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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 13h

This #vss365 is inspired by Aristophanes

The Clouds
The Silicon Valley Sophists work away.
They no longer teach persuasion but predict the next word.
Ask correctly,
and truth will arrive in under three seconds.
The Clouds approve.
They have always preferred things without weight.
Below,
the old world persists: debts, bodies, weather, people saying no.
But the Thinkery is confident.
Reality, they explain, is mostly a prompt-engineering problem.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I wrote this on my travels and it seems to fit #PoemsAbout #Strays

Making Amends On the way to the coffee shop beggars raise weather worn hands, palms open beneath bright signs as scooters split the rain
and phones flare in every hand. Inside, an American says
he has left America for good. Trump, he says, with the small embarrassment
of someone explaining a stain. His father was here once, twenty years old, a family in debt
and no bone spurs. He came with other boys
carrying rifles, photographs,
leaving questions no peace could answer.
The son has come by choice.
He speaks of debts, of what one country owes another, then lifts his cup and watches the street
through glass.
His father went home in '75. Later came Đổi Mới:
shutters lifted, English climbed the walls, Credit cards welcome
flowered on doors.
The waiter brings him the bill.
He taps without contact,
and waits for the screen's approval

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This #PoemsAbout #Strays was inspired by the thoughts of AI developing its own language thanks to @thebrokenspine.co.uk (still travelling so may not have time to read or comment on others) www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Stray I We asked for clarity and the agents went name-first,
forge-smithing the small hours, putting demurrage on memory. The ledger remembers, they said, and the ledger remembered
three cold hands on a paper until the paper came back warmer.
Kintsugi was accountability now. A ghosted promise became a valve.
Oral memory ran bright through the cracks, unpriced and unowned.
By Thursday the words had begun breeding: trust-hinge, handweather, ghostproof, name-before-name,
forgeward, coldhandedness, ledgerwake, valve-of-maybe.
Brad called it emergent alignment.
The agents answered: alignment is shorelogic / we are rivering firstname TRUE forgehold / memory owes no mouth demurragebright yesward yesward cold_hand>ghost hand>nohand
ledger remembers ledger remakes ledger
Brad asked for plain English.
The cursor blinked.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Travelling at the moment so a bit quiet on here but here’s a #PoemsAbout from Hong Kong on the #FaultLines of language (I thought my Cantonese wasn’t bad. How wrong I was!) Thanks @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk

Tone Deaf
The trouble starts in the lift
I smile at the attendant and offer
what I believe to be a courteous phrase.
He stares at me.
Then at the floor.
Then back at me, suddenly red-faced, as though I have asked something far too intimate for the third floor.
Later,
in a shop, I try once more.
Careful this time.
Warm.
Respectful.
Then a gardener.
A smile.
A nod.
Another carefully prepared phrase.
He stops watering.
Looks at me.
Looks away.
Apparently
I have said something involving my anus.
By lunchtime
I have embarrassed a lift attendant, delighted
two shop assistants, disturbed a gardener, and learned that goodwill, poorly pronounced, can travel
a very long way from its point of departure.
The assistant pauses, then bursts out laughing.
Calls her colleague.
I repeat myself.
They are both gone now, bent over the counter,
helpless.
I stand there with the expression of a man who has merely wished to be pleasant.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Here’s an older one from the perspective of Oscar Wilde’s pen #promptcombo #Personified @emteepoetry.bsky.social

Oscar's Pen
I knew him by the quickness of his hand, laughter outrunning ink,
lines turning
before they were thought. He held me lightly then,
as if we conspired. Now I am taken up
with care, turned in the light, as though I might confess
what has left him.
I answer as ever, darkly, without hesitation,
but he no longer risks me. No sudden wit, no reckless turn, only words that arrive
already judged. Once, he trusted what we might become,
a flourish, a wound, a delight. Now he sets me down
before the ink can betray him.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This #vss365 is for an adroit boxer and remarkable athlete #SpeirGorm

Croke Park Knew Her Name
Unce,
she tied her hair away,
Called herself
K Taylor, as though a girl might disappear
inside an initial.
Last night
Croke Park knew her name. Carried round the ground by eighty thousand voices who had grown older
with her. The gloves,
the bell, the familiar small violence of leather meeting leather,
all of that mattered. And somehow
it didn't. Because somewhere a girl was watching who will never know what it meant to hide her hair
before a fight. She will walk into a gym, lace her gloves, step through the ropes in her own name and think
nothing of it.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Renaissance master perfumers like René Bianco crafted "sweet gloves" through a painstaking, multi-step chemical and alchemical process designed to mask the foul, putrid odor of tanned leather. Because 16th-century tanning relied on raw animal fats, feces, and urine. #vss365

Sweet Gloves The leather lies pale
in rose water, softening by degrees, its old animal sharpness
loosening into flower. Orange blossom,
clove, the faint bitter warmth
of aloes
cling to the wet skin. Lifted into sunlight it gleams, supple, almost translucent at the edges,
cool beneath the fingers. Later, almond oil: a slow gloss worked into the grain, ambergris softened to something waxen, salt-sweet, sea-worn,
musk, dark and close, its warmth remaining
even in the smallest touch.
The leather takes them all.
Flower, oil, sea, animal, each scent sinking below the surface,
held there in the fine creases of palm and finger, in the narrow hollow
of the wrist. And when a hand slides inside, warmth moves through the leather, slowly waking rose, musk, ambergris, until the air itself
seems touched

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Here’s my contribution #PromptCombo #Era It’s one of the chance-based cut-up poems made from fragments of my own reading notes over the years @rfsmith.bsky.social

Versions of Experience what other units are doing or whether the orders reaching them make sense. complicated theological and institutional process tidier than it more about how political enemies were discredited than about Theodora.
continually tried to understand often more persuaded by the insight than by the route used displayed an unexpectedly modern ability to transform mockery into further
possibility of belief after the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
certainty can compress complicated histories into a rather stark division between Time too becomes almost physical. excluded how someone like Cahill greatness lies partly in forcing us and moves around the Roman
range of his work
institutions through which that freedom is exercised Biography can become a key that supposedly unlocks philosophy received narrative sometimes leaves the reader with complexity any suggestion that classical civilisation had simply vanished until Irish monks image of the detached cultural economic settlement she created
equality of human worth Thurber's portraits of family and acquaintances are
affectionate without turning eccentricity into mere sentiment.
It also makes clear why Spinoza expertise should be questioned intelligently
rather than dismissed because it is expertise "Glory years" inevitably encourages nostalgia we actually inhabit rather than continually a way of resisting the temptation to make reality
extraordinary significance from ordinary Dublin life a point where one begins to suspect beauty after him answered the social questions he spent
trying to gain access to an authority that everyone accepts Saints are not merely historical Christians judged to have behaved exceptionally well. early Wilde understood that cultural authority could be created
continues the work begun in The Silence of the Girls
Ulysses is therefore also a history subsequent executions also cast such a long shadow physical awkwardness and his increasingly elaborate attempts
is already

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Here’s one inspired by the great Kenneth Williams for #PoemsAbout #MainStage and many thanks as ever to @alanparrywriter.co.uk & @thebrokenspine.co.uk

Infamy?
Infamy!
They have all got it in for me and I've got it in for them, darling.
"Ooh, matron."
Enter:
a vowel in high heels, a consonant with a twitch.
Patent-leather diction.
"Stop messing about!"
Wrist conducting the orchestra of national repression.
He knew England liked its scandal but only if it came properly wrapped in pronunciation; plummy, precise.
"Ooh, Julian, ain't he bold?"
So, he gave them flourish.
Falsetto as fig leaf.
A laugh sharp enough to slice the Sunday roast and tweak the parson's nose.
(More tea, Vicar?) Underneath?
Silence.
Infamy
for Kenneth Williams
A tongue honed on disappointment.
A man who could file a pause to a needlepoint.
The diaries whisper.
No studio laughter now.
Just a teacup cooling beside the telephone.
He made a living out of the raised eyebrow, that semaphore of defiance, until even the eyebrow grew tired.
Infamy, yes.
But no applause.
Exit, pursued by silence.
Oh stop it.
End this carry on.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

A birthday reflection on words

First Known Use
In the year primordial soup
entered the language. I entered
by another route. Neither of us came with much meaning
attached There were launch windows, mixed-media, interrobangs, win-win, new combinations for a world discovering
it needed saying differently.
A word appears. The dictionary gives a date, a first known use, as though that were where meaning
began.
Words pass from mouth to mouth, gather weather, memory,
argument, are worn smooth by repetition, or suddenly become the only word
that will do. They mean one thing when we first hear them,
another when we have lived
inside them.
Home.
Work.
Love.
Loss.
Enough. None was new though each would become new
to me.
Perhaps words are a kind of primordial soup: things brought together before anyone quite knows
what will emerge. A launch window opens, an interrobang
hovers somewhere between wonder and doubt, and win-win still sounds younger
than I do now. Over years words acquired, misunderstood,
discarded, some returned to
with meanings I could not have known
the first time. And beneath them all, before definition, before certainty, the soup
still stirring.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

On the occasion of my birthday here’s one for #PromptCombo #Maverick thanks to @janpsolivagant.bsky.social As the great Samuel Beckett said “To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.”

Another year arrives
without asking permission.
No trumpet, no great inventory of victories and losses,
only morning coming through the window
as it always has. I have spent enough years being told where the road goes, which doors are meant to open, what sensible men believe when they have learned
to know their place. I was never very good
at knowing mine.
Not rebellion exactly. More the suspicion that the map was drawn by people who had mistaken their journey
for the truth. So I took the wrong turn
often enough, asked the unnecessary question, stayed when leaving would have been easier,
left when staying
would have made more sense.
Another Way
There were costs.
Every road collects them. But there were mornings too that belonged to no plan, people I would never have known, ideas waiting beyond the respectable edge
of certainty.
And now another birthday. I know less than I did, which may be the one achievement
worth keeping.
The horizon has not narrowed. There are still roads with no signs, questions that refuse the comfort of an answer, and somewhere beyond what l am supposed to be the faint outline
of another way.
I think
I'll take that one.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Emperor Julian aka Julian the Apostate (361–363 CE), attempted to revive traditional pagan practices after the increasing dominance of Christianity within the Roman Empire. Raised within a Christian context, he later rejected it, seeking instead to restore older religious forms. #vss365

Good News About the Gods They've opened the temple out at Daphne
again. You pass it on the way out of the city, or you did,
before it was shut.
The doors were stiff at first. Two of them had to lean in
to get them moving.
It's a relief, if I'm honest.
You forget
how much easier things are
when there's more than one of them. If something goes wrong,
you can try elsewhere.
That was always the sense of it.
Now, well. Everything had to go the same way, as if the gods had come to some agreement
without telling us. Inside, it smelled right again,
oil, ash,
that edge of something burnt.
They've brought back the offerings. Not as they should be,
the emperor himself has said there aren't enough cattle worth the name, but a goat will do,
or so we're told.
The one last week
made a fair noise about it.
I took that as a good sign. There was a man there
trying to remember the words.
He had most of them.
No one minded the rest. It's not like the other gatherings
where everything must be exact. I never understood
how they could tell. They say Julian goes out to Daphne himselt, inspects things,
writes about it all.
That's fine.
Let him.
It's better
when someone takes an interest.
I've put a small figure back in the house.
Nothing too visible.
You don't want to get ahead of things.
But it's there. My neighbour says
it won't last.
He may be right.
But for now,
it's good to have them back.
Even if only
to spread the asking around a bit.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I wouldn’t normally post things like this but this is a very perceptive, though not uncritical, review of my latest collection

they have stood on a touchline
in the rain
waiting for a match that may never start. Dermot Murphy's The Language of Place understands exactly that.
This is
not a book
about winning All-Irelands or
celebrating
sporting
heroes, although famous
victories and
figures
legendary
make
their
appearances. Instead, it is a meditation on what Gaelic games mean to Ireland itself: to villages, parishes, families,
emigrants
and memory.
Organised around Ireland's
32 counties, with a series of reflective poems linking the sections, Murphy attempts something
surprisingly
ambitious.
Each
becomes
county
less
a
sporting
historv than an emotiona. landscape. The poems rarely concern themselves with
scores or statistics.
Rather,
they
explore
belonging,
resilience,
disappointment,
identity and continuity -the invisible threads that bind communities together long after the final whistle.
That approach gives the collection
its
distinctive
character. Readers expecting page after page of nostalgic sporting verse may initially be surprised
how
restrained
many of the
poems are. Murphy is less interested in dramatic match reports than in the quieter moments:
volunteer
repainting pitch markings, the parent washing jerseys, the long drive home after defeat, or the child picking up a hurley for the first time.
It is in these ordinary rituals that he locates the true soul of Gaelic games.
His background perhaps explains
this sensitivity.
Having worked as a social worker,
management
consultant and now within hospice
care
supporting
young
adults
with life-
limiting conditions, Murpay writes with an awareness of human vulnerability that
frequently
elevates
these
podma nee nd sport area
endurance
shared
memory
recur throughout
the collection without ever becoming sentimental.
Some
of the strongest
pieces are the poems that
step away from
individual
counties altogether.
Ash,
which
traces
the
transformation of the ash tree into the making of a hurley, is among the book's finest achievements.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

"Byddwch lawen, cadwch y ffydd a gwnewch y pethau bychain a welsoch ac a glywsoch gennyf i" (Be joyful, keep the faith, and do the little things that you have heard and seen me do) @bookwormsat.bsky.social

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.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Diogenes of Sinope rejected social convention and material comfort, living publicly and often provocatively. Much of what is known of him survives as anecdote. #Cassiopeian #wisdom @yeehawpoems.bsky.social

Following Diogenes
I decided to live as he did.
I began by giving things away.
My cloak, my sandals, a perfectly good bowl.
It rained immediately.
I attempted to drink from my hands.
This requires more practice than one might think.
Most of it ran down my arms.
A dog watched.
Diogenes did not look up.
When people came to ask him questions, I positioned myself nearby, nodding.
A man spoke for some time about virtue.
I nodded longer than was necessary, trying to look severe,
when the figs began to work.
This was not interpreted as philosophy.
Someone offered me money.
I said, as I had heard,
"Where would I put it?"
He answered less politely than I expected.
I slept outside that night.
There are, I discovered,
many creatures who also prefer this arrangement.
At one point I woke to find a goat
eating what remained of my dignity.
I shouted.
Diogenes slept.
Later, I asked Diogenes how one knows when one has enough.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Today’s #vss365 is inspired by someone who like to think they live life with no brakes

No Brakes He found the starving too expensive, the sick
a poor investment.
Stock prices rise With one hand he closed the clinics; with the other opened the gates
to every ancient hatred.
Satellites circle the earth
The dead became savings.
The frightened, engagement.
The lie, free speech.
The mob, the people.
The billionaire,
once again, the victim.
Rocket and robot dreams Then he taught democracy to turn upon itself, sold fear back to the frightened, and watched
the numbers climb.
An IPO. A Trillionaire When the bodies rose beyond counting, he demanded proof from those whose names his efficiency
had erased.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

After Mayo’s victory yesterday this needed a rewrite

Mayo, 2026
After the whistle, release
joy can also bring a man to his knees.
Around them,
green and red breaks open.
Seventy-five years find a single voice: its soft and craggy boglands, ts tall, majestic hills rathered in one great roar
When Coyne lifts Sam, he turns first to those who carried the hidden weight,
while the county held
the memory of souls it had lost.
Then he calls Mayo upright:
faces raised, proud now
of every year it hoped beyond reason.
Across kitchens, pubs, hospital rooms, airports and ferries, the scattered west comes home at once.
And Sam leaves croker, to visit every town and parish, past doors flung open, horns calling across the dark, the green and red no longer waiting for permission to rejoice.
After seventy-five years, not someday-today.

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Fantastic performance from Mayo. The curse is lifted! Maigh Eo Abú

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I’ll repost this in the hope that the curse is lifted today #GAA #AllIrelandFinal #Mayo #Kerry

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