Month: Jan 2026
-
110126: Japanese Short Form Poetry

Senryuleaves frame the old homessomeone lives here, quietlymending the day Haikustone learning stillnessmoss writes its slow green letterswhere rain remembers Senryuleaves cling, moss clingsin the window, a single lampclings to its warmth. Haikubrick wall, stone housesall framed by the patient mossof time letting go. SenHai #34 poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2026.
-
The Old Woman With No Cat

The Garage SagaOr: The Cat, The Porsche, & Grand Theft Auto The Old Woman stands in her tidy, overly-organised garage,phone to her ear,staring at her car that hasn’t moved in a month.On her screen, the tracker app glows: THEFT WARNING! A voice crackles through: “Ma’am, our system shows your vehicle is stolenand it’s moving through……
-
Announcement

This blog, Still Life, has a new sister called Ossuary Ink. If you like darker, moodier poetry and prose, then Ossuary Ink may be a good fit. Follow the link below, and subscribe so you know when a new poem or story is posted. I look forward to seeing you there.
-
10.01: Journal of Thoughts

The Thimble and the Hummingbird I. The Inheritance of Absence I keep few things.A silver thimble, a rocking chair,and a preference for memory over monument.Objects shed their stories like birch bark,curling inward, fragile, ghost-scripted.But the thimble holds the shape of her fingerprint,the chair holds the curve of her spine,and I —I hold the space between.…
-
09.01: Csárdás

Csárdás — (myth in the bones, fire in the blood) It begins with a single note.Thin. Aching.A thread of winter smokeunraveling from a fiddle. The room stills.Dust rises like memory.Somewhere in that soundis a field at dusk,an empty chair,a story your grandmother once whisperedwhen she thought you were asleep. But then —the pulse strikes. The…
-
0801: Ten Things of Thankful

I’m back home after a glorious holiday with family. I am thankful to have seen a Savannah Hawk land a few metres away from me (in Anapoima Colombia). Its wingspan was so large that when it took flight, I felt the pressure of the air under its wings. To see the night sky in all…
-
0801: Tideglass

Tideglass She walks where the sea leaves its broken things,soft glassand sorrow in tangled strings. A letter floats in a rock pool’s sleep.Its ink runs cold,its silence deep. “My heart’s no sum that sense can hold,but it forecasts storms, and it’s turning cold.” She reads,then folds it like a prayer,and leaves it cradledgently there. Written…
-
0701: A Six Sentence Story

Clinging to Small Solid Facts in Six Sentences We talk about Venezuela, as if naming it might steady the water, and I drift in the jacuzzi like a bubble, briefly convinced of my own shape. I mention that Einstein had flat feet — facts don’t ask questions because saying something solid feels like ballast against…
-
23.12: Journal of Thoughts
The Gift Economy We are not measured by balance sheets,a favour owed, a debt now cleared.The soul keeps no such ledger. We are measured by the cup of watergiven to the rootless seed,by the shelter built for a stranger’s storm,by the word spoken into a silencethat might never answer back. Love, like poetry, is a…
-
05.01: A Liturgy for a Bubble

A Liturgy for the Bubble in a Current Once upon a time We gathered at water’s edge,in a jacuzzi between the spokenand the dissolved. We knew when a metaphor was not a metaphor,but a bubble wearing a skin of air, and we spoke to the Brief Republic,the Spinning Borders,the diamond thinning to memory.We called it…