Julian (Hool)
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hool415.bsky.social
Julian (Hool)
@hool415.bsky.social
830 followers 670 following 3.3K posts
Nominated for a Forward Prize, Best Of The Net (Twice) and Two Pushcart Awards.
Black Bough (Silver Branch Poet), East Ridge Review (Featured Poet), Frogmore Papers, Full House Literary, Dream Catcher, Starbeck Orion, Dreich, Broken Spine, Frazzled Lit.
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hool415.bsky.social
Hullo and hey… do show some love for @frazzledlit.bsky.social and poetry editor extrodindibaire @lozzawriting.bsky.social by voting for them for the Chill Subs Best Lit Mag awards. Give this already mighty publication an added leg-up! It only takes 10 seconds…!
November 26, 2025 at 9:47 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #reflection
Some Reflective Thinking Voyager clutches a shiny plaque representing each of us, music too: our very best, (tided up), front room view. Walked a lake’s frosty path and found the chattering-dead: memories rake up their muddy beds. One day my only child will write my history; the font unfamiliar, his lines inevitably all askew. Watched Manhattan’s cubed-escarpment float East River: a doors flung open, shimmering, advent calendar. Retail-reflections: the window’s-paparazzi, damning flashes of a harsh judgemental surprise. That near wordless, instinctive mirroring: from those first and furthest days of love.
November 26, 2025 at 7:56 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo. Just put this
up on the shady side for TopTweetTuesday…
Wave The White Flag For Knee-Jerk Pacifism Cowardice runs through me like rotten Blackpool Rock, it’d take conscription’s nipping dogs and long-armed crooks to shepherd me to fight, I’d only want to flay and de-eye with malice those potato-skins lined-up quaking in the army-barracks but Nazi-jackboots weren’t ever halted by handwringing or whistling fusillades of wishful-thinking, though I’d likely quickly die, squashed flat as an unpondered Rorschach blot, I’d hear my final fired choir of hated bullets: Sing!-Sing!-Sing! out for my and every other cowering voiceless child.
November 25, 2025 at 7:48 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo @thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social and to #promptcombo #onroofs
Love the theme, as great as Fidel’s from last week!
Ben Nevis First seen from a petrol forecourt as perching on top the next block’s trading estate: it’s not a good look, this mountain’s all slouch, no poised, sky-scratching nib of summit, but a fist of dull clenched crayons, though I can just pick out its small menagerie of pepper-corn birds. There should be more aloof arrogance here for I stand at the foot of the roof of the land, yet this peak is drawn and redrawn behind net-curtain clouds: an unexpected shyness tentatively peeping back and forth.
November 24, 2025 at 8:24 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #measure
Measure Alas, so much is unmeasured: we do not know the length of life until and if hospice-coddled; the worth of our existence to society’s peering popcorn-chomping faces; even the grip of love fluctuates, like a kite grappling with the most uncertain winds.
November 22, 2025 at 8:22 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #specific
Specific There is a specific point: ice flops into water; when denuded light, gravity-free cannot run any faster; for suddenly embracing God or by being caught similarly surprised by the revelation of love in a way all slow and painful de-conversions are not.
November 21, 2025 at 8:24 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo @dragonslayerma.bsky.social Thanks for such a stellar theme.
I love the idea that whatever our beliefs, as energy is never actually destroyed we will always continue!
#promptcombo #northstar
Twinkle At my ending a pinch of heat slips free, this distilled kiss ascending is immortality. Jostled by a bawdy waiting breeze, my tiny warmth touches clouds, to coax a single raindrop legacy. Which in turn might fall on-top an over-mighty swell, to roam the seas as part of a never-ending wave farewell. Or perhaps I will just arise unhindered, a wisp with other chattering atoms: an almost undetectable atmospheric phantom. Then you may see me wink high above a winter's night, as I dance momentarily, with a star's tentative and always bashful light.
November 18, 2025 at 3:15 PM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #reality
Photo (You and Me By The Groynes) At the seaside, you are five, here: both of us content to be a child, the stubborn groynes as me resisting the pilling shifts of time; in reality this scene is all a perpetual ticker-tape of change. Behind: new voices are photo-caught rushing past, swinging buckets, to scoop this spilling, watery world afresh, while beyond sticked retirees lean upon their windy out of season breath.
November 18, 2025 at 8:35 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #grow
Hauntings We know we cannot grow beyond our ghosts, they keep us fixed refusing a real aging of us, their hauntings, all passive-aggressive, arm in arm, moments preserved: orphaned currents in amber-filled skulls. Each apparition knows us well enough to unpick stitch by stitch, that tapestry of mind, daily re-woven and then hung again to pointlessly hide behind. It’s no wonder we get penalised for holding on so late, such vivid and overdue library books.
November 17, 2025 at 8:37 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #issue. An old one.
In The Car (Filling Up) Last week I shared my car with a liberal priest. His collar did not tether him to scripture: card-shop platitudes preferred to what his book traditionally thought profound. His religion post-vague, his lodestar so diffuse to be indistinguishable from a scented candle’s sweetened haze. He was adamant (plagiarising the refrain), that all you needed was love. Of course we agreed, (you cannot do otherwise within such featureless fog) so why, I said: the garb, the magic, the take-on-faith woo? He replied succinctly, that he bore a God-shaped hole inside. I think he’s right, that this gape or gash or ache is carried by all of us, but the issue is whether we’re compelled to find any fluff or old rubble to stuff it satisfactorily full.
November 16, 2025 at 8:54 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #transport
Transport When I fell for you, my own transportation ceased: I felt all my tyres gently hsssssssttttttt… and the rushing stopped. I was newly content just to be parked-up and entirely driven by someone else.
November 15, 2025 at 8:25 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #poemsabout #desire @thebrokenspine.co.uk @karenpgonzalez.bsky.social
An old one, from far away student days. Hope you are on the mend Alan. Thanks all.
The Going Back Room Afterwards lying on my bed alone, I hear ceiling steps above, then metallic pulses from a tap: the heartbeat of a chugging pipe restored, and deafening still you facing me, having left the certainty of your chair to lock and check again the door before that your voice murmuring something soft and small, a footnote unheard, uneeded, just cluttering it all further back again getting close, my fingers brushing milky flesh within that seasoned kink of wayward buttons further still to 3:00 when sunlight hemmed those suffering curtains, you, here in my room, the building heat, so stultifying to even earlier, an age away, when content to just observe you as a voyeur: head bowed over desk, novel and notes, spread or propped, and at 2:00 when you arrived and only an oscillating fan vicariously could reach for you and wandering backwards ever more all the way to the day, that walk in the park, when I suggested we could study together, not daring to see your face as I spoke, by either hiding among those clouds, the ones so teased, caught like wool on wire, or down below stuck within the many fossils of muddy studs on show.
November 14, 2025 at 8:03 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #science. An old one, first in Frogmore Papers.
Overheads When I was young the constellations were glints of bone, suspended skeletons, whose mythic forms loomed large as legends; the pinned sagas of my junior skies. Then a telescope brought the stars to me. Freed from their confinement by the sound of science, I understood something of the universe’s atomic roar. I noticed colours: odd drops of blood, the discarded flecks from a manhandled bullion and tints from the deftest breath of blue. For a time, these sparks scarred me as the furthest outriders from the pomp of a Creator’s blaze. Now my exploded theology has flung these thoughts aside and all my myths have died. With only science left, half a knowledge no longer enough to hear the birth of light; and the sky is mute again, the darkness, undisguised.
November 14, 2025 at 7:53 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #number. An old one today.
On Love Fading No reset button for when all is broke, or statutory directive to invoke. No free-phone number to locate and call, or self-righting mechanism to install. No duty to love under the constitution, hence no ombudsman for restitution. No clocks reversible (by more than an hour), or god with any really useful power. No flashing alarm-box that will be seen, for social services to intervene. No government website to explain a state-love allowance which can be claimed. No paramedic service with response time targets to electro-shock dead love and somehow revive it.
November 13, 2025 at 7:46 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #myth
Myth You’d think a myth must begin with the deliberate coupling of a chain of lies: packed and bumping carriages of commuting falsehoods, but they can set-off (and often do) as plain truth. It’s the simple wear and tear of the journey, the forgotten departure point, which means (without malicious intent), the final disembarking of these words is undocumented from some lost and foreign land… coming round, blinking, using only a strangely exotic and utterly implausible lexicon.
November 12, 2025 at 8:53 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #measure. An old one today.
A Half-Warming Stone A child’s death over a century ago, though without the eras knee-jerk florid penmanship of beloved, cherished or deeply missed, and absent any arthritic angels, stooped and bored looming as the inscription’s bower without the usual Jesus’ knifing, citing imperial rights trumpeting his cruel and premature call… parents stating loss so plainly, and who left a clue that their love was modern, softer than all the plumped-up, stony High Victoriana. The churchyard is scoured for any similar mark, yet only this tomb insists their child reached not six but that and a half. Love, unlike time is indivisible, but this fraction needed to record its fullest measure.
November 11, 2025 at 8:00 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo. This put up on the shady side for a TopTweetTuesday #winter #poetry challenge.
Condiments Of The Season A tree-heart in winter is not a dead place, despite its canopy of care blown-away, leaving just that lattice of rigour-mortis-ribs, a sluggish pump still murmurs underneath, imperceptible as any gust-facing-prayer; sinuous roots fumble: thirsting-veins drilling, seeking the sunk-sump of sun from those cartwheeling summers…sadly migrated; tendrils as white-canes, feeling for lightly-bewildered sparks as love took new forms when a decision to fragment made, shattering that whole, seasoning earth’s mulchy plate with its myriad of sprinkled salt and peppery kids.
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #literature
Literature Words snake into lines, lines stiffen to build-up a book, that seeded fecundity which exists between covers soon overgrows into a wall-climbing creeping library.
November 10, 2025 at 7:52 AM
hool415.bsky.social
@rfsmith.bsky.social @dragonslayerma.bsky.social @thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
@victoriaspires.bsky.social I’m hosting #promptcombo this week.Use the #promptcombo and post me @hool415.bsky.social for the theme of #workinglove Anything on love, work or a mix of both! All welcome till 5pm Friday!!
Working Love I fell for you in work amid the photocopier’s paparazzi-flashing, had no control over seating so, between floors giddy elevator conversations snatched. Once, outside, during a fire evacuation test I stood by you, aware my ruddy-face was so obviously smouldering. Hold the note you gave me for supposed help on an urgently demanded spinning-hamster-wheel type task, just a rather economical: ‘Thank you v v much’ but I imagined that first word unexpectedly promoted and H.R. formally introducing its shyest new replacement: Love. Since that day to my certain knowledge you’ve never used ‘v v’ again… though I make sure those twanging Cupid arrowheads are near daily kept still in play.
November 9, 2025 at 7:42 PM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo @tomsnarsky.bsky.social and to #smallpoemsunday
Biblical Rocket Fuel I’m waiting an American billionaire to consecrate a place of worship on the far side of the moon, something like Tintern Abbey transposed stone by stone, its roofless receptiveness would be perfect… even if a need to still be fully suited, all our prayers getting boosted by a quarter of a million miles further up the ladder and maybe nearer to God’s home.
November 9, 2025 at 8:12 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #law
Civic Paraphernalia States, gods, and laws are all constructs in a way that love is not. Sadly, we need some guide rails to allow the best in all of us to bloom and fully flourish.
November 9, 2025 at 8:04 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #language. An old one.
A Token Biscuit Grandpa’s stroke puts us all in hospital, an icy sea of wavy linoleum speeds my Matchbox cars. His pillow-propped face dented: a pale loaf refound and pulled from the bottom of the shopping bag. Hearing language’s early steps: the sock-mouth moving, whilst I drive around underneath his iron bed’s redundant wheels. Opposite, a stiff cantilevered-hand brandishes a digestive-moon of startling beigeness at a straggling caravan of untrading visitors. Much older: I realise it was just a sovereign in a bony clasp, to pay the fast approaching ferryman.
November 8, 2025 at 7:55 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #geography
Geography I’m not sure I ever really understood the geography of you: that hazy topography beyond the easy sandy curl of your deceptively accessible shore, but that near-impassible cloud-shrouded hinterland is probably the biggest reason I stayed with you so long.
November 6, 2025 at 8:00 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo @rfsmith.bsky.social
Thanks for an early classic poem for the very seasonal #storm theme for #promptcombo
All welcome, just post to the above address with both hashtags.
(The rfs one above, not mine!)
@thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social @victoriaspires.bsky.social @dragonslayerma.bsky.social ⛈️
Squall, Bedruthan Cove, Cornwall The sky is suddenly shuttered, a god-fearing, if futile attempt at boarding-up, then raw incomprehensible torrents. Not mere weather, but mile-wide, a bay’s exhaustive bereavement begun. Below a perilous cliff path, the self-flagellating bash of sea: dented and scored enough to will its own collapse, while hovering over the gap, (a chomp of fallen and gushing rocks), blackened birds must cope with the stifled chokes of wholly inconsolable winds.
November 2, 2025 at 5:38 PM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #creature
This one a recycle from TopTweetTuesday
Moth: The Nocturnal Icarus Disintegration shaped as creature: mortality tasted with every choking flap; mahogany planed-off twirl, a minuscule aerial dust bowl. Against candle or lamp, first spots of a magnetic, if erratic, muddy rain.
November 2, 2025 at 8:43 AM