notebook and pens and existential questions

Word, pictures, poems, what is it all? Are short-short stories stories, or what?

What is the point of words? What is the point of blogs? What is the point of poetry? I can’t explain.  -I can explain, but only at length. Either way I won’t stop. I shared a fifty-word short-short story this week and someone said Nice poem. On another site, someone asked Is this a poem –  those four words but laid out in a ‘poetic’ way with line breaks and no punctuation. Discussion raged. People hated modern poetry, non-rhyming poetry, rhyming poetry, poetry without commas or poetry with front-shifting word order. 50% of people agreed that the four words could be a poem, and 50% were certain it could not.

If I, the poet, say it is then it is, formed one viewpoint.

No, if I, the reader,  say it is then it is, formed another.

In this atmosphere of disagreement and non-consensus, then, here are some short-short stories. Or poems. They might be headlines, or they might be observations, or they might be anything. Here they are.

six word story microfiction sefchurchill.com

six word story microfiction sefchurchill.com

six word story microfiction sefchurchill.com

short-short microfiction sefchurchill.com

short-short microfiction sefchurchill.com

100 word microfiction sefchurchill.com

Mainline news this week focused on the Kim-Trump meeting, and football. My own news feed remains full of billionaires, tunnels, and ambitious project targets.

There’s another busy week ahead, and then another one. It feels never ending. Art time is squeezed by work time. Me time is squeezed by colleague time. By Wednesday I am desperate to have lunch on my own. I recall fondly hours working in a university library when at lunch, without discussion, we each sat with a sandwich resting on our knees and a book in our hand, silently reading. That may represent the peak of civilisation. In another minor peak, (and another triumph of the short-short) I had a haiku accepted by a journal. You can read it here – it’s in Issue 58.