a solution to a twisted conundrum.
Inside this poem are the molecules
which make up every other poem,
written, forgotten or yet to come.
Saturday, 8 November 2025
James Watson – d. November 6th 2025
a solution to a twisted conundrum.
Inside this poem are the molecules
which make up every other poem,
written, forgotten or yet to come.
Pauline Collins – d. November 5th 2025
your audience willing you to risk
what they never could. Leave them
with your lines ringing: why do we
get all this life if we don’t use it?
Diane Ladd – d. November 3rd 2025
I saw you work the diner. I saw the silence
in your eyes fueling that barbed kindness,
and though you don’t live there anymore,
still I can never rinse away that wildness.
Tcheky Karyo - d. October 31st 2025
my face an unchanging moon,
my voice like low tide. There is
drama in my stillness. You think
you know what I’m thinking?
You will know when I tell you.
Peter Watkins - d. October 30th 2025
has been judged to be too
horrifying for social media;
no firestorms burning through
Home Counties, no fallout, no
looters shot on the street, only
this nightmare, filmed as truth.
Tuesday, 28 October 2025
Prunella Scales – d. October 27th 2025
the sound of Medusa cross-bred
with a hyena. To see her up close
is to step closer to death; death
by stare, by word, by comic gelding.
Tony Adams – d. October 26th 2025
of the semi-derelict motel just off
the Kings Oak bypass; moustache,
and sta-prest suit, already on his
third flirtation of the day, recording
each soul in a double-entry ledger.
Dave Ball – d. October 22nd 2025
the sound of the house band, pitched
somewhere between bliss and blitz,
songs to dance to, songs of despair,
battle-scars of all the good times.
Samantha Eggar – d. October 15th 2025
before you can blink, you see the screen
closing in like the walls of a cell, noticing
that each role is darker than the last.
Tony Caunter – d. October 13th 2025
from this man, who looks like
a bear but walks like a stray dog,
cuckolded in the name of drama,
looking for love and a quiet pint
in a postcode that doesn’t exist.
Diane Keaton – d. October 11th 2025
mere love and death; what about those
dizzy ingénues, women caught between
socialite and socialist, the lost and the
sweetly damaged, playing for laughs in
the diners and bedrooms of our hearts?
John Lodge – d. October 10th 2025
through music, each era a disguise,
each movement like a new religion.
Not for me the future in the past;
I would have given anything to be
the singer in a rock’n’roll band.
John Woodvine – d. October 6th 2025
there is the residue of a face
in the blink before and after
static, a man of a thousand
faces, all of them the same,
all carved from cold stone.
Jilly Cooper – d. October 5th 2025
far from her paddocks and gymkhanas.
She dresses me in hunting pinks, asks
me to spank her with her daddy’s crop
before handing me a novel, sighing,
saying Why can’t you be more like him?
Patricia Routledge – d. October 3rd 2025
telephone voices and antimacassars,
foundation garments and Rotary Clubs,
the arch drama of sweet domesticity,
artificial and yet authentic all at once.
Jane Goodall – d. October 1st 2025
where I came from, imagining
my simian family on their lonely
hillside, their devoted steward
offering gifts of love and curiosity,
holding out a hand like a mother.
Brian Patten – d. September 29th 2025
lying on a park bench in a city of words,
reciting poetry in his sleep, the sound
of a place, a time that won’t come again.
But vanishing tricks are two for a pound
round here, and all that’s left now is rain.
Bobby Hart – d. September 10th 2025
in a poisonous world, but there’s
a song that’s getting the funniest
looks from everyone it meets.
A man smiles, takes the last train,
forever blowing bubblegum.
Friday, 26 September 2025
Menzies Campbell - d. September 26th 2025
Where the middle way is still a way,
where to have convictions does not
mean that you have been convicted,
where the race is only with oneself
and the mediocre need not apply.
Danny Thompson - d. September 23rd 2025
heartbeat picked out on four fat strings.
Let them talk about technique; style is
the only style, trusting your ears to tell
your fingers where to go, what to say.
Claudia Cardinale - d. September 23rd 2025
the feline, barbed cheekbones and leopardine
eyes. Pull the focus, lengthen depth of field,
cut, print the magnetism, abandon all hope.
Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird - d. September 22nd 2025
something more than light is fading.
The bails come off, the nightwatchman
shakes your hand, certain in the
knowledge that there is a corner of
a foreign field that is forever Barnsley.
John Stapleton - d. September 21st 2025
we must find our time, our place, unknown
to all except the journalist who realises that
there are no bigger stories than our own.
Sonny Curtis - d. September 19th 2021
on the day after the music died?
They played songs you don’t hear
anymore; stories of strange lives
made straight, written for no-one.
You wrote the songs; the songs won.
Robert Redford - d. September 16th 2025
charm school graduates summa cum laude,
making dangerous look fun, standing for
something, not standing for other things,
fashioning stories from the best of dreams.
Ricky Hatton - d. c.September 14th 2025
working the heavy bag, arms
blurring from jab to uppercut,
eyes glittering like a title belt.
His mouth broke into a smile,
to show a mouthful of nails.
Stephen Luscombe - d. September 13th 2025
and yet so close to nirvana.
I’ve seen the word; it’s cruel.
I hear your music once again;
melody is the true dharma.
Sad day. I can’t explain.
Chris Hill - d. September 11th 2025
a denomination somewhere between
funk, soul and jazz, a fervent scene
that few have power to truly move.
Beats per minute are the sacred text.
One track finishes; cue up the next.
Giorgio Armani - d. September 4th 2025
without me it is empty. I stoop
to tie my lace; it bends with me.
At day’s end, we climb the stairs,
undress, and hang each other
in the dark wardrobe of sleep.
Joe Bugner - d. September 1st 2025
when all around are cheering
for the other man. Sparring
with legends, you must know,
is a tough way for a man to win;
the other way is never to give in.
Angela Mortimer - d. August 25th 2025
Miss Sobersides, above the spin
and daring frillies, from an age
where glory was £20 prize money
and the signing of an autograph.
Terence Stamp - d. August 17th 2025
deep in the bluest eye.
What thrift of movement,
of expression. What want
of love that cannot finesse
a smile. What stagecraft
that might save your life,
or break you in two.
Biddy Baxter - d. August 10th 2025
from vicarious experience. See him
as a boy, landlocked and ordinary,
boarding a ship about to leave port,
captained by a matron of the blue seas,
wide-eyed and hungry for the voyage.
Ray Brooks - d. August 9th 2025
I think I heard your voice inside a dark shop.
Years later I found a battered bowler hat
in my suit pocket. It will help me remember.
Eric Midwinter - d. August 8th 2025
in the Palace of Varieties,
yet in the Gods a man sits,
with a pen and a memory,
describing the anatomy
of laughter, writing faster
now for fear that the silence
in its wake might be forever.
Jim Lovell - d. August 7th 2025
I looked up at the night sky
to find no moon shining.
Instead, the face of a man,
learning his noblest goal
was not glory, but surviving.
Terry Reid - d. August 4th 2025
you were someone else’s song,
always coming in a bar too late.
A plaything of capricious fate,
in the right place at the wrong
time, but somehow still singing.
Stella Rimington - d. August 3rd 2025
from a cold history to a new heat.
Pieces are in play, stakes are high.
A solid legend makes a good spy.
Norman Eshley - d. August 2nd 2025
in another middling script;
spear-carriers and walk-ons
of the tiny screen, emptying
themselves into their roles,
immortal and obscure.
Wednesday, 30 July 2025
Alan Bergman – d. July 27th 2025
with the senses, to summon rhyme
to do the job of memory, to light a fire,
to be the voice heard above the choir,
words jangling, to fix in us a place, a time.
Tom Lehrer – d. July 26th 2025
alacrity, sagacity and mockery and repartee,
There’s plenty of absurdists and they come at ten-a-penny.
There may be one as sharp as him but I can’t think of any.
Cleo Laine – d. July 24th 2025
afraid they might taste of vanilla
without your drizzle of hot honey,
that easy contralto into glissando
up through four octaves to a trill
like an insistent lover’s tongue.
Hulk Hogan – d. July 24th 2025
brutality as a trompe l’oeil,
muscle tears and dislocations
mere Grand Guignol. You were
the bronzed heel/hero dying of
surprise in every bout, only
to be resurrected as a cartoon.
Ozzy Osbourne – d. July 22nd 2025
born from a cauldron of riffs,
who duetted with the Devil.
Happiness he could not feel;
he breathed sulphur, and
when he bled, he bled metal.
Kenneth Calman – d. July 21st 2025
takes a scalpel to itself,
yields its uncertainties,
admits the things
it does not yet know:
what dreams are for,
where poems come from,
how the heart
chooses its disguise.
Connie Francis – d. July 16th 2025
and they are few, is an ideal:
my swoonsome parents
queuing outside The Broadway,
their love as pure as your voice.
They, like you, had their day;
now I, over the years, must pay.
Shunsaku Tamiya – d. July 11th 2025
but couldn’t hold them in place without glue.
It was never the same as the picture on the lid.
I tried to finish what I started; I never did.
David Kaff – d. July 11th 2025
the follow spot settles on me,
more than half way through
my brief solo, spaced out
and smiling, finally having
a good time all the time.
Norman Tebbit – d. July 7th 2025
to search for the sleeping Grandees
of Little England, those cadaverous
few, still mumbling articles of faith
in their deathless slumber, still
wondering why we cannot forgive.
Luís Jardim– d. July 4th 2025
are curious ornamentations
of conga and clave, supple
fingers picking out a pulse in a
register somewhere between
heartbeat and wingbeat.
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