Fiftywords

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.

For #vss365

Being and Becoming We are the pause between falling and forgetting, where form still murmurs but name has slipped. Water refuses stillness. It ripples time into spirals, turning bare branches into a tapestry of flame. Here, in the shallow hush, what was and what is speak softly together, the weight of what fell mirrored by the flicker of what is yet to form. This is not death. It is the long pause between root and wind, matter and motion, where change is not loud but luminous.

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.

Here’s one for today’s #vss365

Much appreciated Paul

Thanks Ann

Too generous as ever Rachel

Thanks for that lovely summation of the poem

Thanks for that Gary, I really appreciate those comments

Thanks for such generous feedback

That’s definitely worth considering, thanks

Thanks, that feedback means a lot

Thank you, I’m so pleased you found something in it

It didn’t occur to me but now you’ve said it, I see it 👍

Thanks Jan, really appreciate that

In turning a dog tag into a reliquary of the self, the poem asks what remains when life is reduced to metal, whether the imprint holds anything of the original heat.

A deft image of anxiety as the betrayal of one’s own terrain: firm ground turning fluid without warning, identity liquefying beneath the feet.

Its power lies in the pivot from domestic normality to military enumeration, counting not just tasks but lives, reduced to “blood group, service number, surname.”

A tender litany of seasons becomes a quiet ledger of love’s endurance, each name a term of endearment that slowly turns elegiac.

The final note reframes the poem’s grief within a long lineage of imperial machinery, identity reduced to metal, yet paradoxically made eternal by the act of bearing it.

A powerful example of how inherited memory holds both tenderness and terror; the geopolitical is present, but the emotional engine is familial loyalty

Thanks Sue, glad it worked out

Beautifully intimate: the battleground is the home, not the state, though the vocabulary of wargames and neutrality creates an echo of larger political tensions without insisting on them.

Its satire bites hardest in the final lines: humanity as a species only fit for souvenirs.

The poem’s pivot from sitcom to atrocity is brilliantly handled; nostalgia fractures into historical grief.

A haunting reimagining of dog tags as witnesses, stark, intimate, and quietly devastating.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments John

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

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

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.

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

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.

Here’s today’s #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.

In a damaged world, truth survives only in the fractures. For #vss365