Willesden Herald Short Stories 7
   
 ...

 Nutrition

The prize-winning stories from the Willesden Herald International Short Story competition.
Book available here



-------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 4:01 pm

 


Night Souk / Candy says feat Foy Migado

---
- posted by fatboy @ 11:36 pm

 
Tears shining like slug trails

This week I witnessed the most pitiful sight imaginable, a true end-of-an-era moment.
As a gun carriage dragged a dead woman in a box covered with a decorated piece of
cotton through the cleared streets of London to a performance by a man dressed in the
garb of a witch in front of an assembly comprised of charlatans, chancers, and class warriors,
I saw a man burn his own poems.


- posted by fatboy @ 4:49 pm

 
amsterdam girl


from Prison: A Monologue
-----
- posted by fatboy @ 7:04 pm

 
Advice for Train Guards on the Last Train



 

       Advice for Train Guards
       mfd
- posted by fatboy @ 3:22 pm

 
Glenda Jackson remembers Thatcher's victims
Thank you, Glenda

---


- posted by fatboy @ 9:23 pm

 
Our Bog is Dood
`


Our Bog is Dood    --   Stevie Smith



Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood
My darling little child?

We know because we wish it so
This is enough, they cried,
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride,
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.

Then tell me, darling little ones,
What’s dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.

But when they raised them up again
They had forgotten me
Each one upon each other glared
In pride and misery
For what was dood, and what their Bog
They never could agree.

Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that soon should drown them all,
That never yet drowned me.


----------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:54 pm

 
Eulogy Fir Robin Cook
by   'Jason King'


Edinbury's mobbed the day
but awfay circumspect
for a Scottish statesman droaped doon deid
n it's time tae pay respects

Eh did ehs bit fir freedom,
Fir justice n fir truth
No like thon toss in Downing Street
The yin wi the hoor's mooth

Erse-lickin yon Yankee cunt
Oan the issue ay Iraq
And sendin oor lads to the front
N some widnae come back

But Cooky had his principle
His courage, gall and pluck
'Where ur they WMD's then?'
'Thir no thaire - git tae fuck.'

And comrades oan the benches
They were craven, timid swine
Thir erseholes in tight clenches
As they towed the perty line

The track his only respite
Fae the Middle East debate
The Tory press cried him a traitor
Wi thir Arab racial hate

Eh died up in the hills eh loved
Nae doaktirs on alert
But it was the liars doon in London toon
Thit broke that brave, brave hert.

--
from the story Kingdom of Fife from the collection
If You Liked School, You'll Love Work by  Irvine Welsh

----
- posted by fatboy @ 10:35 am

 

waiting room, spalding
mfd

---
- posted by fatboy @ 11:08 pm

 
I'm



I’m arguing with Yevtushenko,
I’m justifying all my lies to my child,
I’m watching filthy black clouds floating
towards a full and beautiful white moon,
I’m zipping my jacket against the cold,
I want to be poetic about the moon,
I'm saying that the light grey wisps
across its beautiful whiteness has made me think
of a snow leopard alone in the night.
I’m afraid for her to know what Lorca knows.


----


You’re

You know how these things happen,
you’re a writer, a leaper from stone to stone,
a noticer of the grass blurring beneath you,
a noticer of the whiteness
of coffee cups, of the stream of loveliness
that flows through the coffeeshop doors
to meet their loves. You’re here,
not meeting your love, you’re there,
on the hill, leaping
from rocks, the same hill, different rocks,
different blades of grass blurring,
descending from the summit to the riverbed,
thinking of the insistent wind, thinking
of our children and the terrible truths
waiting for them.


-----
- posted by fatboy @ 9:19 pm

 
The Sidekick Woman


The Sidekick Woman (excerpt from Prison: A Monologue)
MF Delgado
 ----
- posted by fatboy @ 1:03 pm

 
Miranda’s pale arms remind me most


Miranda’s pale arms remind me most
of the marshalling-yard at Temple Mills;
her veins and scars are the criss-crossed rails,
and the blue abscess between her elbow
and her heart is the slope of the hump-shunt hill.
Her blood flows slowly like the crippled wagons
we chase down the hill with our brakemen’s sticks.

Miranda’s arms are raw with her temper,
as sore as the yardmen who lose their wage
in the shanty to cardsharps on payday.
They are a razored calendar of rage,
voodoo dolls of the mother who deserted,
a diary of overthrown princes,
a litany of gougings and despair.

—
- posted by fatboy @ 2:46 pm

 
I was leaning




I was leaning back in my swivel-chair, with my feet up on the desk, magazine open,
and I was enjoying this little essay. It talked about Schuyler's history of stays in psychiatric
hospitals. I liked the snippet that said Schuyler had been making poems for about thirty five
years before he gave his first public reading. By then he was 65. It took him that long to
overcome his extreme shyness enough to stand before an audience and read his poems.
According to the essay the queue for tickets stretched several deep around the block.
Imagine that – people queuing to hear a poet.

I can imagine that little piece of information comforting a few people who may write poems
and who may want at some time to be known for writing poems and who may want at some
time to stand in front of an audience that has queued to buy tickets to have the chance to listen
to these poems being read. I imagine some of them thinking that they too are terrified of public
speaking, or that they too haven't the faith in the poems that they have made to dream of reading
them aloud to strangers. And I imagine them looking at Schuyler's age and thinking that they are
only 27 years old or 34 or 51 or 63, or whatever they are, and so they still have time, and that
maybe they will get there in the end, by the time Schuyler did, and that they too will be writers.
And because of that they don't give up because they are too old, or not good enough, and because
little by little they think they may be finding the voice that is theirs, or all of the voices that are theirs,
or at least a voice that is casting off what was put into it in schools and opinion columns and other
venues.

I can imagine this because I remember reading Kerouac by the side of a road in Greece as the hills
turned purple at dusk, and then on Basel railway station, and then in a flat overlooking the beach
at Portreath, and I remember thinking that Kerouac was late getting into print and that I had still
got a few years to get to how old he'd been when On The Road was published and so by that age
the three pages that I had written and had spent years endlessly rewriting would have grown to a
great novel that would make all further novel-writing redundant.

When I passed the age that Kerouac had been and my piece had grown only to an endlessly revised
seven pages I thought of Henry Miller. He'd been even older. I would still be able to make it by the age
he was when he'd got his book out in Paris. And as I was thinking this I shifted my position a little in my
chair and I knocked a glass of water with my feet and it went over my keyboard. I didn't pay much
attention to it immediately because I was enjoying this article I was reading in this magazine, and I
was enjoying the thoughts it led me to. But then I started to get a tiny panic about what would happen
if I wanted to write something at the speed that I need a keyboard for, but I call someone on the phone
as I read and am assured a keyboard can be sent to me in a few hours. And so I continue to read about
how Schuyler returned from a European trip with his dream of being a short-story writer. In the same year
he suffered his first major episode of psychiatric illness and I read that over the next 35 or so years he
is hospitalised around ten times and then the article comes to what strikes me as a fine piece of
poetry, something Schuyler wrote, an elegy for Frank O'Hara,  Buried at Springs. The poem
starts

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much….

and at that particular sitting that is about as far as I got with the essay since those lines made me agitated,
as poems or journalism or fictions often will, and I had to get up and move about. For some reason
I decided I should get outside so I decided to take the binbag out to the bin. It was March and very 
sunny and my porch is brilliantly white, and with the intensity of sunlight that day bouncing off the walls it
felt like stepping onto a porch on Mykonos. On the waist-high ledge of the porch, by the left
supporting pillar, there was a wasp, dead, on its back. It shouldn't have been there. It was only March.
I couldn't fathom how a dead wasp could be there in March. I stood there, already agitated,
almost paralysed with thought about how that wasp could be there, dead on the wall of the porch.

I came back into the house, puzzled, and that feeling was in the back of my throat, that feeling of
agitation that comes when I think I'm going to have to try to explain something to myself by hitting
the keys of a keyboard and then reading afterwards what words that hitting has made, and from that
see if I can see what it is I was trying to explain to myself.

But the keyboard was fucked. From the water. Some of the keys worked, not all of them, but no
numbers, no commands, not always spaces, no tabs. I was in that frenzy again. I threw everything
out of a cupboard and got a hair-dryer out and plugged it in and with one finger typed and with the
other tried to dry out the keyboard. I got something down before the frenzy stopped and when the
frenzy stopped it let me stop. I could just stop and read what hitting the keyboard had done but I
don't suppose it explained much at all.



Mykeyboardis        fucked/betterthanitwas/the       numberswork
butstillfucked/    youcanseetheproblemhuh?/nospacebar/
soIhadhopedthati          wasntgoingtowanttowr        iteapoem/


untilsomeone’spromiseofasparekeyboardarrived/
soishouldneverhave started readingschuyler writing
aboutfranko’hara/
thebitaboutthe       hornetintheroom/whichihadn’t
readbefore/                  youseeitwas sunny heretoday andtheporch
outsidemyfrontdoorisbrilliantwhiteandonthis
brilliantwhiteporchwasa dead wasp-  on its  back   -
and ican’t for thel ife ofme figurewhereit came from





---
- posted by fatboy @ 4:24 pm

 
"....they'd kill us all to make a buck."

.
Fuck the Tories, fuck their class war, fuck their urban clearances.
Fuck all those who accept the trinkets and baubles of the Tory establishment.
Fuck all those who collaborate with them.
Fuck all those whose wealth and contentment is dependent on the poverty and misery of others. 




-------------

Song to the Men of England   -----------   PB Shelley


Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat -nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love's gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.

Sow seed, -but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth, -let no imposter heap;
Weave robes, -let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre!



-------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:09 am

 

 


django
--------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:17 pm

 
An elegy in Holloway



A subtle puffy-eyed way
of always looking down
in the pouring rain,
it made you beautiful
once upon a time
to all the boys in your class.
This was a bad neighbourhood once,
family friends wouldn’t venture here,
you could wear the sweaters
with the plunging necklines
and be safe from the Mr Evanses
 and the Uncle Lens, though
the organisation of drug selling
around here on corners
and at the margins
of the estate blocks
presented a bigger threat
when you would not bite your tongue.
With luck the smarter boys
thought you were a prostitute
and that you may be
someone’s property,
someone who wouldn’t think twice
about killing them
in a slow and terrible way.
“Darling” was the most
they would dare call
 out to you, because after all
you looked tough and pretty still.
They may even have sensed
something about you, even then,
unsavoury, deathly, diseased,
and I can’t have been the only one
to wonder if anyone else
could detect something brutal in you,
in your prettiest days, in the way
you walked, and in the sharp corners
of your face, that hinted at the knife
you carried in your handbag,
and the black rage they planted in you
at home. Things happen to everyone.
Little of what happens to us
at the bottom of the world is just.
The world is full of people
working their way towards the knife
and gun and needle
and the rope in the empty room.
All the murderers
who were never found
are here among us,
some are unsated still.
But with all of what you were,
and what people saw to fear in you,
you were ill and burning in small fires
from the inside out, not purely rage
but decay that ends in puzzlement one day,
with just a few people
ranged around the furnace
or the dug earth
saying their last goodbyes,
and struggling with what is life,
and you, your struggle done,
burning or mouldering,
with no justice from life,
gone.


- posted by fatboy @ 1:01 am

 
Johnny Parent reads Civrene K. Brabt's taxi music  -----

text of the poem here


--------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:34 pm

 



Sending a poem by Waldo Williams to a friend


In a moment, over coffee perhaps,
or when you are snagged among the dire thorns
of the day’s tasks, or locked in the footfalls
of the weak and strong and pretty people
on a crowded street of your dirty town
I hope you may enjoy this, these words
some poet received as a mystery
while holding their own pen, since down it flowed
some possibilities about what this,
this life, some part of it, may be be meaning
to us, refreshing us when we have lost
ourselves in crowds of others, or in doubts
about what strength we have left for the fight
we renew each day, just to keep us here.






..
- posted by fatboy @ 10:27 pm

 
Stuck for Christmas / Hanukkah / birthday present ideas?

Can't wait for the Chilcot Report?



Amazon.co.uk £7.99, includes free delivery in the UK

The Book Depository £7.99, includes free delivery worldwide

Before Hutton, before Butler, before Chilcot,
Mikey Fatboy Delgado was looking into the matter...
In the spring of 2003 the Iraq war is underway and
Mikey is almost all in favour of it. It makes for good
television and is improving his sex life. If only the BBC
would sort out those green pictures of fighting in the
dark he might even be prepared to cough up for a licence.
And if only corrupt policing and the amount that Blair grins
weren't so unsettling he would be able to relax and enjoy
watching the highlights of the fighting more.
***************

“Saddam has bitten the kids and pissed on
the mat and eaten our ganja and he won’t
stop fucking barking, so bosh, ta-ta, thanks
for all the fish, and fucking goodnight Irene.
Your services are no longer required, Saddam.
You are going up the motorway, pal.”



“You’re a nasty fucker. We’re nasty fuckers.
We’ve got the big battalions, you’ve got fuck
all. Out you go. Goodnight Irene.”


***********************




-------------

-----------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:01 am

 


Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize

Get your entries in, the deadline is approaching,
the trophy has been polished and shined and put on public display.
Closing date for entries, Friday 21st December 2012


This year's judge is the excellent David Means

How to enter






-----
- posted by fatboy @ 11:11 am

 
`
Adam Hu Gesher and The Mizrachim play live
at The Center for Distressed Poets

`
- posted by fatboy @ 9:19 pm

 
Driver, out

 and here,

and talking of here , something stunning


----------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:31 pm

 
`


Today on Whiskey River.
Thanks.



.
- posted by fatboy @ 4:02 pm

 
Imagined Poetries
MF Delgado




"Shooda won that Turner thing..."


---------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:34 am

 


café
mfd



...
- posted by fatboy @ 5:27 pm

 
....to bring us back to the truth, to a consciousness of what we need,
to those deep desires for justice and meaning, for respect and commonality,
for freedom from debt, from the monomaniacal ideology that creates
the plantation and calls it the world. 


.
- posted by fatboy @ 8:12 pm

 


Literature / Art
mfd

Buy Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6
.
- posted by fatboy @ 7:56 pm

 





In Spring


Luciano has passed away – sign on the café door.


Don’t close your eyes in Spring, even for a second.
So much happens. Just for a day I missed
the ornamental cherry where the paths meet
and now the fat baubles of blossom are gone,
laying as petals at the crosspath like pink-tinged snow
on the long-trumpet daffodils.

In the café the gardeners have made a gift of primroses.
Every table has one. They are for Luciano.
At the Gaggia machine which makes too-strong coffee
Lydia sees primroses everywhere she looks.
Her sadness is unrelenting. The counter
is a barrier to holding her.
It makes me ashamed to be happy
in front of her and the primroses
when I remember that Luciano has gone.

At the table I am composing a letter
to Ali in Mosul. I am saying Yes. Spring.
The lesser celandine, now it’s everywhere,
the big-starred and the little-starred.
While I walked in the woods today
I sent thoughts to you of blackbirds and robins.
As they flitted from tree to tree I imagined
orange and yellow tracer fire across the path.
But it was quiet there, not like war at all, just as loud
as the fluttering wings of birds on branches.

I am writing at the café table. In my arms
is my sweet baby who took her first steps
when I was looking the other way. I missed them.
She has soft brown hair and the sweetest nature.
People looking at her almond eyes
ask if there is any Chinese in the family.
They crowd around us, cooing about life
in the shadow of Lydia’s grief. Oh Lydia,
keep your sweet faith. Don’t die inside.


..
- posted by fatboy @ 1:12 am

 
Willesden Short Story Prize 2012: RESULTS by Steve Moran
(film recording from Katy Darby's You Tube channel)



The very affable and amiable Stephen Moran announces the winners of this
year's competition. Stephen is a great champion of the short story form and
through his founding of the competition, and via many other venues, he has
given great encouragement and support to many others, including myself.

Buy the book here
.
- posted by fatboy @ 8:01 pm

 
Moving Poems

curated by Dave Bonta


.
- posted by fatboy @ 5:45 pm

 

.

Advert for Clinic 5 Psych Ward Poetry Circle (All Welcome)
mfd


.
- posted by fatboy @ 9:00 am

 




There is about half a white moon tonight

There is about half a white moon tonight
against that exquisite blue the colour
of bottled ink. It sits over the bus shelter
by the all-night shop where boys will fight
later over drugs or girls. In the early morning
the unremitting boldness of a few drops
of some fool’s blood pressed from his lips
by other lips, or by a fist without warning,
will look blue against the pavement stone,
and later as the sky lightens to its autumn white
some commuter may see these drops are shot
through like small red scattered leaves thrown
by an oracle from a cave, and that each leaf
is lettered with the story of itself.
I was lost in the sight of the moon.
The moon was beautiful, careless, and aloof.

…

Mikey Delgado

from the Pretend Genius Press anthology
Last Night’s Dream Corrected

- posted by fatboy @ 8:56 pm

 


the woods are lovely, dark, and deep
mfd

.

- posted by fatboy @ 2:59 pm

 
...they tell me if I don’t show them how to link it up to the tv
they’re going to send my toes back to Danville in the box that
the highly durable, quality feel, sports attachments came in.



.
- posted by fatboy @ 11:13 am

 


- posted by fatboy @ 3:47 am

 
...and in the middle of his forehead
a tiny tiny blue bruise

..
- posted by fatboy @ 11:31 am

 
…revealing the true beauty and genius of the Chicago footworking scene


.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:11 am

 


café, golders hill
mfd



--------

- posted by fatboy @ 11:47 am

 


mfd

----



`
- posted by fatboy @ 11:43 pm

 


island christ
collage - mf delgado

---
- posted by fatboy @ 11:43 am

 
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

RM Rilke

----
- posted by fatboy @ 1:11 pm

 


west heath
mfd


-------

- posted by fatboy @ 12:19 pm

 
“Poets cry their hearts out. If they don’t they ain’t poets”

.......
- posted by fatboy @ 1:22 pm

 
The woman skating reminds us of the white dust
somehow, of the powdered bones in the rutted field.

......
- posted by fatboy @ 4:04 pm

 
Dai K lives at the end of a valley.

..
- posted by fatboy @ 8:36 pm

 
Weldon Kees reading his poem 1926


---
- posted by fatboy @ 8:13 pm

 


mfd


.
- posted by fatboy @ 7:46 pm

 


at Ty Coch, Rhiwddolion - meadow flowers
mf delgado


--------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:38 pm

 


mfd


----
- posted by fatboy @ 10:59 pm

 
The women of Kilkenny weep when the team loses
- posted by fatboy @ 3:47 pm

 


garden
mfd

--
- posted by fatboy @ 3:16 pm

 


Story - Dentist by Roberto Bolaño
from the collection Last Evenings on Earth.

mfd


---
- posted by fatboy @ 3:10 pm

 


Willesden Herald
New Short Stories 5

For the price of 4 cups of London coffee, some longer lasting nourishment.
Buy via here

-------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:42 pm

 


through east facing kitchen window, early morning sun
mfd
- posted by fatboy @ 12:01 am

 


short stories
mfd
- posted by fatboy @ 11:00 am

 


mf delgado

.

- posted by fatboy @ 3:49 pm

 
Reviews here and here of the novel Life and War with Mikey Fatboy Delgado




.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:39 am

 
Skanking to Captain Ska in the kettle.




via dvorakoa
-----

Original Captain Ska video and download links here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQFwxw57NBI

.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:11 pm

 
Day X

Chant -

“Give us back our EMA, make the fucking bankers pay”

http://anticuts.org.uk/

.
- posted by fatboy @ 1:04 pm

 


leaning trees and man, golders hill
mfd


.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:26 am

 
Liar Liar



hat tip - http://fatbuddha.blogspot.com/
- posted by fatboy @ 3:07 pm

 
Gregory Isaacs, The Cool Ruler - R.I.P

Brixton Academy 1984

Front Door





----------

Slave Master

Everytime I hear the music and I make a dip........





(All 13 parts of this, from the late golden age of reggae,
are here in the uploads list - big up Betopoa09
http://www.youtube.com/user/BETOPOA09 )




.
- posted by fatboy @ 9:02 pm

 
Now Available -
order from Laughing Mushroom Press,
or via Amazon
or any good bookshop.



Life and War with Mikey Fatboy Delgado





Before Hutton, before Butler, before Chilcot,
Mikey Fatboy Delgado was looking into the matter...
In the spring of 2003 the Iraq war is underway and
Mikey is almost all in favour of it. It makes for good
television and is improving his sex life. If only the BBC
would sort out those green pictures of fighting in the
dark he might even be prepared to cough up for a licence.
And if only corrupt policing and the amount that Blair grins
weren't so unsettling he would be able to relax and enjoy
watching the highlights of the fighting more.

***************

“Saddam has bitten the kids and pissed on
the mat and eaten our ganja and he won’t
stop fucking barking, so bosh, ta-ta, thanks
for all the fish, and fucking goodnight Irene.
Your services are no longer required, Saddam.
You are going up the motorway, pal.”



“You’re a nasty fucker. We’re nasty fuckers.
We’ve got the big battalions, you’ve got fuck
all. Out you go. Goodnight Irene.”


***********************

- posted by fatboy @ 1:12 am

 


dungeness / August
mfd
- posted by fatboy @ 11:09 am

 


mfd



---------

- posted by fatboy @ 9:13 pm

 


snowday


-----

- posted by fatboy @ 9:33 pm

 






.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:17 am

 


december

.

- posted by fatboy @ 6:56 pm

 


to kenwood
- posted by fatboy @ 12:30 am

 


the soft-dying day

.

- posted by fatboy @ 10:59 am

 



snowdon summit, august

-----
- posted by fatboy @ 3:07 pm

 





.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:40 am

 



at lowsonford


mfd
--------

- posted by fatboy @ 11:49 pm

 


ashwell, herts


--
- posted by fatboy @ 2:12 am

 



spring and all


.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:43 pm

 


silver birches, mist and thaw
- posted by fatboy @ 9:31 pm

 


snowdon summit
- posted by fatboy @ 11:42 am

 


skater and biker, south bank
- posted by fatboy @ 10:28 pm

 


running man, misty morning light, hampstead heath
- posted by fatboy @ 4:03 pm

 


bench, west meadow, kenwood
- posted by fatboy @ 9:57 pm

 


jumping master
- posted by fatboy @ 5:08 pm

 

mfd

--------

----------

- posted by fatboy @ 10:20 am

 

dungeness

----------

- posted by fatboy @ 12:55 am

 


dungeness
- posted by fatboy @ 12:40 am

 



mfd

------------
- posted by fatboy @ 2:51 am

 


mfd

---------------

- posted by fatboy @ 12:09 am