Ju (Julian)

@hool415.bsky.social

1035 Followers 825 Following

Poetry stuff only. Nominated for a Forward Prize, Best Of The Net (Twice) and Two Pushcart Awards. Black Bough (Silver Branch Poet), East Ridge Review (Featured Poet), Joint 1st BB New Simile Competition.

Road Walking home it’s late, streetlamps gild with a coppered light. I’m on the other side when you pass me by, unnoticed. You two are your own parade, all mingled arms and tumbling laughs pursued by a pair of lolloping balloons. We are fifteen, friends, -why I didn’t speak? Barefoot uninhibited zest facing my clomping shod of shyness. Now I only hear dead tongues and the road between us, a cleaving tarmac Styx, as cancer will attack you both: your clinging walk, just a prescient awful pact. I cannot warn of your deaths for the past allows no bridge, just the small hour stumps of jetty, to step again a little closer, to those who once had lived. Julian Cason
Thinness Everything feels precarious; the usual hoard of evening birds aren’t flying but without caring, just swept; that smoke-tinged breeze is evidence of a dusk gone too far and peeling; tonight’s half-moon: sky’s poorly fastened sole remaining button; an owl and a car alarm sing out in the unison of the jolted. Later, familiar ghosts will be efficiently delivered to any quaking postcode. Julian Cason
Uncharted Age Still not old, but close enough to see its shore, to unpick the thicket of figures rushing out to meet me on their sands. Not ready spears, but brandished walking sticks; shouting, due to weathered or failed senses; many using faraway languages of addled minds: that cruelest inverse glossolalia. There are still stabbing reefs a-plenty before any actual certainty I will make land. Julian Cason
Once, On Honeymoon We drove for lunch, when two cars by Boots The Chemist, simultaneously decided to reverse. Nothing that wasn’t metal was badly hurt, the pair got out and resumed as proxies the loud argument their vehicles started. Honestly, my wife was briefly horrified, but it felt to me more a reminding, a light-seasoning of real life, still out there, biding idly, beyond our wilful two-week look away. So, I’m glad I saw it, just a little seaside salt sprinkled over our spread of days. Julian Cason
Balance Some theologies insist on a modest surfeit of goodness to justify eternal life; in all of sieved time, maybe a clutch of souls perfectly balanced, oscillating like a condemned Janus, equally stuck between soft angelic harps and spikier music from the Devil’s many playful prongs. Julian Cason
Tapering July Yesterday, we went to the stream, parts pumping surprising colour from a still startling pre-loved sky, but so stringy and incongruous within the haze of trees, like their one troublesome varicose vein; fuss and flaps from a single consulting duck, who alas, clearly didn’t know quite how to operate. Julian Cason
Sprint Sprint is all-out effort: the world turned to mere background carousel, it’s unsustainable, but I’d still rather be an impulsive flash of hare than pondering even if ultimately victorious tortoise; I’ll judge my own race, thank you very much. Julian Cason
Reheated Today it’s college-hot again: remembering vividly my room’s afternoon-pulled amber-leaking sun-battered curtains and that unexpected visit once, which surprised us both (though in different ways); later, a gravel scrunch to the sweating wood of the library, floorboards reliably protesting like an ancient ocean-bothered cabin, without thoughts of a before or an after, no sense in fact of Time having any waving hands; faces so young, to be effectively blank: everywhere, out of sight, people filling up as hive-tied bees but on forays for their own particular pursuit of the buzz of knowledge. Julian Cason
Our Street This street’s original feet are now of course in the ground, our particular stretch being I believe, an Edwardian invention; even those first voices pushed in robust, over-engineered prams have grown to dust; though most of the windows are modern secondary double-glazed, I can still feel respectable ghosts, stepped back just in the lee of shadowy curtains; a wonder too if any original front garden shrubs survive: those tireless batons of seeds, passed on, season through season, like seen but forever unheard generations of always short-lived children. Julian Cason
Headwind A way to recognise the very clearest thwarting headwind source is found by any close-up examination of a mirror. Julian Cason
Conquer They say love conquers all, but this requires both split apple halves to be reunited; if not, it’s only the preserved and pickled jar of a long lasting but bitter tasting, unrequited. Julian Cason
Pressure Valves All gales originate from the Westbury Whitehorse Carpark, pushing you so far off-kilter, it’s walking, but with a mangled and transparent zimmer. Stayed in a hotel where 2 a.m. winds ran pell-mell down corridors, rudely sticking tongues under gawping doorframes. Nothing handles breeze better than a hairy-willow: a verdant fringe luxuriating; cosplaying quietly, acting as current-stroked antipodean coral. Julian Cason
Patient It’s a virtue of sorts, but also a slow puncture of agency, a passive roadside wait. Sometimes you need to put on the blue sirens and break the speed limits for fate. Julian Cason
Unabashed Worked with someone who was unabashed, uncompromising and spoke in a filterless brazen; less fun for us, the not in management, needing to marshal all our dialects of diplomacy: we the people, who nine to five lived and breathed as bashed. Julian Cason
Bugged A dead fly on the sill. I missed its dying, all the relentless cries of wings. You forget how they must carry their own glass on their back; just a brittle lightweight curl now, a planed shaving from a bigger, fiercer creature. I will tissue it up and we will share a hollow final crunch. Some insects are destined to always bother you, a childhood cranefly my father caught: splayed inside a book, perfectly spread-eagled like an awful 1970s centrefold. Julian Cason (First in The Alchemy Spoon)
Magnetism Some birds use the earth’s magnetism to navigate great distances, we don’t seem as able to float above and learn these things; yet for all this achievement, most of the chitter we hear from birds, like us, is a sharing of their panicked search for a tightly-nested love. Julian Cason
Night Shift Someone from work barged in the other night, unsurprisingly, it seems the hierarchy of life is maintained in dreams; made me wonder if anyone ever progressed a second career just as a doppelgänger of themselves, gaining promotion by stretched small-hour stints in a no less challenging but so much darker parallel world? Julian Cason
Embrace Maybe there’s a downside of getting close: a stifling or blinding to the fully-shaped and our needed stepped-back detail; imagine if the Moon could embrace the Earth: its craters and rilles scraped-out by the nosey peaks of the Himalayas, we’d be flooded with shadow, so night would be drowned, seeing much more of a face but in truth far, far less. Julian Cason
Rose These are supposedly more enlightened times, so I think it unlikely that anyone ever rose from the dead. Faith is the absence of critical thought; prayer a one-way yet understandably desperate call; religion: an imperfect lens for viewing the universe’s majestic awe. Without the divine, I can still wish upon a star, feel the cosmic winds of worlds undiscovered from afar, and equally, just like the godly, desperately not want to die. Julian Cason
Approaching Heath Hospital, Late Afternoon, December 19th A sick, nearly-spent advent calendar; each window: sallow glass, holding glib, half-schooled germs. Curtains hang like open dressing-gowns. Julian Cason
Delicatessen The Deli, the penultimate time I was propositioned. Spend the day on my boat, Saturday, she said. It will just be us, a hand anchoring my arm. She was fifty, I half that. When I paused she laughed, offering lunch as well. That laugh, spat-out, hard-edged, showing she had invested nothing of herself in me. The last time was work, someone’s house, she just emerging: three quarters still bereaved. On my final visit she met me braless beneath her thin crisply-ironed blouse. She asked for a hug. A hug, she said, slowing down the word so it could safely steer the approaching junction. I left on both occasions gradually, the invitations supposedly unnoticed by me, each time wondering why I said no to everything instinctively, quite so much. Julian Cason
Frolic You start a folic in sunny rippling shallows, being both warm and fun, though these frothy fuzzy banks seamlessly lead into the darker roving currents of many potentially submerging blues. Julian Cason
Defiance There needs some rushing force for any defiant push-back; like the way a planted flag can only properly live and breath if aroused by a challenging wind. Julian Cason
Glowing Heat Those summer months, when some bird prowled our garden with the rasp of an antique photocopier; the neighbour but-one repaired a vintage motorbike: the air doing laps pillioning his unbuckled forest fire, (a leathery lunar eclipse similarly tainted); odd planets reminding of stray Paracetamol; when the Latter-Day Saints and Evangelicals knocked on the very same day, (God evidently betting on two dogs at the races); pregnant-you, devouring apples like the sole, county-wide cider press; it all feeling precarious enough, just waiting, daily, to board that potentially cancellable sunny flight. Julian Cason
A Bus Route Seen From Work I stare out the second-floor office window: rain rushes to and from a bus stop; double-paned, the whoosh near silent, lying patient in the gutter till a vehicle finds it; these drenchings are uniformly people-focused, like tall trees and their relationship with lightening. I love the colour of this overwhelming greyness, it’s Monday-muscular. Julian Cason
Tenderly When you spoke so tenderly at the funeral, it was a little warm kindling in a damp forest of despair. Julian Cason
Swoon A swoon supposedly happens when head over heels and overcome by love; this oxygen-starved, giddy-induced fall takes you plummeting back down to the denser layers of just pottering-on through life, breathing more easily but lower and maybe desperately alone. Julian Cason
Alphard My favourite star is Alphard, very heart of the Hydra, (I think it means the solitary one) earth’s atmospheric scintillations making it erratically and often rather eerily, continue still to beat. Julian Cason
Apprehension Fear is a facing the immediate now: the nocturnal throat-clearing of a floorboard outside your door; apprehension is its second cousin, twice removed: the brightly-lit horrors of a tomorrow you cannot avoid. Julian Cason
On The Back Seat I’ve been one hopeless thing after another: an often overwhelming sense of just being generally a passenger, slipping-back into that bouncing caravan only loosely attached to your own life; seeking through each ridden-bump or scurrilous-indent, the revealed phrenology of all my roads ahead; any guaranteed agency may well be illusory slop, (though if it was tearfully raining, I’d probably even take the moonshine-pitch of a static, off-kilter monk!) Also, I once heard of someone in work who apparently, drove themselves to love. Julian Cason
Mellowness It’s a state of less, an absence of, something devoid of fight or rage. A day or season’s end: rusted-light through evening’s net of trees. The attitude, if luckily retained, within that piecemeal fading of great age: the inference of a gentle scoff or shrug, at the final slowing of the tick, the tock. Julian Cason
Llandaff Cathedral, Seen From Wingfield Road Facing west, among the smarting clouds of dusk stands the far cathedral spire, sharp, if black against the blaze, an upturned stylus ready for the night, for the spinning sky unsleeved then the needle finds voiceless songs, from the furthest edge of time, but destined only to be heard by those with scratched or woken minds. Julian Cason
Lurch We can only lurch: there’s no smoothness built-in to any progress. Goals by stops and starts. Think three steps forward, but accept five or six back. (Proof plenty surely, that these thoughts were not authored by a robot.) Julian Cason
Roll Out Love’s start turns you water-boatman, that fragile insect navigating an entirely alien skin; an attentive stillness is required, not absolute, just enough, like a child’s imprecise but best statue-game attempt. It’s different to a caterpillar’s self-obsessed navel-gazing, whose supposed new beginnings are mostly premature and disappointing sappy unzippings; if love works there’s the plunge together, shooting over life’s limitless Niagaras: such a cosy, rolling barrel to be skaddadling in with hopefully only those very rarest pointed splinterings. Julian Cason
Landings In college, had a tiny fling with a poet, she took me to special places of new unused words; the fling quickly flung but I was changed: things could be delicately laid on pages; that what we needed said was patient and always waited. Julian Cason
The Pine Dresser Dismantling the pine dresser (put up in ’74), I am stuck on a last warped hinge. A lone bolt writhes like a maggot, burrowing deep, holding onto the shelving for never used plates, when my father’s cusses return again. Back then, a brace of strangers delivered the jaundiced wood in two parts: the younger leading but unspeaking, the other cigarette bobbing, brusquely bossing, and me being ushered away while my father strained and swore, breaking the likely same askew fastening. So now I connect once more, my struggle to reverse, to undo. Each laboured half-turn back, along the gnaw of a crooked path, refinds the thread of an afternoon’s strain, preserved so unexpectedly, in the unforgiving amber grain. Julian Cason
Clench clenched mouth makes a grimace clenched fingers a ready fist clenched mind a likely bigot Julian Cason
Novel The English students in my college sat outside on sunny benches with open novels straddling knees, it would only take two of them just so gathered to squawk about (for example), the author’s view of love; these caught snippets felt part of a proper if still largely theoretical, vital education. I was a new historian, though ironically with little relevant past of my own. Julian Cason
Fiend I’ve never known evil outside a Netflix documentary: fiends, who so politely sometimes accompany me during tea. I’m a classic liberal: awful acts, yes, but rarely irredeemably wicked people; there’s redemption plenty to be had without any need to bother Jesus. Julian Cason
A Quick Break Whilst looking away and making a coffee the crow on the lawn had shattered into a spread of sparrows; these bits helpfully soon picking-up themselves. Julian Cason
Moving Space There are nights the stars don’t wink but stare so hard you see eyebrows raise; those few last satellites buzz like spectral honeybees, and the air feels suddenly pure, conscience-clear under some lingering, hushed Amen; where meteors rip open the thrown roll of sky with a flash of a tailor’s casual blade; when mortality is embraced by fingertips running across this lavish thread of stitch-free gods or simply as an ersatz hope from our own sown-in curiosity eternally stretching. Julian Cason
The Games We Play Driving rural back roads, though only when no-one else can be seen, I slip into this stupid game of a national hide and seek, imagining the starting point of Nelson’s Column then tasking myself to find the best place to crouch. Usually, I end up choosing the loft of some patently unused distant farm building. I’m pretty good at it but during his many turns of disappearing, I’m forced to accept that God is the better. Julian Cason
Consuming We may believe we are caterpillars: consuming for an unknown but instinctively believed greater good. Yet the danger here is taking the branch to a squidgy toothpaste-grave, the issue of unsought angel wings, and having everything once clung onto prised away and left cruelly suddenly far behind. Julian Cason
Just Four Of The Astronauts Who Walked On The Moon Are Alive Today The rest now breathe unvisored dust, lying laced with earned moonshine. Houston/Heaven: Godspeed these launchable-souls one last time. Julian Cason
Luck I am interested in the mechanics of prayer: locking-in to a faint signal; our spewing ticker-tape messages sent; the recorded length of any long-delayed reply. A friend in school got impressive results staying more local, using a resolutely mute pocketed ancient coin. Julian Cason
Eureka There is this home quite nearby, which appears abandoned, plants have muscled-in across the drive, half a gate plays recklessly, but at night a bare light bulb (absent shade or modest curtain) stares out. It’s how any house would act naturally, if left alone, just thinking hard, dwelling on its one great idea. Julian Cason