december

.

- posted by fatboy @ 6:56 PM

 
In a barn in P———– in spring



What happened here is this—the long
smell of the sacking and the engine oil
across the many years and the scrape
of the concrete on my writhing back
and the throat-blocked voice breathing stop
and the plea HELP scratched into a timber
by my adored mouth and the roar of a tractor
after lunch across the fields and some brave bird
coming to the tree to herald spring as we
by its music are dragged across the gritted floor
our hips rising and twisting and sunlight
of March quality striping the gaps at the edges
of the vertical banded doors and this—what
is it—apprehension of a shotgun death flitting
across the mind as the farmer hoists to his shoulders
my white wintered legs and denies me life
and channels into me his own shoaling river
and calls me beautiful beautiful beautiful
and kneels like the crucifix of a weathered man
with ankles in his hands which move as if salting meat.


(http://qarrtsiluni.com)
.
- posted by fatboy @ 6:52 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 @ 2:07 PM

 





.
- posted by fatboy @ 11:40 PM

 



at lowsonford


mfd
--------

- posted by fatboy @ 10:49 PM

 


ashwell, herts


--
- posted by fatboy @ 1:12 AM

 



Don’t close your eyes in Spring
- posted by fatboy @ 12:06 PM

 
sometimes i feel like a motherless child




.
- posted by fatboy @ 10:02 PM

 



spring and all


.
- posted by fatboy @ 12:43 PM

 


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

 



Kultur on the eve of war

- posted by fatboy @ 10:09 AM

 


mikey delgado meets keith hudson on Golders Hill
vocals, melodicas, overdubs, mix, photos - mikey delgado
rhythm - nuh skin up

try with headphones


**
- posted by fatboy @ 10:35 PM

 


snowdon summit
- posted by fatboy @ 10:42 AM

 
Queen and Country / Letter
(click)


....and London Mikey the black boy
never came back
from his next leave.
Stabbed by a white boy
in a pub in cowboy country
south of the river. National Front.
Good fucking bloke he was, Mikey,
called his house his yard.
One of the boys man.

Peace!

Later!



----------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:40 PM

 


skater and biker, south bank
- posted by fatboy @ 9:28 PM

 


running man, misty morning light, hampstead heath
- posted by fatboy @ 3:03 PM

 
on hampstead heath with milou and serge gainsbourg in dub
- posted by fatboy @ 6:30 AM

 
variation on black orpheus theme (edit)
(re-recorded and re-uploaded)

film: at kenwood and hampstead heath 14/7/08
music: variation on black orpheus theme (edit)

film and music: mikey delgado






------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:37 PM

 


bench, west meadow, kenwood
- posted by fatboy @ 8:57 PM

 


jumping master
- posted by fatboy @ 4:08 PM

 
Last exit to Cricklewood
mikey delgado collaboration with C du Pape and Faustino Rioja Crianza






-------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:52 PM

 

mfd

--------

----------

- posted by fatboy @ 10:20 AM

 
wh'appen when a gunman....? (edit)
mikey delgado live at The Inbox





mikey (melodica, controls)


------------
- posted by fatboy @ 9:53 AM

 
'golders dub'
early hours melodica chill out
mfd






------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:43 AM

 
skank, mikey's melodica over the top of dub master x


- posted by fatboy @ 10:35 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

 
In a country churchyard



A shadow and solitude. We are alone save for the singing
of the choristers. The cook could comfort us but the night café
won’t be open for hours and the gravestones are cold
and the shadows have shadows and the solitude is also lonely.
After great pain, this one says. But who knows?
If they weren’t there? Dusk greysilks the air.
Don’t be brave, it will hinder the absorption of nutrients,
the cook had sobbed.He advises using grief to seize
and take hold of the hands of the ones we want. By feeling them
it sends a signal. It is how he chooses his meat. The lambs
wait for him. It is a great responsibility. I order them
to die. The reverend father fades in his blackness
into the dark. Somewhere he is coming home alone.
We wait until we can’t tell him from the night
and we leave, and we leave him there, among his forefathers.



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

 

mfd









-----------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:27 AM

 



Poetry Sits Vac / Sits Wanted.
Page 1 of 47



Poet seeking work, flexible hours,
live in or out. Prefers to do ballads and/or
quatorzains but anything considered.

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


Couple, he 37, she 34, both formalists
available for sonnets, sestinas etc.

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

Live-in poet required. Every other weekend off.
No post-modernists.
No doggerel writers need apply.


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

Poet seeking work from October.

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


Comfortable room available
for a versatile poet. Mostly light verse
required but may be required to
compose epithalamiums as our children
are close to marrying age.

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

Shakespeare was a man of wit
and on his shirt he had some shirt buttons...

Lady poetess looking for post, preferably
in a home without children. Large portfolio
available for inspection. Comic verse
and villanelles a speciality.

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


Writer of nonsense verse (live-in) required.
Will need a valid passport and U.S visa.


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


Can you rhyme at will? Then this may be the job
for you. Friendly modern Orthodox family with
two children, seeking live-in poet, preferably
female and Jewish.


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

Are you a fan of Modernism and vers libre?
Then this ISN'T the job for you.
Family, modern in every respect except for taste
in poetry, seeking a full-time formalist, live in
or out.
Some weekends required.


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


A room of one's own is waiting for that special poet.


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


L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet required for immediate start.
P60 must be available. Generous package and holidays.

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


caxtons are mechanical birds...

Do you agree? Are you able
to mix humour with metaphors?
If so a fabulous opportunity awaits you.
This position would suit a retired gent
working from home.

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



Poet seeking position, live-out only.
Likes Eliot, Stevens, Lowell, Bishop etc.


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


Hungarian couple, hard working poets, long visas
looking for poetry work in London and/or the home
counties.

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


cont'd over
-----------


Amanda Saxonheart, Media Editor, writes: >




When Gyorgy Petch arrived by coach in London with just one suitcase, a notebook, and no discernible skills, and certainly no tool kit for plumbing jobs, the immigration authorities must have been tempted to advise him to get back on the bus, forget about us, and head back to the Hungarian/Slovak border.

How amazed they would have been to have followed him into the streets outside Victoria Coach Station and witness the tumultuous scenes there. Word had already got out that Gyorgy was arriving and the streets were packed with families desperate to secure his services. His services? Some mistake surely? What services could Gyorgy Petch possibly offer anyone, least off all the families of north west London who were out in great numbers vying to outbid each other to get Gyorgy to ride home with them. After all, Gyorgy has no degree, no plumbing skills, has never picked a strawberry for financial gain in his life, has never even seen a cockle.

Well, the secret resides in that notebook which Gyorgy takes everywhere. And what is in that thar notebook. Is it gold? Oil? Not quite, but not so far off the mark either. Why, you cry, what then is in this magical notebook? Poems of course. Hundreds of them. Sonnets, sestinas, rhyming couplets, comic quatrains about the accession of Eastern European countries to the European Union. Page after page of black ink gold.

Poets, for all those who have been on Mars for the last five years, are BIG, and they are in demand, and though the world is full of them and even fuller of their verses it is undeniable that demand is outstripping supply. In a recent survey over seventy three per cent of households on Hampstead Garden Suburb were found to employ at least one poet. At least?! Yes, at least! You read it right. A staggering seventeen per cent of households on the Suburb now employ two or more poets. The rush hour bus which shuttles between Golders Green and the Suburb is dubbed by locals the 'Anthology Express' due to the number of poets on their way to and from their places of work in the homes of the well-heeled local residents.

Said Father Thomas McGuinness, waiting at Victoria and hoping to snaffle Gyorgy as poet-in-residence for St Edmund's in Finchley Central..."We hope that Gyorgy will look upon our offer favourably. He will have a five year contract, five weeks holiday, a non-contributory pension scheme and...

Cont'd page 9

Page 11 Poet assaulted in late-night scuffle over shwarma

Page 13 Poets go home? - Have your say - Are we being swamped?



.
- posted by fatboy @ 10:06 PM

 

the earth yields tender grass

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

- posted by fatboy @ 9:10 PM

 

mfd

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

- posted by fatboy @ 10:08 PM

 


- posted by fatboy @ 10:47 PM

 






----------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:44 AM

 
Stepping from the funeral car, creased suit



Stepping from the funeral car, creased suit,
from the breath of family into sun
of the kind one gets in April sometimes
but rarely, a dread is cooled there somehow,
as if it is old and ailing and suffers the heat
and there is a breeze risen from the north;
or as in the blood room when the patient
is about to fall and the nurse reaches
above the faint head of the pallid man
and flicks the blue switch of the cooling fan,
and the air becomes cold against his wet
and holds him upright, soothed and to himself
shamed. And the procession in twos enters
the slabbed cold, to stares, the family, us.


---------
- posted by fatboy @ 6:49 PM

 






mfd
----------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:04 PM

 

draft and pen



- posted by fatboy @ 7:03 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 @ 5:54 PM

 


- posted by fatboy @ 9:10 PM

 


Pearls caressed from bamboo / Spring
mfd




-------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 9:07 PM

 


Translating her father's poems
with the poet's daughter

mfd

- posted by fatboy @ 12:48 PM

 




platform mirror, letchworth garden city, new year



- posted by fatboy @ 11:46 PM

 



dec 25 hyde park 3pm

last year





------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:06 PM

 



mostly birches, hampstead heath







-------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:18 PM

 



near flatford mill




---------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:52 PM

 



and it was so





-------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:48 PM

 
from Prison - a monologue.

A pad in HMP Cardiff.

click for sound

I never thought I'd kill anyone, man. I never thought I'd kill anyone when I was a kid.......


------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 9:51 AM

 



saturday, after rain





--------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:58 PM

 



moon over the hippodrome





-----------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 2:14 PM

 



in a station of the metro (1926)



- posted by fatboy @ 8:54 PM

 



and one bus may hide another


(one train may hide another - kenneth koch)




-----------------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:22 PM

 



our arms are full, our heads are empty




----------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 9:40 AM

 

bus
- posted by fatboy @ 10:44 PM

 



in west meadow





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


--------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:51 PM

 



sky, railings, couple in red, reflected in water



------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 6:54 PM

 

. 
- posted by fatboy @ 2:28 PM

 
from Prison - a monologue

Click for sound Alison, what are you doing now, love?



--------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:58 AM

 
On the day Weldon Kees disappeared



In the defunct hotel we sneak from room
to room, our hands are ghosted white
with plaster from the ceiling roses
we’ve chiselled free in the curtained gloom.
Between roses we puff Amsterdam’s finest green.
It will enliven the brandy we’ve lifted
from the off-licence on our way to this work.

The higher I get the more keen
I am to talk about Weldon Kees, but poetry
and films aren’t machines made from words
to any of you here, they are sentimental and gay,
not like you tough thieves. Poets, if you knew any,
would have their berets and cravats ripped away.
They would be seized upon like similes
in overflows of incomprehension, and the tale recollected
in tranquil beer gardens after work at the end of day
by you heroes, you unwitting reciters of epics
who never noticed Derek loves Roy scratched
into the bridge with a key on its edge, the letters white
through green lichen; or that distressed on the ledge
of a high window a woman before falling turns
as if she’s changing her mind, slips to rest in mid-air
several times in a newspaper’s frames, holds her skirt
as if she should protect her modesty on the way down,
and startles the leaves and branches of limes
which cannot slow her. She will be named later.
I will think of her till then as Betty Nebraska.




-----------------
- posted by fatboy @ 7:31 AM

 

heath 
- posted by fatboy @ 9:46 PM

 


cheb nacim, rise, finsbury park




-----------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:21 PM

 

. 
- posted by fatboy @ 12:19 PM

 

. 
- posted by fatboy @ 10:13 PM

 



catsear , sky, noon




----------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:39 PM

 



pillared dormitories






---------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:53 AM

 




..and the sky is vast
holkham




----------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:25 AM

 
At the teaching hospital

(This Week - Exploring The Haiku Today --

from November the
Psych ward poetry circle
meets at 4 pm

–note on the door, Clinic 5)


At the teaching hospital, he says, in the late afternoon
the light has almost but not quite gone. It isn’t now
that most people draw their curtains but it’s time here
to not see any more people passing the window, or hear
the thoughts they have, or see them going wherever
they are going, to do whatever it is they are going to do.

It’s too much. And the bird on the ledge on the other side
of the curtain – there is a life in that too. He says
he doesn’t want to always be thinking
why that is a bird and why he is what he is,
and how easily he might have been a starling
or some other thing that lives outside
with no-one to medicate his pain.
He has wondered these last few minutes
if it can be time yet. Does he hear voices?
Only when he notices himself saying to himself
oh fuck off as he shuts the day out,
or when the hemiplegic tries to rise, to run,
asking, did Mallarmé ever say ‘ça suffit’ ?

Is he frightened? Now?
Only when he notices that he can see himself
from above like a camera, or when he sees
that the camera sees him in the dark
illuminated by blue screenlight
in the still house. Or in bed, when he will be asleep
and helpless, when nothing is moving except the dust
disturbed by his breath, and the house itself, and him laid out
with everything that is him departed from its case.
I am afraid, he says, that there are not-quite-people
gathered around the bed, observing my sleep,
watching the blankets rise and fall. They never speak,
not to each other, not to themselves.

The circle listens, gasps, shudders.

The sociopath with vertigo is the first to rise.
The collective is drawn to purpose like the atoms
of a shoelace through an eyelet, he says. These rooms
are groups of lines in which we hide ourselves.
A female student, he thinks, knows she can’t do this work.
She goes home each evening smelling of hospitals.
She sees the emptied bodies wheeled past the ward,
she smells the stripped-down beds. She fears to think
of herself as a cabinet of bric-a-brac.

You man! Beans? Si, Art,
grassy arse. Pay Li-wee, con
template, says the O.

What is this? Pay him
with a template? You speak It-
alian? Chinese?

Adore. No.

He is besieged. My
walls may fall. We can help. If
you co-operate.

You must.

I can’t.
I will lose myself.


--------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:20 PM

 



soda / pop isogloss





------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:50 AM

 


dreamfilled





-------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:33 PM

 



"...a little ray entered the woeful prison"





-------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:40 PM

 







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






- posted by fatboy @ 12:28 PM

 



bar table, brighton beachfront





---------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 3:34 PM

 
excerpt from Prison - a monologue.

A cell in HMP Cardiff. The prisoner is chatting to the audience.

click for sound

-------

...and on this altar were tins of pineapple chunks, and boxes of stuff that gives us bowel disease..biscuits and shit like that...they think it’s from some god of course, and that’s all right, that’s nothing too weird, they dont have to believe in the nailed up son of god, but freaky freaky man...they all had this on their altar...this photo......

(shows audience the photo he's holding)







--------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 8:50 PM

 






-------
- posted by fatboy @ 7:36 PM

 
Excerpted from Prison - a monologue

Edward said the jails are full of foreigners



----------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:55 AM

 



things to do when elected

mfd




----------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:05 AM

 



tapescript
mfd





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

 
Photograph



At half-time in the centre circle we enjoy
a cigarette laced with something from Amsterdam.
There’s a photograph of us in that slight mist,
glistening; talk mist rises from our mouths,
and from the pursed lips of Steven who died young
is the straight blast of exhaled smoke mist.
We are each gazing in a different direction;
our red shirts are grey in the picture. We are
inside the white circle, six of us, separate
somehow, like horses, coralled together, but alone.
You can just make out the thin smoke rising
from the tip of the spliff in Steven’s hand,
outstretched to whoever wants it. No-one
leans towards him to take it. In that old
photograph, in that slight mist at half-time,
he already seems the most alone of all of us.




14-03


---------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 9:31 PM

 



cafe , night.
mfd




- posted by fatboy @ 8:50 PM

 



texting / guangzhou from brighton





--------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:25 AM

 




temporary paste while changing trains,
coke machine, blackfriars station





-------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 7:51 PM

 



national gallery




---------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:55 PM

 



fallen birch in ironpan pond




----------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:22 PM

 


sunday, west meadow




------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:45 AM

 

december / mfd

some trees




---------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:44 AM

 


North Circular sunset, 4 pm





------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:36 PM

 


landscape and people, hyde park, 1 pm, Christmas -
mikey delgado ©

- posted by fatboy @ 2:31 PM

 



vor... M11 southbound


- posted by fatboy @ 12:21 AM

 







----------------------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 5:21 PM

 

light - 11 a.m



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

 

sunday 2 p.m 
- posted by fatboy @ 11:01 PM

 




leaf and sky /
november




- posted by fatboy @ 10:05 PM

 



below north wood
mfd





-----------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:12 PM

 


sunday





-------------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 1:32 PM

 


6.30 pm
mfd





------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:27 AM

 


cloud and jet scars - mfd
7.30 pm, 15th june, nw11.





------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:47 AM

 



worlds, everywhere




---------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:23 AM

 



the sea, the sea





---------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:39 AM

 

.









-------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:06 AM

 

old portsmouth 





------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:25 AM

 

straining 28/05



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

 


Coffeeshop notes on 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle'





-------------
- posted by fatboy @ 10:55 PM

 
en haut elles mangent des singes




en haut elles mangent des singes -
collage -
may05 - mikey delgado




--------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:34 AM

 

Cardiff - Election Day - 5/05
mikey delgado




-----------------------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 11:22 PM

 

city / detail



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

 

beyond the thin red curtain at midnight
is a full yellow moon - mikey delgado
- oil on board





---------------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:56 AM

 

Soraya Gilman is, let's face it, dangerous...
- draft of short story on A4 envelope
Letter #13 (to Mrs Zahavi)




---------------------------------
- posted by fatboy @ 12:28 AM