Otwituaries : Andy Jackson's tweet-length poetic elegies for the departed

Politics is a long walk, not a cab on expenses. It does not speed through our darker towns swerving round the fallen, past the crowds. It i...

Some lives are a slow turn of the arm, same line and length day after day; others deceive with variation, changes of pace and angle, occas...

The universe is barely credible, its mass in excess of what is visible, its meaning opaque, intangible. Most of us exist and die, illegible ...

It’s not easy in the Big Easy, friend, and making it big is the biggest joke, but a bluesman’s a bluesman right to the end, and life’s hard,...

You sit down to play; the kit becomes an orchestra, a symphony of drums, super-heavy, hi-hat like a ticking bomb, paranoid snare and depth-...

Sooner or later we will return to an Eden of our own; yours will be lush and romantic, bass amped up and folded back until it becomes a h...

Even through the soup of medium wave I heard that glimmer of guitar, a six-string smile, riffing like a wink. Song devises codes of joy; you...

Some songs blunder in, shouting their own names, angry, but with no solutions. Others wear different skin, turn inertia into flames, kindle ...

America wears a disguise of song, usually too long, torn between the loud and the lush, and always too much. You sang anguish into a soft sp...

In One! A double - no, a treble bed. In Two! The only colours; black and red. In Three! The working man and his pleasures. And Bully’s Speci...

Butter and fillet steak comes up to room temperature in the old kitchen. In the yard a motorcycle clicks as it cools. I hear laughter lik...

I watched you write me into a poem, your old shirt cuffs ironed to a shine. We are all in a sonnet for the unlucky, far from who we want to ...

We love our mavericks; deft, defiant, playing impudent one-twos with two fingers in the air, a betting slip and a phone number hidden in ...

I stumbled across you in the labyrinth of childhood; serpentine, seductive, waiting around the corner in a place where television was a tw...

Here are roses and a meat cleaver, Scotch & Threat and hearty laughter, a slug of pain for a luckless lover. Life is large, but you wer...

Have you met him yet? The empty man at the empty desk, gloriously flat, outrageously bland, playing a ‘Don’t Know’ in a slough of ‘Strongl...

If you would speak up, know this; the right word is a wedging of doors, a filling of lamps, a bending of bars, a flare shot into the sky, a...

A celestial On Air light blinks and the airwaves open up. The music is drowned out by the wild sounds of a zoo where animals cannot sing and...

Here is a song sung in code, in chant, howl, shriek, moan, sung as in future days, old now but once new, stoned yet stone cold sober. Don’t ...

The screen role demands a particular Englishness; weary, morose, soft hands but hard eyes, finesse but not flash. I wonder who might fit the...