Fiftywords
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fiftywords.bsky.social
Fiftywords
@fiftywords.bsky.social
1.6K followers 2.5K following 1.6K posts
Thinks too much and tries to make sense of the world’s chaos, beauty, and commas; mostly through poetry.
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fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for today’s #vss365
The Architecture of Knowing We carve numbers into stone, teach the void to count itself. We build gods from silence, give them names, make them speak. We spin time into circles, teach the sun to set, the moon to return. We lay grids over the sky, measure stars against our own hands, say, this one is here, this one is there. We fold the endless into books, stack pages against the weight of forever, write the last line, so we can sleep. But the sky is not written, the tide keeps no measure. The numbers end The void goes on. We are small, smaller than the maps we draw, but this knowing can set us free. We may vanish, dissolve into the tide's uncounted pull, but to vanish is to belong.
November 22, 2025 at 8:13 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
What does it mean to hold onto your name when the world and your mind starts to forget it?This #PoemsAbout #Dogtags looks at memory, identity, and the quiet defiance of holding on. @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
Dog Tag Not the metal but the certainty that your name once fit your body. You carry it because the world keeps trying to rename you: patient, veteran, burden, relapse. A small plate of fact against the drift. You touch it just to feel the sentence of yourself still whole. And you wonder what a name is worth when the mind walks off without it. A tag, a trace, a held fragment of the man you insist was real. Identity, reduced, only just refusing erasure. Until the day Until
November 21, 2025 at 6:39 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
The phrase “a schmozzle in the parallelogram” was immortalised by the legendary Gaelic games commentator Michael O’Hehir. It describes the chaotic, harmless scuffle that sometimes erupts during games. #vss365 #Speirgorm
A Schmozzle in the Parallelogram Oh, the lift of it, the sudden, soaring joy a group of lads, in perfect, wordless harmony, to stage a small opera of push and shove. A harmless rapture, a muddle of mirth, the kind of brawl that makes no enemies, only participants, swept up together in the same bright foolishness. Jerseys flap like banners, boots scatter divots like confetti, and the crowd erupts, not in outrage, but delighted recognition: ah yes, the ancient dance is upon us again. No malice in it, just the glorious release of being young and alive on summer grass full of thunder with nowhere in particular to send it. And over the mayhem, O'Hehir, smiling in his voice, christens the carnival with that perfect blessing: A schmozzle in the parallelogram! And the whole place cheers, for the play, for the players, for the sacred mess of it, and the shining truth that nobody really minds.
November 20, 2025 at 1:46 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s today’s #vss365
The Option That Never Arrives Option as différance: neither here nor there, forever circling the runway Of the self. Meanwhile the modern world hands us artisanal indecision, forty-seven oat milks, and no script for being human. Freedom, they said, lies in choice. But mostly it lies in the aisle, watching us panic.
November 19, 2025 at 5:21 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
In a damaged world, truth survives only in the fractures. For #vss365
The Refusal That Remains Reality is the lie we consent to dream, the soft machinery that cages the truth. And the poem, a small act of refusal, keeps open what the world would seal.
November 18, 2025 at 9:50 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This is for today’s #vss365 and anyone who experienced the exhilaration of Troy Parrott’s goal for Ireland yesterday #Speirgorm
November 17, 2025 at 10:39 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
A poem for #vss365 about yet another housing plan in Ireland, all the broken ones before it, and the new voice in the Áras. #speirgorm
Between the Plans Another plan announced. Another promise poured into the cracked mould of every failure. Blueprints bloom, and wither, a perennial policy, of tomorrow. Rents climb like ivy over condemned walls. Faces queue for rooms that will never be theirs. We count the years in waiting lists, the decades in deferrals. And somewhere between quays and the pull of coast roads, a voice rising, low, steady, heavy with the years we kept in silence. She listens, strips the ache of slogans, and lets it breathe.
November 16, 2025 at 9:36 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
As my beloved Constantinople is often called the city of the worlds desire, here’s another for #PoemsAbout #Desire @thebrokenspine.co.uk
City of the World's Desire A glint not water, not quite promise, just flickers at the hinge of continents. Streets refuse their names. A dome lifts like an unanswered question. Wind tastes of salt and a rumour of gold. You think you've arrived, but every corner slips sideways, a palimpsest of footsteps you cannot follow. Desire here is architecture: arches leaning into absence, a wall held up by all it remembers. Voices braid themselves through alleys of unspent longing. Nothing begins; everything echoes. And the strait, that restless throat, keeps whispering departures, as if the city were the dream before you dream it. You walk until the light turns colourless, until even the horizon falters, and still, in the half-thought between breaths, the city tilts its face toward you, unclaimed, unclaimable, wanting to be wanted.
November 15, 2025 at 10:11 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This Steve Reich inspired poem fits today’s #vss365
Utterent Track after Steve Reich I was born between stations. I was born between stations. Places passed through me, names without meaning, fields without fences. We said we were going somewhere. We said we belonged. We said these seats were ours. The engine never asked. The track never turned Only forward, only faster. In other carriages, voices blurred, languages I almost knew, faces I had once worn. I heard a whistle. Not mine. I saw a hand, not raised to wave. We rode the same line, but differently. My window showed a version of sky. And still, I was born between stations, my name is a whisper, my destination left blank.
November 15, 2025 at 8:49 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Knowest thou not, O Fairies' lord!
How much by us contemn'd, abhorr'd,
Whatever hides the female form
That cannot bear the mortal storm?

William Blake, The Rossetti Manuscript
#BookWormSat
November 15, 2025 at 7:47 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Roman Emperor Hadrian loved a young man named Antinous. History turned their passion into rumour #PoemsAbout #Desire @thebrokenspine.co.uk @alanparrywriter.co.uk
A God of Flesh and Marble (Hadrian remembers Antinous) They say we used to canoodle; a word too soft for the solemn silk of your body folded into mine. Too coy for the way your breath halted my empire. They don't say love, not for men like us draped in marble and consequence. Unly rumours, reliefs, a glint in the eye of a broken statue. Only gods dare name it. You, river-born and taken by river, drowned not in current but in the undertow of politics, prophecy, or my own fearful need. I built cities from your absence. They deny our love. But they weren't there when the world slipped from your wet, unbreathing mouth.
November 14, 2025 at 6:00 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s today’s #vss365
A Hymn to Prohibition Every transgression is an act of faith in the law that forbids it. Desire listens for the voice of no. Guilt replies, a hymn to prohibition. The law endures, because we keep trying to break it.
November 9, 2025 at 9:05 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
A different sort of war for #BookWormSat “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.“ The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)
Sediment What settles looks like peace, dust after labour, ash after fire. But sift it, and you'll feel the weight of all that sank first.
November 8, 2025 at 9:36 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s on older one for today’s #vss365
The Glamour of Grammar They taught us rules: avoid the split, mind your moods and predicate wit. But no one said what clauses could do, how a comma might cast a spell on you. A well-placed dash? A trapdoor's swing. A semicolon? A secret ring. Modifiers glimmer, verbs take flight, each sentence stitched with sleight of write. Beneath the tense and case and form, lies something bright, and sly, and warm: a glamour, old, in subject and style, that turns a rule into a beguile.
November 8, 2025 at 9:05 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
I posted this earlier in the week but it works for one for the #LockedDoors of knowledge that some of us experience #Poems About @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
November 7, 2025 at 5:40 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
The agency of women is often seen as a fatal flaw in history and myth #vss365
Hamartia (She Speaks) For Antigone, Medea, and women since They wrote my flaw in the script before I spoke. Called it pride when I would not bow. Called it madness when I named the wound. But I was not the storm. Only the wind that said no. They say I missed the mark, as if there were a mark I was allowed to hit. They do not ask what it means to carry law in your blood and justice in your throat, to bury a brother, to bear the unchilded grief of a husband's betrayal and still walk unburnt through fire. My hamartia was not blindness. It was sight too clear, too sharp to play the game of looking away. Call it flaw if it helps you sleep. But I was never broken. I was breaking free.
November 7, 2025 at 9:58 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for #PoemsAbout #LockedDoors @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
Door Without Passage The door leans in its frame, neither closed nor open, its seam of light a promise without witness. You wait, learning the hours by dustfall, the years by the wood's slow warp, believing each breath of hinge a signal of permission. But no hand denies you, no voice refuses. The weight of your own doubt, that drowns out the silence, keeps returning. And at the end, when your body bends toward earth, the door inclines, not to admit, not to refuse, only to cast a shadow where nothing stood.
November 7, 2025 at 7:39 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
My memory of education for this #vss365
They Called It Learning I. They cut my hunger into neat syllables, called it learning. Each word weighed on a meagre scale, enough to fill the day, but not the mind. Latin declensions, not meant for our mouths. We learned instead the grammar of getting by. Taceantur sub rosa dicta, keep what's said unsaid, that's how you survive. M. We spoke in wages, in shifts, in weeks, the world bounded by admin jobs or industry. Poetry? Just a posh word for wasting time. IV. Yet nights, when the tv hissed its end, I'd mouth the names of gods they never taught, their echoes rising through brick and soot, small syllables of light they never could extinguish.
November 4, 2025 at 11:59 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
The story of D.J. Carey (one of the greatest hurlers of all time) is one of brilliance and downfall, a modern tragedy of fame, trust, and hubris. #Speirgorm
The Memory of Ash after Sophocles We crowned him with laurels, fed him praise as wine. But who may drink glory and not thirst for more? The years grew quiet. Fame withered like ivy on winter walls. He looked within and found an emptiness that called itself disease. "I am dying," he said, and compassion answered before truth could speak. Compassion is sacred, but curdles to grief, when trust becomes deceit; the honest hand will bleed on the sharpness of a lie. He took their silver, their prayers, their trust, coins gathered from compassion's well. He walked among the sick, spoke of hope, and pocketed their faith. The gods watched, silent, as mortals made him myth again. Hubris is not the cry of power, but the whisper of need, the man who cannot bear to be merely a man. Now the gates close. The crowds are gone. The medals dim beneath prison dust. He calls out, but the echo that answers is not forgiveness, only wind through hollow halls, only the slow unravelling of a name that once carried a county's pride. And still the air remembers: how bright he burned, how far he fell, how easily a hero unmakes himself for greed.
November 3, 2025 at 7:27 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for #vss365
Domus The house is quiet, except for what hums, the fridge, the fear, the endless day. The clock ticks on, each second a secret. The air is still. The drying dishes bear fingerprints of forgetting. A light blinks, unsure of its purpose. And Always, Always the endless rhythm of doing and being undone.
November 3, 2025 at 4:12 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s a creature for today’s #vss365
Narwhal No legend. Only heat where cold should cradle. The tusk listens, salinity, fracture, ice forgets seasons. It swims through thinning sheets of absence, a spiral in retreat. Myth was never shelter. The sea offers none now.
November 2, 2025 at 9:12 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This one also seems appropriate for today’s #vss365
The Poetry Business They tell me to write what I honestly feel, but polish it first for commercial appeal. Authentic, yet tidy; raw, yet polite, the agony market's performing tonight. The judges adore a well-seasoned despair, with trauma in couplets and grief with some flair. They tell me my verse must be urgent yet neat, with trauma that scans and enjambment on beat. I've written of loss with a tasteful finesse, but all of these rejections just add to my stress. They praise me in panels, then cut my remark, so earnest, so brave, so conveniently dark. I'll polish my suffering, proofread my pain, then queue for applause in the festival rain. Yet still I keep writing, for what else remains? The business of poetry - dreams, lightly chained.
November 1, 2025 at 2:56 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for today’s #vss365
Beatitudes of the Market Blessed are the busy, for they shall inherit the ashes of the earth. Blessed are the efficient, for they shall make idols of numbers and call them God. Blessed are the investors, for they shall reap what others sow in suffering. Blessed are the innovators, for they shall patent the air and sell it back to the breathless. Blessed are the consumers, for they shall hunger to feed the greed of others. Blessed are the children, for they shall inherit the debt of our desire. Blessed are the poor, for they shall provide cheap authenticity. Blessed are the faithful, for they shall worship at the altar of infinite growth until the altar burns. And it was good.
November 1, 2025 at 9:11 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. ” Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost #BookWormSat
The Patient Earth I dream of quiet roots, of time dissolving into the patient earth, where breath becomes becoming.
November 1, 2025 at 7:36 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Do we know the true cost of our phones #PoemsAbout #Blood @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
Bloody Phone This Bloody phone. Won't charge again. Keeps freezing too, and the screen's a bit cracked. Typical. Ah well, I'll get another. My contract's up, there's a newer version, better camera, faster load, things I'll never need. Kanku, can you try again today? Your small fingers, so good for sifting slurry. I need a phone, to keep in touch with people I don't know, for watching things I'll soon forget. The water's black, I know. The air burns your lungs. But still, it won't take long, and I'll pay, $1 a day (or whatever it is), it's better than nothing. There's no other work, and it helps your family too. Just a handful of cobalt, that shimmer in the mud. Enough to keep me charged, connected. Kanku, please, one more time. A child's life This Bloody phone.
October 31, 2025 at 5:57 AM