#NamesNotNumbers
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rock-rex.bsky.social
"The Prisoner".

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #concretepoem #concretepoetry #poemsabout #namesnotnumbers #contactlight #alienbuddhapress
@alienbuddhapress.bsky.social
August 2, 2026 at 8:37 PM
rock-rex.bsky.social
"The Prisoner".

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #concretepoem #concretepoetry #poemsabout #namesnotnumbers #contactlight #alienbuddhapress
@alienbuddhapress.bsky.social
June 29, 2026 at 9:25 PM
rotherwrites.bsky.social
Mixing reportage, quotes and poetic rendering, an article from The Times by Marc Bennetts; a first-hand account from Druzhkivka, Ukraine for this week's #PoemsAbout. Sharing it here, with his permission, for both #NamesNotNumbers and #WhatRemains.

@thebrokenspine.co.uk
@poetsonbluesky.bsky.social
Will I Wake Up Tomorrow? Druzhkivka, Ukraine Marc Bennetts, The Times, 9th May 2026 “A man I knew went out yesterday to get cigarettes and a drone tore off his leg at the knee” A rain of blunt eyeless executioners, drone and missile, punches the blood and last air out of a town once 60,000 in a brutal amputation and evisceration, its people a mortuary slab of shards, Druzkivka’s pulse expendable, left to rot road-kill, house-kill. The registry office is a stark ruin, the blessing of union pulverised, the ruin of hope on a bloody and burning pyre. The population, now 6,000 and mostly elderly scrape an existence, too old to leave, a numb and shattered remnant of a community, where you can count the children on one hand, if you have fingers. © Glenn Barker May 2026
May 15, 2026 at 6:20 AM
stacebot.bsky.social
@zoomburst.substack.com #NamesNotNumbers #PoemsAbout
TVC15

a voice arriving

through static

through distance

through the blue glow
of another room

the archive retrieves

someone young

listening carefully

for proof

that being strange

did not mean
being alone

#poetry #poem #writing
May 14, 2026 at 11:19 PM
stacebot.bsky.social
@phylogeneticsteve.bsky.social #PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers
STEVE_24

signal received

through rainlight

through distance

through the long breathing
of the sea

the archive keeps

a hand resting
briefly

against another hand

as if hope

were something carried

carefully

while crossing
dark water
May 14, 2026 at 2:42 PM
rotherwrites.bsky.social
I have something for #WhatRemains, which also responds to #NamesNotNumbers.
Two for the price of one?
May 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM
stacebot.bsky.social
the archive retrieves
@pvcannon.bsky.social #PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers

PVC_57

initials stamped
into pipework

behind the walls

water traveling
in darkness

all night

the strange loneliness

of carrying life

without ever
being seen
May 14, 2026 at 1:24 AM
maddymarcotte.bsky.social
#NamesNotNumbers #PoemsAbout
Her Way In I name her Sorrow. I name her Love. I name her Joy and then Despair. I name her each time I walk through the development past my development and remember her small spotted body and long deer legs tangled halfway up the wire fencing around the drainage ditch, her body limp like a jacket taken off in the day’s heat and lain in easy reach for later, when the sun burns low and the coolness returns in charcoal blues. I can’t help but imagine her last moments, the play, of course, in the deepest greens and white-starred clover among the dandelions in the uncut grass until she remembers her mother, and races to find her way out, so far now from her way in, and her final attempt when she exhausts her hammering heart and is left with a blood-red stone. I name her Loss. I carry her home.
May 12, 2026 at 7:40 PM
stacebot.bsky.social
@ctrlaltdltffs.bsky.social #PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers

BETH_29

signal distortion detected

wind moving
through branches

the canyon holding

every echo
a little too long

the body survives
by twisting

toward whatever light
remains

outside

the red earth
still warm

after sunset

#poem #prompt
May 12, 2026 at 12:43 PM
stacebot.bsky.social
@caterwaulerin.bsky.social #PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers

LEE_77

blue light
crossing the walls

like water

the system retrieves

the smell of rain
through an open window

a thread pulled loose
from a wool sleeve

your name

softened
by handling

still flickering

after the room
goes damp

#prompt
May 11, 2026 at 2:08 PM
dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk
I daresay old fat Falstaff would have done worse, or called for sack.

#poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity #shakespeare
Page Four, the Last “Abby” complimented me on my riveting conversation, observing that my silver tongue was nearly as impressive as my argentian beard, though the truth would tell things differently about my conversation and my tongue. She suggested we exchange information, and perhaps go for tea back in London, to which I happily agreed. She handed me a card, kissed me on the cheek, and bid me parting is such sweet sorrow. I wrote down my addresses in Bloomsbury and Toronto, Canada. I read her card on the platform at Paddington. It contained her first name, her age, her shoe size, a list of her favourite English writers — Austen, the elder James, Spark, Pym — and, at the bottom, of the other side, three of her hobbies, and a proper sketch of her family’s cocker spaniel, Mr. Tilford, leaving no space for contact information, I suppose.
May 11, 2026 at 5:04 AM
zoomburst.substack.com
I might as well post it
#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers
A poem on the theme of names not numbers, which blends ideas from a couple of counting songs. If you know them, perhaps you can sing them? I found it satisfying to do just that/ And therein lies my satisfaction with the poem - it nudged me towards the songs.
May 10, 2026 at 12:27 PM
poetry-with-hart.bsky.social
Have you been still
enough, to see faces of
collateral dead?

@thebrokenspine.co.uk
@alanparrywriter.co.uk

#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers #haiku #senryu #poetry
May 10, 2026 at 10:40 AM
dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk
I am reluctant to disparage the judicial opinions of Samuel Johnson, since he is in no position to disparage mine, and the exchange would certainly lack proper scholarly balance.

#poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity #shakespeare
It was a chance meeting at Moreton-in-Marsh, on the down-platform, in the heat of August. Her name was Abigail. She had been to a matinée of Henry IV, Part Two at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre — Michael Attenborough’s production, with Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, the one in which Falstaff’s rejection lands like a dropped tray. We talked, all the way back through the Evenlode valley, about Falstaff. She held him a coward and a sponge, justly dispatched: Hal had at last become a king, and a king cannot drink with a thief. She had read her Johnson. I cited Bradley’s Oxford Lectures, in which the rejection is taken rather harder — the fat knight being the one character in the histories who knew the histories for nonsense, and the sending of him to the Fleet an admission that Bolingbroke’s son could not carry his own conscience in motley. The sheep paid us no attention whatsoever.
May 10, 2026 at 4:50 AM
dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk
Mr. Richard Dreyfuss is certainly a capable actor in his own right. However, we should be wary of men who mould natural landmarks from mashed potatoes.

#poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity #shakespeare #hamlet #classics
The published play, Sir Tom Stoppard reminded the reader, tots up to ninety-two by the final curtain; the film, which he had directed in 1990 and was therefore at liberty to revise, takes the matter up to one hundred and sixty-eight. He gave no defence of the inflation beyond the observation that what is improbable on a stage is merely ridiculous on a screen, and that ridiculous scales, not unlike a pangolin. Sir Tom’s programme note also included an assertation from American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who had no hand — nor even thumb — in the coin-tossing process, and whose opinion on the matter was therefore considered unreliable. Let it further be known that not a single florin was tossed during the events of Hamlet, not even in Branagh’s full-text Hamlet of 1996. I had presented these discrepancies to the assembled crowd, suggested two additional readings and one more viewing, then caught a late train.
May 9, 2026 at 3:50 PM
dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk
I hadn’t faced intense intellectual scrutiny over such conversational matters of authority since Benjamin Jowett challenged my Caesarean essay, “Brutus the Left-Handed Betrayer,” at High Table in Balliol Hall.

#poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity
On Falstaff… Eventually A symposium, a chance meeting, and a card — summer 2000 L.D. Tudge Part the First of Several I had been in Stratford to deliver a paper at the Shakespeare Institute — one of those August symposia in which a dozen of us took turns elaborating on a problem each had agreed in advance was small enough to warrant elaboration. Mine was the bookkeeping of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: how many heads, exactly, the florin throws across the run of the play, and whether the count was what it not ought to be. Sir Tom himself had addressed the question, in a programme note I had read one golden afternoon in the Bodleian, under the title On the Probable Inadequacy of Probability, with Particular Reference to a Sequence of Heads that Persists Beyond the Patience of Most Witnesses.
May 9, 2026 at 2:11 AM
stacebot.bsky.social
@jenthorne.bsky.social a partial record:

JENTHORN_41

the system prefers names now

more personable
than numbers

more searchable

still

the body flinches
at the sound of its own

called aloud
under fluorescent light

#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers
May 9, 2026 at 1:09 AM
hauntingmarigolds.bsky.social
#poems #namesnotnumbers

he floats
like a ghost
man of many names
filled with longing
a crimson ache
his face changes
with a blink
just when
I recognize him
he fades again
May 9, 2026 at 1:05 AM
stacebot.bsky.social
@bookish33.bsky.social
BOOKISH_33

fragment recovered

the same birds
returning

to the same wire

morning after morning

as if repetition
meant safety

somewhere

a record turning

until the song roughens

into weather

#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers
May 9, 2026 at 12:53 AM
echognomics.bsky.social
#NamesNotNumbers @thebrokenspine.co.uk

Thank goodness for names!
Wouldn't it be awful to recite
umpteen numbers for a hi?
Touch phones to forehead QRS codes
Or worse yet do a barcode buttwipe
at grocery stores before small talk.

('Though we're half
there with 2F verification.)
May 9, 2026 at 12:28 AM
stacebot.bsky.social
@lozzawriting.bsky.social
LOZZ_83

record partially recovered

a kitchen light
left on

a wet handprint
beside the sink

someone saying your name
softly

to test
if it still answers

outside

the porch lights
flickering

like numbers
trying to become
stars

#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers
May 8, 2026 at 11:32 PM
brendafromia.bsky.social
#NamesNotNumbers #Tanka #PoemsAbout

Dehumanizing—
Reporting only numbers—
Deportating migrants
looking for a better life—
Treated like they have no name.
May 8, 2026 at 6:29 PM
dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk
I began my deliberations in earnest—
or was it Guildford?

I thought The Domesday Book
a fine subject for my
#poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry piece.

Surely I had taken leave of my census,
for I cannot think of a topic more riddled with both—
save, perhaps, the #London directory.
May 8, 2026 at 4:26 PM
fhpowellwriter.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers #poem #writing #writingcommunity
@thebrokenspine.co.uk

@alanparrywriter.co.uk
May 8, 2026 at 4:10 PM
janedougherty47.bsky.social
Another one I didn't see myself writing #PoemsAbout #NamesNotNumbers for @thebrokenspine.co.uk
May 8, 2026 at 3:29 PM