Jay Hulme
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jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Jay Hulme
@jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
20K followers 650 following 2.6K posts
Poet. Speaker. Educator. Performer. Adult, YA, and Children's poetry. Occasionally picture books. Lots of posts about churches. Unapologetically trans (he/him) jayhulme.com
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jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Can I interest you in a VERY silly church tower?
It's a church tower with a very still stumpy extra bit, and then a little metal thing on top of that. The scale makes it look like it's melted, or sort of slid down inside itself like a novelty light saber. A wider view of the stumpy tower with the full church in frame. The church is also stumpy.
December 1, 2025 at 8:14 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Waking up and it's still dark outside like
A rough wooden carving of a face high in a church. He looks... Unimpressed.
November 30, 2025 at 9:09 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Also, a little bunting. Nicer than tinsel, I think...
Some paper bunting of pink and blue baubles, hung above a row of old books and nicknacks
November 26, 2025 at 12:39 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
When I got my own place my Grandad gave me the first artificial Christmas Tree he'd ever owned, and a box of random decorations.

She's looking good for 64 years old...
A small artificial Christmas tree with wide spread branches and multicoloured decorations, with presents gathered beneath it
November 26, 2025 at 12:38 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
The 25th of November is St Catherine's feast day.

"This isn't about God,
the stained-glass legends of broken wheels, the barrowload
of miracles, or the dinner-plate halo they will nail to your head.

Under the gospel,
the truth of it: woman answers back, ends up dead."

- Rosie Garland
Saint Catherine Rosie Garland It starts as a joke, the one about the kitchen and what you're doing out of it. All smiles. Splay of knees, bulge of crotches, mutter of heavens, these women. Why have a dog and bark for it? Keep your eyes open for the tic of an index finger shoving spectacles up a sweaty nose. Keep running circles round their gnawed faith. Jab and feint. Jab and feint. They will kill you for being cleverer, worse than laughing at their dicks. You know all of that but won't stop. Can't. You didn't read the Library of Alexandria to bat your eyelashes and keep schtum. This isn't about God, the stained-glass legends of broken wheels, the barrowload of miracles, or the dinner-plate halo they will nail to your head. Under the gospel, the truth of it: woman answers back, ends up dead.
November 25, 2025 at 9:53 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Even the church printer knows not to betray me today. The demon that possessed it must be an ally.
A pile of folded booklets. The cover says "Taize service on transgender day of remembrance - on Thursday 20th of November 2025 - at St Nicholas church, Leicester
November 20, 2025 at 2:33 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
"and the devil said you don't want it but would be something like
black black black black black black black black black black
black black black black green black black black black black
pink"

- Rebecca Tamás
from Witch Trials By Rebecca Tamás when the devil came back the witch started asking him about god again even if it was a somewhat awkward subject she wanted to know why she occasionally turned up at church and sat alone on the end stall feeling bored and sick and all the stone seemed to say you are not alive you are not alive you are not alive the devil pushed his hair up into a butterfly clip sighed and said it's buried there's just this space and the witch said tell me about the space tell me what would happen if I could touch god and lick his marble face tell me what would occur if I was let down there to find him it's been so long and the devil said you don't want it but would be something like black black black black black black black black black black black black black black green black black black black black pink
November 19, 2025 at 4:22 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
I am often to be found caring for the unknown dead, who emerge, shattered, from their ancient and forgotten graves. Collecting them, burying them, praying them back to their rest. It makes me think, sometimes, of the transphobic refrain that in a thousand years our bones will somehow betray us.
Bonefields By Jay Hulme When you die, they say, we'll know who you truly were; vultures of morality, picking us out of ourselves. Perverse sky burial, bodies stretched out on sky towers of hatred. No ritual in this but the pain. This will not be how it ends. I refuse my uncreation. These wings become me; this splintering holds me. My marrow returns to the sky, the earth, the creation from whence I came. They say once, my atoms were birds; they become so again. They say stars. I say vultures. When we lay down together in the bone fields of despair you must tell me: how can you fear an ending that's the same as where you began?
November 18, 2025 at 12:11 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Glimpses of light, in the darkness...
Light seeps through a narrow window set deep into a church wall. All around it, darkness.
November 17, 2025 at 10:11 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Visited a little redundant church in the middle of a field.

It was full of dead wasps who'd come in to die as winter hit, and I found a broom at the back and simply couldn't help myself.
A broom beside a pile of dead wasps and dust on a tiled church floor
November 14, 2025 at 2:37 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
A living church. A thriving church. A church with no functional noticeboard but a lot of space on the railings.
The railings outside St nicks in Leicester, with ten different posters tied to them. There's the November and December schedule showing all the events and services, as well as posters for evenings with the cathedral choir at St Nicholas, a Taize service on Tdor, a special eucharist the Sunday after Tdor, a candlelight carol service, church Christmas decorating, a Christmas craft afternoon, beer & carols with Kate Bottley, and a Christmas eve eucharist
November 7, 2025 at 10:04 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Cathedral friend.
A magpie perched high on a cathedral column
November 6, 2025 at 7:24 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Wanna see the newspaper clipping about it?
SHOCKING DEATH OF A WELL-KNOWN ARCHITECT. Mr Ordish, of Queensborough Hall, Leicester-shire, met a terrible death late on Tuesday night. Deceased attended the presidential address of the Sanitary Institute at Leicester, and on returning by the train he got out at Syston Station before the train stopped, and, falling between the carriages, his head got under the wheels, causing instantaneous death. Deceased was an authority on church architecture.
November 5, 2025 at 3:05 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Join me on BBC Radio Three at 9:45pm this Tuesday, as I take you on a journey to the cave of St Robert of Knaresborough, to explore if a place of faith such as this can ever, truly, be abandoned.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
The interior of St Roberts Cave, with rough hewn greening limestone walls and a mud floor Nobody lives here, few people visit, fewer pray, but this site is still holy. The moths clinging to the roof of the cave, don't know it's abandoned, the spiders pray their own prayers in their scuttling tongue. God cannot abandon a place, as much as we cannot abandon ourselves. What is created cannot be uncreated. What is carved from the cliff cannot be put back. This cave became a hermitage, the hermitage became a chapel, the chapel becamea shrine, the shrine became a ruin, the ruin became a crimescene, the crimescene became a tourist attraction, the tourist attraction became forgotten, and still the cave opens onto the river, the trees turn green and gold and drop their leaves, and the leaves become mud and layer onto the stone, and fill in the open grave, and carpet the cave floor, and feed the trees, that continue the cycle they began long before Robert arrived. There is something here, in this cave, that opens outwards. A span wider than the cave walls and the space between the water and the cliff. We walk here in the footsteps of the past and the future, witnessing the promise of all we could be. Medieval Theologians spoke of the possibility that it was in the nothingness that we could discover the infinite, that it was our preoccupation with all that there is, that got in the way of all we could be. Robert shed the world like a cloak, and created, in this sliver of land, something else. Every time I come I try to step closer to that something. To the truths that he found here in this fragment of space. I sit in the dark of the cave and hope that I see it, that I glimpse the wonder he saw, placed just an inch out of reach. Jay kneels before st Roberts gave, scattered around him are the low walls the the ruined chapel, and behind him the mouth of the cave opens up in the ivy-covered cliff
November 3, 2025 at 1:30 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Someone visiting St Nicks: "hmmm, I wonder how old this church is..."

Me, a small and gnomelike creature that lives in the walls, appearing silently and from nowhere to say: "let me tell you the secrets of this ancient and sacred place."
Jay sits cross legged on the floor by the altar and pulpit steps, gesturing as he speaks. Someone sits in the pew in front of him listening (hopefully)
November 2, 2025 at 8:01 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Oh no, some say he's talking about Cathedrals again...
A photo of jay holding a microphone and gesturing at a PowerPoint slide that just says "Cathedrals"
October 31, 2025 at 1:03 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Me: I love my best friend, I'd die for my best friend.

The most recent photos of me and my best friend:
Okay so this is like a lovely formal family photo except the parents are at the back looking happy in their best outfits and jay and kym are at the front, and kym is putting jay in a weird headlock Another lovely formal family photo with two beautiful parents at the back smiling all happily only jay and kym are at the front and jay is poking kym who is screaming and slapping him in the face.
October 29, 2025 at 9:51 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Had the rare joy of preaching this Sunday, looking at Prayer. Here's a little bit of what I said...
Perhaps we begin by praying at meals. Before bed. In the mornings. When an ambulance goes by. Perhaps we make an effort to thank God for a beautiful flower, or a kind word, or the presence of a friend, or stranger. And perhaps that prayer will grant us more strength of faith, or a clearer sense of God's call on our lives. Perhaps it helps us see God more clearly, and more often, recognising consciously what has always been there. Perhaps we find, in this newfound sense of God's presence, the strength to do and be what we could not before. Prayer is not always about asking, but about being in the presence of God, and about allowing yourself to be changed by that encounter. "More and more by each glistening minute", as Jorie Graham would put it. Prayer is openness, and vulnerability, and longing. For me, prayer is reaching towards the vastness that is God, and, more and more often, being able to recognise God reaching back. As God always has, since long long before I believed. In the famous painting of God creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God is leaning forward, almost falling off his cloud, every muscle straining as he reaches, reaches, reaches. Well past the middle of the panel, hand outstretched. And Adam sits on the rocks, reclining, hand raised upwards, lazily curling a finger. AIl he has to do, is straighten his hand, stretch out his arm, lean forward an inch, one inch, and he can seize God by the hand, by the wrist. If he reached out to the same extent as God, they could press their foreheads together, face to face. Prayer is extending that finger. Stretching out that arm. Working to cross that gulf which we have created, with our petty preoccupations. With our desire to be, like the Pharisee, SEEN to be pure. But, as we know, "nothing may separate us from the love of God". All we have to do is reach out, just the tiniest amount, and there God is. Waiting. Patiently. For us.
October 28, 2025 at 2:21 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Little Holy Island retreat. Hiked for hours in the dunes. Prayed in the ruins. On the outcrops. By the sea.

Watched the sunset. Waited for the stars to open up. Saw the milky way. Saw a comet fall from the sky. Split into two. Burn up over the land. Red and white coals in the darkness.
A tree alone in the sand dunes A castle behind ruins and gravestones painted red by the sunset A rainbow rises out of the ruined abbey A sunset over the sea.
October 24, 2025 at 7:43 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Saw him in a shop months ago and didn't buy him... But I can't stop thinking about him.
A little snail statue, it's weirdly cute with a smile and really chubby cheeks Little statue of a snail
October 15, 2025 at 2:15 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Literally JUST mint flavoured sugar.
Ingredients Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Fondant (sugar, glucose syrup, water) Oil of peppermint, Electrolytes (potassium chloride, calcium lactate, sodium chloride, magnesium carbonate), B Vitamin Blend (Nicotinamide [B3], Calcium Pantothenate [B5], Pyridoxine Hydrochloride [B6], Methylcobalamin [B12]) Gluten Free, Vegan.
October 12, 2025 at 9:10 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Did some colouring in and could only find the Sharpies I'd bought for a workshop I'd run a few weeks ago, and... I've never coloured in with a pen that doesn't go all weird and Streaky? What is this? Uniform? Colour? Is it? Magic?
A coloured in floral pattern. The colours are uniform and not streaky
October 12, 2025 at 8:56 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
My friends are like "I can't connect with/find time for my faith right now, do you have any advice?" and I'm like "make a space for prayer/meditation in your home. Don't care if it's a room or a corner or just part of a shelf. Put physical space aside for it, and the mental space you need will come.
A prayer corner under an eaves roof, there's a flock of paper doves on the back wall, in front is a table with two books, an icon, and two lot candles on it. Hanging over the wall is a wooden cross. There's a kneeler below.
October 11, 2025 at 12:18 PM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
Perhaps it's because I'm in a city centre church where we've literally had people graffiti theological questions on our notice boards in pencil and felt tip pen, or perhaps it's just that colliding the worlds inside and outside of ancient churches is my ~thing~, but I do legitimately love this.
A chapel in Canterbury cathedral. Graffiti style graphics with theological questions are on the walls and columns
October 10, 2025 at 8:27 AM
jayhulmepoet.bsky.social
People online are losing their absolute minds at this art installation at Canterbury Cathedral and all the ridiculous reasons they're giving as to why it's bad kind of prove the point of why it's good, actually.
A photo of steps at Canterbury cathedral, on the wall a graffiti-style graphic in red and black reads "god, what happens when we die?"
October 10, 2025 at 8:24 AM