outside, eyeballs might block the sun.
 
Even above the lake isles of Lough Gill,
Adlestrop’s dismantled barrow, a hill
on the road north of Poughkeepsie, there are eyes
 
now all the world’s a drop zone of the mind.

 

Paul Farley is one of the finest poets now writing in English.  Better still, he is a huge fan of The Fall.  Find out more about him here.

PaulFarley2

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