Paul Farley

Masonic creature. Maker. Water encircledsurvivor of hat crazes. Crib fabricator.Chiseller. Tooth enamel’s hardest expressionon any branch of the mammal clade. Stash housebuilder. Stickler. Worker in wands and twigs,in waterproof slick fur. Dammer of the catchmentunder winter constellations that burn and flickerwhen dark and frost resume the Northern hemisphere.Your ice creche. Your...

He operates out of unremarkable premises. The smell of peardrops comes from the spray-and-body shop. On the other side it’s paintball: NEMESIS.

Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step. He keeps them in the dark. It stinks, I know. Like a stable or a paddock. Perspective slackens like an ankle rope

in a gallery. Carpets sleep off the world, digesting its flash and glamour, its...

When the cutting edge was a sleight, a trick of time, we blinked our way through Jason and the Argonauts, thrilled by the stop-motion universe, its brazen Talos grinding like a Dock Road crane, and the Hydra’s teeth sown into studio soil by Harryhausen, who got between the frames like a man who comes in bone dry from a downpour by stopping the world and snapping out a path...

One for the money. Arrangements in green and grey from the window of an empty dining-car. No takers for this Burgundy today apart from me. I’ll raise a weighted stem to my homeland scattering by, be grateful for these easy-on-the-eye, Army & Navy surplus camouflage colours that seem to mask all trace of life and industry; a draft for the hidden dead, our...