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
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
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