and at sea; cabin boy on a ship
of principles, a bristling steamboat
from another time, its first mate
hoisting the old red ensign high.
Saturday, 23 November 2024
John Prescott – d. November 20th 2024
and at sea; cabin boy on a ship
of principles, a bristling steamboat
from another time, its first mate
hoisting the old red ensign high.
Vic Flick – d. November 14th 2024
silence Dusty, Sandy, Shirley,
leave spangles of six-string light,
glints of joy and menace, hit or
miss, a bullet in every riff.
J Saul Kane – d. July 12th 2024
deadly venom and samples,
spikes of snare, sex, spaghetti
and a bass so deep it may not
kill you today but one day will.
Peter Sinfield – d. November 14th 2024
above bloat and bombast, your dark literacy;
phantasies of neurosurgeons, jesters, prison
moons, adolescence painted crimson, black.
Shel Talmy - d. November 13th 2024
their dirt into coal into diamonds.
Good times come and go, leaving
the sound of London youth melted
and pressed into incendiary vinyl.
Brian Maxine – d. November 13th 2024
of something, even if it is only yourself.
You must wear the belt as if it were gold,
tilt your broken face to the sky, neckless,
defiant, like you were the last of the line.
Timothy West – d. November 12th 2024
chiselled from millstone grit.
Speak to crowd and camera
of hard times and heydays.
Gild with bluster and brass,
all eyebrows and uppishness.
June Spencer- d. November 8th 2024
Farms fall fallow; all that remains
are the bruised-apple accents of
those who have lived here forever,
days moving so slowly they can
only be lived by the quarter-hour.
Quincy Jones – d. November 3rd 2024
the slender thread braiding sweet
and swing and stomp and screen,
in good company and bad, always
beating out your own signature.
Janey Godley – d. November 2nd 2024
that there are fates worse than death.
Some can deliver the comedy of truth,
be sharp and blunt in the same breath.
Teri Garr - d. October 29th 2024
all elbows, fight over the best lines.
You trust your magnetism, and say
vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?
Not bright enough for some, but then
not every star owns their own shine.
Jack Jones – d. October 23rd 2024
dark in the shadows of vaudeville.
A choir of wives and lovers sing
dressed in the silk of his voice,
not one hair or note out of place:
‘Come aboard. We’re expecting you’.
Geoff Capes – d. October 23rd 2024
and firemen hauling the deadweight
of the 70s from a moribund Olympia
to a kind of glamour, provincial Atlases,
straining to lift us high above their heads.
Jim McColl - d. October 22nd 2024
we are the soil that we grow in,
our histories a ripening mulch.
We learn how to dig from such
as you; how words are a sowing,
how gardens measure our time.
Toshiyuki Nishida – d. October 17th 2024
chaos reigned; elemental forces
caused this child to journey east
in a band of badly dubbed beasts.
What I learned from such stories:
that a pig is a pig in any language.
Mitzi Gaynor – d. October 17th 2024
they have all been washed away
into the storm drains of Tinseltown,
set adrift on an ocean, clinging
to a raft of what might have been.
Liam Payne – d. October 16th 2024
and more. It hides their scores in distant
places; some seek a tune only to find it
crumbling into a handful of bum notes,
mistimed cues and sad, sad silences.
Philip Zimbardo – d. October 14th 2024
My line has made itself a prison
Your line assumes its own authority
My line has been sent to solitary
Your line knows we must be punished
My line is an experiment, unfinished.
Alex Salmond – d. October 12th 2024
where some throw in their lot
with the dubiously charismatic,
the caustic and the convicted,
with those who believe that
two Noes sometimes make a Yes.
Ron Ely – d. September 29th 2024
empty save a note in bronze ink
identifying a southern latitude
where trees are pulped to make
comic books, and you are a king.
Wednesday, 9 October 2024
Cissy Houston – d. October 7th 2024
how you would say it: with solemnity and
sweet inspiration, from a chorale of sisters,
cousins, daughters, beautifully tragic but
painted with the coloratura of greatness.
Kris Kristofferson – d. September 28th 2024
though some choose dirty denim over rhinestones,
writing the lonesome sound of the comedown,
of a morning lost and found on a sleeping sidewalk.
Maggie Smith – d. September 27th 2024
nor expression, nor the potential of line
and delivery. Acting is a lonely passion;
its virtuosi are deathlessly in their prime.
David Graham – d. September 20th 2024
into some supermarionated future,
where we har beyond rescue, where
hour haccents betray us, and life
halways ‘as strings hattached, milady.
Tony Soper – d. September 18th 2024
except on television. I stood alone at the
wrong end of my binoculars, peering at
a man in Barbour in his own quiet paradise.
And that thing with feathers? It
was hope.
Salvatore ‘Toto’ Schillaci – d. September 18th 2024
A volte il fantasma dello spogliatoio
avvita diamanti al posto di borchie,
e per un mese soleggiato, ogni passaggio
va ai piedi, ogni tiro segnava.
avvita diamanti al posto di borchie,
e per un mese soleggiato, ogni passaggio
va ai piedi, ogni tiro segnava.
La stagione finisce; il fantasma se n’è andato.
Sometimes the ghost of the
bootroom
screws in diamonds instead of studs,
and for a sunlit month, every pass
goes to feet, every shot screams in.
The season ends; the ghost is gone.
screws in diamonds instead of studs,
and for a sunlit month, every pass
goes to feet, every shot screams in.
The season ends; the ghost is gone.
Kenneth Cope – d. September 11th 2024
in a minor hit, a short run. You stole
like Pepper’s ghost through walls of
imagination, white on white, bitter as
a dead man set to die a second time.
James Earl Jones - d. September 9th 2024
plutonic darkness made human, gravity
that cannot be resisted. It is authority
and compassion. It is both the presence
and absence of a man, felt and heard.
Zoot Money – d. September 8th 2024
the blown amps, discs that slipped
into the guts of the jukebox, or you
could roll the big roll, playing what
you love, loving what you play.
Herbie Flowers – d. September 5th 2024
the mannered frontmen; leave
just the bass in all its fullness,
leading from the back, beyond
its lowest frequencies, bending
time and colour and memory.
Sérgio Mendes – d. September 5th 2024
da praia e da favela,
música no tom da alegria,
cana de açúcar e sorrisos,
eternamente quente,
eternamente frio.
from praia and favela,
songs in the key of joy,
sugar cane and smiles,
forever hot, forever cool.
Brian Trueman – d. September 1st 2024
a Wheelie-World, a Cuckoo-Land,
where a hand writes a childhood,
teaches funny voices, shows how
silly is just a stop on the road
to the fleeting kingdom of happy.
Phil ‘The Collector’ Swern – d. August 31st 2024
who owned every record ever pressed
and stored them in a church of memory.
Such a man would be worth their weight
in vinyl. I’ll have to take your first answer.
Tuesday, 27 August 2024
Sven-Göran Eriksson – d. August 26th 2024
in how the game is played;
with charisma, effort, libido.
We have to trust in tactics;
this might only be half-time,
we might still turn this round.
Alain Delon – d. August 18th 2024
Être éclairé comme le jour, par votre propre feu.
Avoir des ennuis; ce que tu penses, dis.
Être beau, même jusqu'au bout.
Vivre là où les autres ne peuvent jouer la comédie.
To be lit like day, by your own fire.
To be trouble; what you think, say.
To be handsome, even to the end.
To live where others can only act.
Gena Rowlands – d. August 14th 2024
blurring; the edge of love, of
sanity, decency, where youth
tips into middle-age, where
celebrity pales into ambiguity,
where you turn into your myth.
Edna O’Brien – d. July 27th 2024
those men who would be gods. Rage
from a pulpit of words so we may learn
of little emancipations on every page.
from a pulpit of words so we may learn
of little emancipations on every page.
John Mayall – d. July 22nd 2024
back together again and play for you;
the Class-A team, rootsmen and virtuosi,
stoned bassists, witchdoctors, even God,
strutting through the door you held open.
Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir – d. July 22nd 2024
for harmonies to break, only to be re-sung.
The empty sidewalks on my block used to play
your songs, the sad symphonies of the young
and lovelorn. I reach out. They are still there.
Ray Reardon – d. July 19th 2024
the chalk-marked victim lies on his back.
For those of you watching in black and white
the Count of the Cue is the one in the black.
Bob Newhart – d. July 18th 2024
No, I’ve never heard of him
either.
Oh th-that guy? Well maybe…
Oh yeah, I heard that sketch too.
Yeah, I guess it was pretty funny.
Oh th-that guy? Well maybe…
Oh yeah, I heard that sketch too.
Yeah, I guess it was pretty funny.
James B Sikking – d. July 13th 2024
Hill Street sloughs his uniform,
pipe and hat, shakes the starch
from his voice and combs steel
from his hair. He holsters his
sidearm, smiles, and stands down.
Ruth 'Dr Ruth' Westheimer – d. July 12th 2024
a consenting adult, lost in the
labyrinth of my body, ignorant of
the shapes and sounds of love,
needing advice or, preferably
a diagram. Is this normal?
Joe Engle – d. July 10th 2024
for an old-fashioned stick-and-rudder guy,
slipping the bonds of blue and into black,
measuring life’s curvature and coming back.
Shelley Duvall – d. July 11th 2024
each flake falling like lines from
the coldest script. You are there,
kooky and unnatural yet terrifying,
eternally gothic, strange, overlooked.
Joss Naylor – d. June 28th 2024
running their race away from
crowds,
driven by the climb and an internal fire,
one foot in the fells, one in the clouds.
driven by the climb and an internal fire,
one foot in the fells, one in the clouds.
Robert Towne – d. July 1st 2024
it’s Tinseltown -
a place where nothing
is real and yet everything,
where words
that might be yours
leap from the script
into the mouths of legends.
Kinky Friedman – d. June 27th 2024
desert contrarians who chip away
at the foot of every edifice, who see
sacred cows with a slaughterman’s
eye, blow smoke in a redneck’s
face.
Tuesday, 25 June 2024
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh – d. June 25th 2024
No relation. Michael back to Gabriel. Still
no relation. Jesus has the sliotar, kicks one
from 50 yards…it’s a miracle. Atheists from
Dingle to Drogheda are buying rosaries...'
Donald Sutherland – d. June 20th 2024
have been you; raffish, charming,
dangerous, troubled eyes that
spoke of suicide missions and love
in the dark. You saw me staring,
pointed at me, and screamed…
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