The Power - Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the-pier
palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want: the ornament 
of promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,
the weak grip of a crane in the arcades 
you've built, ballrooms to come alive at night,
then a million-starling roost, an opulent
crumbling like cake icing...
                                            Now, bring it down
in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings, 
that knows the spectral blues; that always starts
in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling 
in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings 
marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume 
of black smoke high enough to stain the halls
of clouds. Now look around your tiny room
and tell me that you haven't got the power. 

Paul Farley. Dark Film. Picador, 2012.

Tramp in Flames - Paul Farley

Tramp in Flames

Some similes act like heat shields for re-entry
to reality: a tramp in flames on the floor.
We can say Flame on! to invoke the Human Torch
from the Fantastic Four. We can switch to art
and imagine Dali at this latitude
doing CCTV surrealism.
We could compare him to a protest monk
sat up the way he is. We could force the lock
of memory: at the crematorium
my uncle said the burning bodies rose
like Draculas from their boxes.

         But his layers
burn brightly, and the salts locked in his hems
give off the colours of a Roman candle,
and the smell is like a foot-and-mouth pyre
in the middle of the city he was born in,
and the bin bags melt and fuse him to the pavement
and a pool forms like the way he wet himself
sat on the school floor forty years before,
and then the hand goes up. The hand goes up.

Tramp in Flames. Picador. 2006