iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

🕯️ SuperNatural KingPin 🕯️ [for Ozzy Osbourne | 1948–2025]

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

✨🧃🌈 DAY 30 — WILD CARD — THE FINAL PRIDE POEM! 🌈🧃✨ today’s prompt is: there is no prompt. today is the wild card, the chaos slot, the glitterbomb finale, the "whatever you want" of prompts. I want your weirdest. your sexiest. your funniest. your proudest. the poem that feels the most you.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

🩰VERSE TRAP #29: Purge, Polish, or Perform It Again🩰 Inspired by those defiant decades where queerness became survival strategy, political act, and disco-lit elegy—this is for the ones who knew that mourning and movement are not opposites. That joy is a form of resistance. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

🟣🕺💚 VERSE TRAP #28: CUBAN PETE & THE POETRY OF POP! 💚🕺🟣 🎺 cue cymbal crash / cue thigh-high chub-rub skirt spin at 40rpm 💥 cue accordion chest / cue chandelier-high grinning / cue desire lit in flashing bulbs—TEN FEET HIGH! get feral with it. make it spiral. make it blush through green rubber.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

🛼✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-SEVEN✨🛼 Today’s poem is a checklist for disaster. A manifesto in bubblegum. A to-do list scrawled in glitter pen on the inside of your thigh. Make it read like a dare. Like a memory you haven't had yet. Let it flirt, bite, heal, hex, and roller skate. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

🌈✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-SIX✨🌈 Today’s prompt is a love letter to a broken hyperlink in your brain. A soft static where something used to be. You remember them—sort of. Or maybe they were you. Let’s glitch—and forget why we walked into the room. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

🃏✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-FIVE ✨🃏 (This is the one I’ve been waiting for!!) Today’s prompt is chaos in a beer garden. Let this be your permission slip to get absolutely feral with it. Let’s write the poem that only these 3 things could make happen. Let’s go full goblin mode. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

🌈✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-FOUR ✨🌈 The theatre of the heart is velvet-lined, overacted, and playing to a half-empty room. Today’s prompt is built on the bones of a showtune—and this time, the spotlight hurts. 📬 Share via Substack chat or DM. 📅 Deadline for all submissions: June 30

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

🌞✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-THREE✨🌞 Today’s prompt is for the kids we used to be. The feral ones. The barefoot ones. The ones who scraped their knees on curbs and thought summer might never end. Let’s trap time. Let’s run until the sky forgets our names. Let’s verse trap. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

✨ VERSE TRAP 2025 — DAY 22 ✨ 🧷 PROMPT #22: Write a poem that spills everything you really meant. Not the words you said— but what was stitched between them. Let the subtext be the main text. Let the phone ring. Let her pick up— or not. ✨ #VerseTrap2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

🌈🔥 VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY TWENTY-ONE 🔥🌈 Today's prompt is for the ones who talk too much because they’re scared to say the one thing that matters. For the overthinkers, the flirters, the ones who turn small talk into survival tactics. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Verse Traps 2025 - DAY 20 it’s sticky with glitter, dimly lit, slightly horny, and probably located at the back of a house party where someone’s reciting Maggie Nelson in the kitchen while you pretend to be chill in the hallway. You're fooling no-one.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

🕺 Day 19 – Verse Trap Poetry Prompt 💥 Today I want hips. I want limbs. This one’s about what lives just beneath your skin and what gets released when it starts to move. So… what does your body say when the lights go down?

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

✨ Day 18 of Verse Trap is a full-body dessert hallucination. ✨ Think sugar. Think sweat. Think sensation that sticks to the spoon. Now it’s your turn. Write a poem that tastes like skin and smells like icing. Lick the metaphor. Suck the symbolism. Set something on fire. Flambé, baby!

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

VERSE TRAPS 2025 — DAY 17 This is about collarbones & fingertips, knees knocking in hallway light, the slow lean-in of a shoulder you almost trusted. Write me a poem where the kiss happens somewhere else. Everywhere else. Write the eclipse before the moon even moves.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

🧥 Day 16: Verse Trap Poetry Prompt 🧥 Write a poem from the POV of your favourite item of clothing. (The crop top knows things. The hoodie forgives. The jockstrap remembers everything.)

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

🧵 DAY 15: Verse Trap Prompt 🧵 Today’s prompt is a celebration of lineage and literary inheritance: 📖 Choose a line from a classic poem (e.g. Dickinson, Whitman, Sappho — or go rogue: Ginsberg, Catullus, Wilde, Bishop, Duffy, Audre Lorde, whoever you want) and write a response.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

I’m resisting the temptation to write anything about Sabrina Carpenter, so here’s a poem instead.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Day 14 Prompt — The post-Pride come down — The morning after sex, scrubbing off perfume — The "don’t text him again" bath, rinsing off the last of your restraint. — Or yes, Saltburn: mouth on the rim, Sophie Ellis-Bextor in your ears, shame & want spinning down the pipes.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

I’m not lazy, I’m in a deep state of pre-movement contemplation.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

Verse Trap #13 is (a)live! 🪩🖋️ Today's example poem → “Flirting With My Reflection” (a tiny poem of daft joy & self-flirtation because sometimes the best ex is the one in the mirror you outgrew 🪞). #VerseTraps2025 #PrideMonthPoetry #QueerPoetry #PoetryPrompt

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

For Brian Wilson. For the first time you ever heard a Beach Boys song in real stereo headphones— and it felt like all your summers looping at once. This is Wouldn’t It Be Nice? — a poem that tries to sound the way those songs feel: layered, ecstatic, endless. round round get around — I get around.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

✨ VERSE TRAPS DAY 12 ✨ I knew this one was going to bring out the yearning poets in the room. The feral ones. The soft ones. The ones who crave and carve and wait. Think hunger as yearning, glow as exposure. What makes you ache to touch? What makes you luminous from the inside out?

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

✨ Day 11: Scratched Initials on the Park Bench ✨ Today’s prompt is all about what we leave behind—intentionally or otherwise. The marks we carve. The names we try to make permanent. The bruised traces of passing desire or tenderness or rage. (Or all three, tangled.) #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Making a list of mistakes I made publishing my first poetry book, so I don't make them again the second time around. - Needs a penis on the cover

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

The real tragedy is how many excellent thoughts I’ve had while in the shower, forever lost to the drain gods. The best thoughts of my generation washed away by Lush Sticky Dates body wash.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

🫠 VERSE TRAP 2025 — DAY 10 🫠 Your turn: Where does the lemon light through blinds fall in your world? What sharp, sour, soft, warm things does it illuminate? Use the phrase anywhere in your poem. Title, line, or hint. ✨ Deadline: June 30th.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

✨🧲 VERSE TRAPS 2025 — DAY NINE 🧲✨ 🖤 Some marks you can kiss off. Some marks you can’t. Some, if you’re lucky, you get to keep on your own terms. 💋 Write one line. Write a whole damn litany. Just write. That’s all this trap ever asked of you. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

🌀✨VERSE TRAPS 2025✨🌀 A sticky, loud, tender, weird, & unapologetically queer poetry competition 🏳️‍🌈 Deadline: June 30th 🏳️‍🌈 Bring your loudest kiss. Bring your fiercest yes. Bring your heartbreak, your hunger, your glittered breath. Let’s trap the verse — & make it confess. #VerseTraps2025

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

🖤✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY EIGHT ✨🖤 Today’s prompt asks a little more of you. And so does today’s poem. It’s from Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel—my collection that’s in each of the prize bundles for this Verse Traps Pride Month Poetry Competition. 📅 Deadline: June 30.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Too many are arguing about who threw the first brick. Not enough are asking if they’d throw the next one. This is the Haus that Pride built. Bring your brick.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

💚✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY SEVEN ✨💚 Today's prompt: "I wanted to be / but instead I became—" → Use this as your opening line. Write about the version of yourself you wanted, the one you became, the glitches, the grief, & the glory. 📌 Full competition details in the pinned post on Substack.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

I don’t write poems. I trap a rogue feeling under a glass and watch it closely. Then I pretend the feeling has realised it’s trapped in a glass, and I let the rest of The Truman Show play out in my head before I write anything down.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Not to be dramatic but if no one writes a love poem about me this Pride Month, I will simply perish; like glitter very slowly (& flamboyantly) dissolving in pineapple lube.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

✨💋VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY SIX💋✨ Today’s prompt is heavy with bruising skies & flickering streetlights: “dusk on your shoulders” Write a poem that’s a slow burn, a poem that gathers shadows, spills secrets, or quietly combusts. 📅 Deadline for submissions: June 30

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

My book is available. So am I. Only one contains finished poems.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Nothing makes me feel more seen than someone saying “this made me think of you” and sending me something deeply weird & mildly erotic.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

I have three speeds: anxious librarian, horny poltergeist, and prophet in a velvet coat.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

🟡💔 VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY FIVE 💔🟡 Today’s prompt is for the ex-versions of ourselves. when that song comes on— the one we used to cry to in the bath / slow dance to alone / scream out of a car window before we knew why. Let’s queer the playlist. Let’s trap the verse—& make it sing.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I didn’t mean to write about them again, it just sort of… happened. Like lightning. Or glitter in your bedsheets.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Such a beautiful sight!! Copies of my book ready for the prize bundles at the end of Verse Traps 2025, and some for online orders.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

writing poetry is hard because you start with “I miss you” and end with “I want to eat your memories with a dessert fork while crying in your bathtub.” No? Just me? Jacob Elordi has a lot to answer for.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I didn’t choose to be a poet. I just kept surviving and writing things down.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

There’s nothing wrong with sucking on the marrow and choking on the bone. All you need is a little practice.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Poetry doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just has to be true enough to ruin someone’s afternoon.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

🪩✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY FOUR✨🪩 Today’s prompt is for the late-night romantics, the glitter-in-the-blood babes, the ones who fall in love mid-spin with someone they’ve never spoken to. Because some of us only feel held when we’re being watched. And some of us spin so we don’t shatter.

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Writing is weird. Sometimes you feel like you’ve built a cathedral. Sometimes it’s just a sexy note to your future self. “Buy milk, you bastard!”

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Ryan Stephen Thornton @ryansthornton.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

🌈✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY THREE✨🌈 Today’s prompt is a gutpunch wrapped in gingham: 🧺 “Describe the person you would’ve loved as a teenager, had you known you were allowed.” 🎯 Read the full competition details in my pinned post.

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