I’m an old guy finding ways to use up each day
so I can get back into bed at night.
I fill the bird feeder, take a painful walk,
spend my pension in inflationary stores.
It’s all the same to me.
I’m killing time, and time is returning the favor.
Gene Newman is a retired old guy (90 yrs) and former New Jersey journalist and columnist. Read more at GeneNewmanImagineThat.com.
Cock-crow ’til owl-hoot I toil. Feeding the hens, slopping the pigs, animal-speak my only communication. Long ago I stopped using words with Josiah, morose and silent man. Holding warm udders, I rhythmically pull. Brown eyes thank me. You’re welcome, I whisper back. My only happiness is this, speaking in tongues.
Originally from the Rhondda Valley, South Wales, Chris has lived for fifteen years in the Almanzora Valley, Almeria. She writes about anything and everything. Micro fiction, flash fiction, and poetry are currently favourites. Published internationally in anthologies, print, and online, she is compiling a book of her poetry and believes there has to be a courageous publisher out there!
Happiness, playing hide-and-seek,
____________stalking fairy tales,
____________once-upon-a-times.
Sneaking into fondest reverie,
fleeing from a darker memory.
Happiness, masquerading a smile,
____________falling head over heels,
____________upside down to a frown.
Escaping glumness nonstop,
floating above the teardrops.
Happiness, your time’s up! Now,
____________bestow my ever after
____________olly, olly, set me free.
Judith wrote this. She is happy having her writings appear in 50-Word Stories.
He collected unfinished things. Paintings abandoned on easels. Half-written books with heroes left mid-struggle. He’d always been bad at beginnings and preferred the established middles. The safe ground where there was still hope, potential, and indecision. He was, himself, an incidental person, a side character half-written and forgotten. A Collector.
Lily is an English artist living as a hermit in the wilds of Canada and trying to write.
I entered her kitchen
on a dark cold night
looking only for food.
But what I found was a feast
of understanding and affection.
Delicious lips tasted my despair.
Strong arms soothed bitter wounds.
My tear-stained heart nourished and healed,
the darkness disappeared.
At her table, she fed me love.
Peter Blau believes everyone has a story to tell and in his teaching he invites students to tell those stories with their writing. His work has been featured in 50-Words as well as Academy of the Heart and Mind, Paragraph Plant, and Five-Minute Lit. To Peter, writing is more than just a means to an end. It is the end in itself.
The story of the week for April 17 to 21 is…
Party Girls by Liz Mayers
and
A Day at the Beach by Bob Thurber
He escorted her, he courted her.
He gave her attention,
His heart, his care, little gifts.
She was his everything.
It was her, not him; she’d built a wall.
She wanted to be a couple, complete,
But she couldn’t give, she couldn’t love.
Was he able to be her almost?
Jacqui romanticized Rebecca’s Frenchman’s Creek so, mistakenly moved to French Creek and dreamed of writing at a desk in the sun room.
Grandpa told me he was yanked from the womb and immediately strapped onto a rocket just as it blasted off. Ever since, it has screamed forward at a super high speed: one year per year. He’s still riding that rocket – he says that’s how he got so old so fast.
Robb Lanum is a failed screenwriter in Los Angeles who fell in love with the short form.
My life
My life in the rain
I lost my shelter
From the cold and the pain
Alone in the dark
Between empty sheets
Will you
Will you ever explain
Well
I’ve had
A drink or two
Thought things through
Outside the pain
There’s nothing to explain
Here’s to you
Patrick Yu is retired and enjoys spending time with his many hobbies and the people that surround him.
My late-summer caterpillars are butterflies now, struggling from overwintered chrysalises, crumpled wings expanding. Departure impatience explodes into vibrant colour as they cascade up like wind-flung blossoms, dancing joyous against the infinite cornflower sky.
One lingers fleetingly on my finger, sumptuous wings spread, sunning – before she’s soaring to meet the spring.
Deborah writes at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.