Fiftywords
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fiftywords.bsky.social
Fiftywords
@fiftywords.bsky.social
1.6K followers 2.5K following 1.7K 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
Given recent events it seems the world veers and teeters on the edge of chaos based on the whims of one man #vss365
Before the Orders One man- a man of moods and menace. This is how power sounds before it gives orders. In Nuuk's streets they march, in Minneapolis they rise. The Arctic crackles, the rivers tremble. Markets shiver. Borders hold their breath. Allies blink. Enemies pause. No one knows which wind will blow.
January 19, 2026 at 12:14 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for #vss365
The Murmur of Wind There is no clamour here, no voices to shape the silence. Only the breath of trees, the low murmur of wind threading through bare branches, and the quiet pull of time slipping through open hands. In solitude, the self expands, unfolding into what was once hidden. You see the edges of yourself, sharp and unrelenting, and the softness too, fragile as frost on glass. Unobserved, the world takes on a strange light: shadows stretch, water slows, stars drift apart, an unravelled constellation, no less beautiful. The weight of solitude is not heaviness, but gravity: a pull toward the quiet centre of all that you are, and all that is. Here, you are enough, untethered, unadorned, your pulse in rhythm with the turning earth. This is not loneliness. This is the gift of being whole in the company of yourself, and everything that holds you.
January 18, 2026 at 2:26 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
I’ve been a little quiet on here for a while as I’ve been travelling but as I’ve just returned so here’s my initial reflections.
A Hymn to the Sublime Intraordinary
We went where we planned. The trip happened, booked, boarded, walked, remembered. The monuments were real. The cities held their shapes. The maps did their job. Nothing extraordinary interrupted the structure of the journey. But the experience of it, that was something else. What we saw was familiar. Human ambition. Human failure. The beauty and force of nature. The fractures in each place, visible and invisible, showed themselves clearly. Inequality moved with us. The world didn't pretend to be whole. And the small moments we witnessed didn't try to mend it. And still, it was extraordinary. Because it began long before departure, in anticipation, in the imagined shimmer of far-off cities, in the widening of attention that happens when you are preparing to look. The awe mattered: the harbour, the skyline, the mountains, the impossible engineering of flight. Natural and constructed beauty opened something in us. It made room. It gave context. And into that space, the ordinary stepped forward and sometimes, just sometimes, it gained more meaning: the unguarded gesture, the irreverent joke, the rhythm of life continuing without permission or performance. On beaches, in cafés, in the soft noise of daily commerce and the hum of tired bodies at the end of the day, something generous kept revealing itself. Not polished. Not profound. Just present. These are moments of what we might call the sublime intraordinary, beauty and meaning arising within, not outside, the everyday. And yes, those moments could have happened anywhere. But, as someone once said, it's the difference that makes a difference. Seeing the same gestures, kindness, fatigue, joy, care, in new languages, new streets, new hands, sharpens your sense of what's shared. It clarifies without simplifying. The familiarity of those small moments didn't make the world smaller. It made it more human. Those moments didn't offer answers. But they did offer energy, the kind that comes from feeling the world up close, not as theory or news or commentary, but as lived experience shared briefly with strangers. This wasn't a journey that changed everything. But it sharpened something, our sense of what matters, what stays, what's worth noticing. And the world did surprise us, often. It did speak, in flashes, in fragments, in the language of cities still inventing themselves. We came back carrying all of it, the brightness and the contradiction, the fatigue and the wonder. It was more than we expected. It still is. All this, and more.
January 18, 2026 at 1:21 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Been travelling for the last month so here’s a quick #PoemsAbout #TimeSlips.
Baggage Claim The belt begins, unannounced. A low murmur of rubber, a circle learning its lines. We step closer without deciding to. Hands loosen. Eyes rehearse recognition. The belt keeps faith with rotation, not hope. It does not pause for names. Relief lifts one case. Another keeps circling, learning patience. What fails to arrive grows heavier by the minute. At last, a familiar damage. Recognised by touch. Lifted carefully, as if it remembers who we were when we left. What did we bring. What will we claim. What have we learned to leave.
January 16, 2026 at 7:12 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Just wanted to wish you all a happy new year and a big thank you to this community.
Fragments of the Turning Year Time does not step; it spills, a cascade into shadow, moments adrift like ash, caught between forgetting and the sharp edge of memory. The year bends behind us, its fractured mirror reflecting what we will not name: a hand unclasped, a voice stilled, a world leaning deeper into its own dark. And still we dare to own it, hang calendars to tether stars, as though the turning earth might tilt toward our smallness. We toast the ruins, raise glass to the vanishing line, believing the future might kneel to our rituals. What is this hubris, to carve meaning from the tide as it slips from our grasp? But beneath the fracture, something endures. Not ours to hold, this world flickers, while stars scatter reckless above, a quiet rebuke to all we claim to know. Time does not heal or hurt it is a reminder us to hold what we can, release what we must, and move forward not triumphant, but awake. And here, within the fracture, lies the gift: not the year behind, nor the one ahead, but the quiet, fragile now, a breath, a spark, a fleeting flame against the endless turn.
December 30, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by Fiftywords
fiftywords.bsky.social
At this time of year I think the #PoemAbout community deserves a collective pat on the back and to offer a heartfelt thanks to @alanparrywriter.co.uk for his wonderful work
For the #PoemsAbout Community: Christmas 2025 Not a contest, but a gathering - lines offered like an unasked question, finding an answer simply by being there. A year has passed in Friday prompts, week turning to week, theme becoming occasion, occasion becoming community. We came with drafts and half-shaped thoughts, and found something steadier, not school or stage, a circle that let thoughts speak and wisdom listen. Encouragement arrived in small gestures: a like, a repost, a gentle reply, words leaning closer without needing to touch. Christmas now, and the year exhales, reflected not in gaudy lights or inflated Santas, but in the glow of many separate hands holding up one another's lines. So let this gratitude travel light, untussed, unforced, ungrand, thank you for the year, the words, the witnessing, and the shared act of showing up again. A season turns. Another will begin. And when it does, we shall meet again, pens ready, voices unbowed, a little kinder for having passed this way together.
December 24, 2025 at 4:46 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
At this time of year I think the #PoemAbout community deserves a collective pat on the back and to offer a heartfelt thanks to @alanparrywriter.co.uk for his wonderful work
For the #PoemsAbout Community: Christmas 2025 Not a contest, but a gathering - lines offered like an unasked question, finding an answer simply by being there. A year has passed in Friday prompts, week turning to week, theme becoming occasion, occasion becoming community. We came with drafts and half-shaped thoughts, and found something steadier, not school or stage, a circle that let thoughts speak and wisdom listen. Encouragement arrived in small gestures: a like, a repost, a gentle reply, words leaning closer without needing to touch. Christmas now, and the year exhales, reflected not in gaudy lights or inflated Santas, but in the glow of many separate hands holding up one another's lines. So let this gratitude travel light, untussed, unforced, ungrand, thank you for the year, the words, the witnessing, and the shared act of showing up again. A season turns. Another will begin. And when it does, we shall meet again, pens ready, voices unbowed, a little kinder for having passed this way together.
December 24, 2025 at 4:46 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for #vss365
Why the Heart Beats Why does it beat? Not for the machinery of breath. It beats for the unnoticed miracles: laughter that lingers, unbidden and unbound, voices, carrying the music of shared existence, the grace of purpose fulfilled, the infinite calm beneath a sea of stars, the small treasures that mark our life. It beats for what is fierce and ephemeral, for the ache and exultation of being alive, for the honeyed breath of twilight, for the fragile privilege of presence. Each pulse is a vow unspoken: to see more keenly, to feel life's wonder, to cherish what lingers as all else slips away. And when it finally falters, as all hearts must, let it be full. Full of the love it carried, the meaning it forged, the hope it dared to shelter, the joy it dared to claim. Let it also carry the debts I owe, to those whose hearts beat no longer, whose lives still guide my own. Let its silence resound, an echo of a life grateful and true.
December 19, 2025 at 11:00 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
As I’m heading off to Singapore where the twin cinema form is popular, I thought I’d try this for #PoemsAbout #Money @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
(Each column reads as a complete poem vertically, while each corresponding line reads horizontally as a coherent poetic unit)
Twin Cinema: Money LEFT SCREEN Money arrives without noise, It settles among small things, It asks for trust, nothing more. Exchange feels possible, even fair. What passes through seems unharmed, untouched. Freedom appears intact, twice over. Nothing breaks here, not today. The day closes cleanly. RIGHT SCREEN A scale is already ticking. It measures what enters, unsparing. Conversion is compulsory, refusal unrecognised. Equivalence becomes law, context discarded. Residue accumulates in silence, unnamed but retained. Options fold quietly, before selection is offered. Wholeness is never recorded, not at any stage. The conditions persist.
December 19, 2025 at 10:06 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This #poemsabout #YouShouldntHave comes from the sharp edge of gratitude
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
Gift The world arrives first. No asking. No terms. A weight, named blessing. A burden, named grace. To whom do you return it? God? Nature? History? The nameless? Gifts given without consent cut twice: you cannot refuse them, you cannot accept them. So the mind keeps one indictment only: You gave me what I must carry. Gratitude thins. Light darkens. The sacred torments and tallies. This life. This gift. It bruises. It brands. Cracked open by its weight, we bleed it back. Really- you shouldn't have.
December 12, 2025 at 6:34 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For today’s #vss465
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.
December 11, 2025 at 2:49 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This #vss365 was written on St David’s day and based on his famous quote
Gwnewch y pethau bychain (Do the little things) The world presses in, too much, too fast, thoughts tangle like brambles, news scrolls on without end. Step outside. Feel the air shift against your skin, watch how the trees move, not in urgency, but in time. Breathe. A bird lifts, a river shapes the land without force, the sky does not ask to be noticed, yet it holds everything. Do the little things. Place your hands on the earth, drink slowly, let silence settle where it will. Not everything must be carried
December 9, 2025 at 10:25 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For today’s #vss365
Magenta, That Impossible Colour No magenta wavelength, no magenta sun, no star that burns such unruly light. And yet, here it is, in the palette of the world, the shade that shouldn't be, a note the spectrum failed to name. Call it the rebel in the prism, the colour that refused to take sides, christened, they say, in the smoke of a battle, a bloom rising from the wreckage of intention. Magenta: the shock of the unpermitted, the courage of the in-between, a hue forged at the edge of ending where something unexpected steps forward. A colour that shouldn't be, and so becomes exactly what we need.
December 7, 2025 at 8:42 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Despite predictions from the current White House Europe is being enriched not facing erasure #vss365
December 6, 2025 at 9:42 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This #PoemsAbout #Imps is rooted in a particular history, but it speaks to anyone who's ever felt their truth diminished, distorted, or dismissed. It’s for those reclaiming what was reduced and remembering what was hidden. #Speirgorm @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
Unshrinking the Leprechaun They made us feel small, a tidy colonial trick: shrink what unsettles you, dress it in whimsy, market it as charm. A whole inheritance flattened into fairytale. A grin nailed to a shameful story. But compression. brings a pressure that one day breaks the spell And then the hedgerows unlearn their taming, the smallness stirs splinters at the edges, height returning, anger breathing, a presence too large for the joke that tried to hold it. Refusing to stay small. Refusing their language. Refusing the lie. Gold is what we find beneath the bright disguise, when a history, long hidden, steps forward
December 5, 2025 at 5:50 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Heres one for this #promptcombo #thispoem and thanks to @victoriaspires.bsky.social for the inspiration
Edge of Becoming The pen hovers a pulse beneath stillness. Something stirs. Not yet but nearly. Words soften, murmur. Clay remembering the shape it wants. I've bent, shaped, bled into the form. It shifts alive, almost other. Still mine, but breathing its own breath. One more touch and it might rise into beauty, or it's lost. The heart leans in. Is this the moment? Am I inside it? Or undone by it? The air thickens, holy, a hush before the bloom. Hold. Let go. It becomes. And then the release And then the ache wakes, hungry again.
December 2, 2025 at 11:19 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For today’s #vss365
Aphotic Black: sap of the sunless world, a bloom without colour pressed into metal-bone. No pigment lives here. Only matter forgetting light, iron loosening, salt keeping score along a drowned keel. In the dark's belly: oxide ghosts, silence-fed, depth-ted. A bell's tongue, stilled, its last note folded into miles of black. Not shadow, shadow needs light. This is older: lichen of the never-lit, a script the tide writes blind. I touch the crust on beams no hand will raise, dark greening the dead, the drifted, the unnamed, till darkness itself blooms with breath.
December 2, 2025 at 9:19 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For #vss365
Mr. Suave She thought it was love, how he always knew what she needed before she asked, how his smoothness posed as kindness, how he wrapped concern in rules, polished control as care, called her devotion his reward. It wasn't one thing, just the weight of being almost wrong, the quiet correction in his smile, his calm belief that he knew best. Then one day, she passed a café window and saw a woman laughing with her whole face. No apology. No glance for permission. It wasn't envy. It was memory. She went in, ordered the pastry he'd said was too sweet, ate it slowly by the window, said good morning to the barista. Later, she went home, danced barefoot on the floor, the music, the motion, just because. Just because she could. It was her life now.
December 1, 2025 at 3:27 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
As the collection reflects on the Irish diaspora experience thought I’d repost with #Speirgorm but the collection speaks to anyone shaped by migration, memory, or loss
November 30, 2025 at 2:31 PM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For Tom Stoppard, a tribute to the last of a certain brilliance. A mind that made thought theatrical, and let language dazzle as it disappeared. #vss365
Syntax of a Vanishing for Tom Stoppard A brightness moves offstage, not extinguished, only elsewhere. What remains is the aftertaste of thinking: a quickening at the margins where language, suddenly weightless, tries on its own shadow. No figure. Only the possibility that thought, when turned lightly, can still unsettle the dark. And if this was the last of that quick brilliance, the mind that startled meaning into motion, then let the silence be porous, capable of mischief, alive to the chance that the next idea might arrive sideways.
November 30, 2025 at 10:23 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one from my rece published collection for today’s #vss365
The Drift This was no storm. No crashing wave, no sudden flood. Only the slow pull of the tide, quiet, certain, as she began to let go. She was calm. Rooted. The tide had reached her feet she welcomed it, not surprised, not afraid. There was no struggle, only presence, clear and light as the last breath she gave. The pain was ours. It moved without sound, an undertow beneath the stillness, not demanding, only there. We did not hold her back. We simply held the shape her love had taken. We bore witness. Not to the leaving, but to the grace of her going, the precious beauty of someone who was ready. And when she went, it felt like the tide drawing back across the sand. farther than we could follow.
November 30, 2025 at 8:20 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
Here’s one for today’s #vss365
Someone You are someone because the storm gathers and still you stand. Because another's sorrow moves through you and you don't turn away. Not for what you say, but for how you listen, even when you don't know how. You are someone in the weight of a glance that refuses to let another fall. Someone, not for what you might become, but for what you already are when the weather breaks and you remain, steady, unhidden. You matter. Flawed, yes. Unfinished, always. But unmistakably here.
November 29, 2025 at 8:29 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
It’s hard to hear the phrase #NoFuture without thinking of those heady days of youthful rebellion #PoemsAbout @thebrokenspine.co.uk @alanparrywriter.co.uk
Teenage Riffs I was fifteen, already full of life, laughing loud, limbs quick, the world still wide and mine, but then a riff kicked in, pierced me, like the sound had been waiting for someone alive enough to catch it. It sparked me. Buzzcocks on a battered tape, a Clash lyric like a dare. I unleashed. Ripped jeans, radio static, hair razored to rebellion, vinyl sleeves spread out like maps of who I already was. We moshed in basements, sweat, spit, black nails, Doc Martens stomping out the heartbeat of the lost. We didn't want tomorrow, just the chorus, louder, louder, till the walls shook with it, and we howled it back: "No Future!" Our idols were broken angels, Poly Styrene, Howard Devoto, Siouxsie Sue, we worshipped them in stickers and patches, zipped up in leather and adolescent ache. Every track was a flare, every night a manifesto. We believed, God, we believed, that songs could save us. And maybe they did.
November 28, 2025 at 6:27 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
This #vss365 is about the pernicious influence of AI
What is learning when it's theft. Thought, dismembered, to feed a mouth that cannot speak. Syntax gnaws the bone clean. Our words, stripped, mined for pattern, sold as wonder. No breath. No blood. The murmur of mirrors feeding on the dead. Language: exhumed, rewired, priced. I will keep the flaw, the hesitation, the wound that makes sound, that pulse before meaning, where the living can begin.
November 27, 2025 at 7:56 AM
fiftywords.bsky.social
For #vss365
Achievable What is this yearning to achieve. Plants do not strain towards the light; they yield to it, cells loosening, walls softening, growth not as conquest but as direction. Phototropic surrender: a leaning rather than a lunge, a quiet agreement with what sustains. Maybe achievement is not a matter of effort but of angle, not a wrestle with the world but the wisdom of turning toward what lets us open into form.
November 23, 2025 at 10:12 AM