iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It’s a long way off and more of a personal project at the moment

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Agreed, I’m not a great admirer of his

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Thanks, it was a great trip. You guessed right, there is a travel collection in the works

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Well, I’ve missed a couple of weeks

Thanks Jen, it’s sad to see what’s happened to the game. I’m obviously biased Gaelic sport still has the strength of being grounded in its communities

A beautifully compressed poem that makes colour itself unstable, dependent on perception, memory, and relationship

A beautifully controlled elegy in which the neglected garden becomes both an image of grief and a record of a life no longer tending it.

There definitely is and thank you for taking the time to look it up

Thanks David, a sad situation

Yes and have the money and lawyers to continue to delay this

Thanks Bernard. It’s a real blow to the integrity of the game

Thanks for that feedback John

This #PoemsAbout #Rot is for any football fans disgusted by wha been goin on at the Etihad. Thanks as ever to @thebrokenspine.co.uk

Rot Rain into grass, crowd into club, street into stand,
father into son.
The roots went deep. They drew on place, memory,
rivalry, the stubborn hope
of another Saturday.
Then came the harvesters.
The shirt.
The ground.
The kick-off.
The television rights.
Sham contracts worked into the earth, accounts tattened, money buried, dug up,
called something else. Season after season the trophies came, bright fruit
from poisoned ground. Now the roots are shallow,
but the rot is deep.
Again.
Again. Until the soil
gave up its goodness.
What remained
was fed with money.
Artificial light.
Artificial heat.
Artificial growth.
And City rejoiced in barren soil. brands. assets.
data. And where the game once grew from the ground, something rank has taken hold, blue, glossy,
rampant,
feeding on what is left.

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Invoking Nemetona gives the encounter an ancient sacred dimension without over-explaining it, allowing landscape, animal and goddess to merge

A linguistically exuberant poem that makes fungal life feel genuinely alien to human habits of seeing and categorising.

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of tonal languages! 😂

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Now, that’s given me and idea, a Graham greene city tour 😉

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I reread Greene prior to coming to Vietnam and remembered what a great novelist he was. Looks a very good event

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

You’re absolutely right Paul

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Thanks Merril that’s much appreciated

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 · 15/09/2026

Even though my spoken Cantonese is ropey I can write hello in Mandarin

The word hello spelled out in mandarin oranges

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Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Thanks Emily. I think I need to practice more even if it entertains the locals

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Thanks and as it’s a tonal language it’s so easy to get wrong

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 · 02/09/2026

Appreciate those comments Paul

Fiftywords @fiftywords.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

That’s very kind Karen, I always find it a pleasure to read your wonderful poems

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Not come across the book but here’s a poem

4 Minutes 33 Seconds in an Anechoic Chamber
The door seals.
A swallow.
Breath.
Breath.
The small hinge of the jaw tests its patience.
Saliva shifts position.
An eyelid closes like a soft switch.
Somewhere behind the sternum, a metronome refuses instruction.
Blood makes its rounds.
The ear, having nothing, magnifies everything.
Cartilage confers with cartilage.
A pulse rehearses the dark.
Another minute
longer than a corridor.
The tongue rests but will not disappear.
Nerves conduct without score.
Breath.
A minute more, no different, no quieter.
The body, unmuted.
No silence.
Only listening.

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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A transition full of excitement and a little fear

Thanks Siobhan, that’s very kind of you