Julian (Hool)
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hool415.bsky.social
Julian (Hool)
@hool415.bsky.social
860 followers 700 following 3.6K 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 #vss365 and to #sole
Escapes All duck, running stooped as if through rain when leaving the scimitar-sweeps of helicopter blades and though the danger hovers it co-exists in its own plane: sufficiently safe though only placed feet away. This same spatial judgment when walking pustulated grass riddled with graves: the deathly layer near but remains one step below. Yet each sharp stone sole-caught, jars, hard as a Lego piece, and by not looking down becomes that boney fingertip of someone shrewd slowly going home.
December 29, 2025 at 8:20 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #air. Another old one.
Durham (A Month Before His University) Brought a ghost to Durham Cathedral. A boy. Flickering. My son’s passed life possessing me, as he waits, restless, on the verge of leaving. How awful to be haunted by your own adored living child. Looking around: this building celebrates fairy realms tunnelled to from real endings, transience hanging heavy in the air. Each stone and weighty church nurtures this, their wooden babble, arthritic rituals, everything that they preach, hollowing. We place a candle, together, though for no real purpose, just two fleeting tourists: a pin of light, so temporary, and one which only makes the coming darkness worse.
December 27, 2025 at 8:31 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #struggle An old one today…
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.
December 26, 2025 at 8:13 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #survive
Survive No one gets out of here alive: we’re all cast in that botched heist, where the bank of our life is always surrounded; survival impossible: the only hope, a light sentence within a non-discriminating (maybe even ungated), heaven.
December 25, 2025 at 8:57 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #shoot Trigger warning: suicide
Shoot Last week, I passed the still unsold house, where a rope-shoot had surprised a barren beam; the garage better storage for such otiose antique things: wizened paints, bronchial mower, shut away with that swinging outdated and superfluous lover.
December 24, 2025 at 8:28 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #jump
Jump It’s a stereophonic hop, the air-bridge between foot and ground, perhaps that strange comma punctuating a walk; it needs a start and an ending or is just a permanent leap into the unknown- baffling as any unfilled colon:
December 23, 2025 at 8:18 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #saturn
Saturn Saturn is a mere bus stop, or to be more accurate, a willing slingshot for our deep space probes. However, those visiting us we must assume won’t need to take such a convoluted route of planetary roads.
December 22, 2025 at 8:12 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #fight
This one comes with a terminal disease trigger warning.
Fight I have shockingly little bellicosity in me, I fear (and who truthfully in the prior ever really knows), I’d pull any future cancer-rug up, and tuck it snuggly round my chin: all those exhaustive footnotes of fighting so forlornly on.
December 21, 2025 at 9:36 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo @tomsnarsky.bsky.social and to #smallpoemsunday #poetry
Pocket Money When eight, chained to a West Country department store, an elderly lady, (over eighty), gently asked to have a hem a little shortened. She also volunteered, strangely, she had always lived alone; her battered handbag cracked to hatch a stiff unblemished cheque book. How much? she quietly asked, (all the while repeatedly trying to create a fold.) The fifty pence then requested releasing the absolute slowest softest howl so much so, I don’t know how it didn’t stall… I sometimes wonder if I might be the last person still alive who has carriage of her tired voice, that pained and public deflating sound.
December 21, 2025 at 1:49 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #humble
Humble I’m still humbled by your halving of the wedding bouquet the very next day, and me then driving us to both your grandmothers: each lying miles apart in their warm and shallow graves. This undiminished atom-splitting love felt by me, even before our honeymoon’s actual start.
December 20, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
fhpowellwriter.bsky.social
When confronted by food, what to eat first?

@hool415.bsky.social

#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions
December 19, 2025 at 1:39 PM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #promptcombo crew! Merry Christmas on behalf of Fidel, Ronnie, Paul, Vic and myself! Your poems have been magnificent this year! 🫵 🙌One quick double check…(*pages rustle*) yes…you are ALL on Santa’s good list! Combo will take a short break after today to return with Fidel hosting on Jan 5th. 👋
December 19, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
Hi, @hool415.bsky.social Ju, here's my fifth response to your #promptcombo #decisions/dilemmas
RSPH OldMoor From our skies small figures In camouflage plumage, laden with binoculars and scopes wend between hides. We record them as they record us. We are Royal Society For Protection of Humans. Nothing worse than for humans to sense they have no control over their landscape so we make it seem they care for us, design this site, build the hides, nurture our nature. They must feel valued and necessary, and make their own decisions. Sometimes the females carry all the equipment. Stats: 3 Widowers, 2 female single parents And 3 young, 4 unemployed males, 7 volunteers.
December 19, 2025 at 7:35 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
daveashleypoet.bsky.social
#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions #poem #inkmine #nascent #XmasShopping
@hool415.bsky.social
December 18, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
poetry-with-hart.bsky.social
Not sure if it's finished, or if the point got muddled by the end. Likely will appear again in my Mountain Mama series later. Regardless, best wishes 🤗

@hool415.bsky.social

#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions #poem #poetry #poemaday #skypoem #skypoetry #wip #wv #Appalachianpoem
Is this her way of testing us? The mountain shakes the frost wondering if her children will starve before they freeze. They show up barefoot at hotels asking for just one room for the night, gone by morning. They hunger bitter in lines till doors snap shut, donations gone, no assistance here. What charity can hearts have in a world of white noise, stark chaos like blizzard snow. I look to the mountain mother wearing her first winter shawl draped over her hair. I finally see her face for what it is, I know her name as Mary, and she has covered her son's eyes from our plight.
December 18, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
daveashleypoet.bsky.social
#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions #emoetry #jumpy #childhood
@hool415.bsky.social
December 18, 2025 at 8:56 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
daveashleypoet.bsky.social
#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions #poem #freeverse #vss365 #regrets
@hool415.bsky.social
December 18, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
mwplovesmusic.bsky.social
Do I stay
or go?
give up
this life I imagined
for a new show?

My grip
on fantasy
too tight,
reality was
a daily fight

I wanted
my you,
but the you
I got
just devalued

The dam
broke,
my water
ran free-
leaving
was the
choice
for me

#promptcombo #poetry @hool415.bsky.social
December 18, 2025 at 10:15 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo #vss365 and to #regret
Regret Such a crisp word, that first firm footprint into snow… a lie of course, more the muddy sludge luring out of season, all the bad things to spring-up and grow.
December 18, 2025 at 8:23 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
daveashleypoet.bsky.social
#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions #blueskyrelay #surrogate #poem #philosophy #petrarchan
@hool415.bsky.social
December 17, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
jenthorne.bsky.social
I've been trying to get a #petrarchan to work all week, and I finally think I've done it for today's #dilemmas/decisions #promptcombo

Thanks to @hool415.bsky.social for the prompt and to @daveashleypoet.bsky.social for the form.
Stalled I freeze where familiar pavements meet, Two equal roads that circle back to home, Familiar paths lie safe when I’m alone, Yet choice itself becomes a jagged beat. My lungs revolt, each breath a broken sheet, My hands shake hard, my pulse begins to roam, The world tilts sharp; I’m caged within its dome, And silence hammers panic’s cruel repeat. Sometimes he comes, my anchor in the storm, His hand that steadies tremor in my chest, Guiding me from the corner’s rigid form. No path is worse, no path is more or less, But sameness shatters, choice becomes a storm, That traps my body in my mind’s distress.
December 17, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
Hi @hool415.bsky.social Ju, here's my fourth response to your amazibg #promptcombo #decisions/dilemmas. Its from an, as yet unpublished collection: "A World Where... 2"
Our Sex Is Our death. Important decision for my wife and I. We live with the urge to do it. Day in day out. Thirty five years married. It has to be mutual. First time sex is last time alive. We must decide before We are too weak and other devices needed. Sex is euthanasia, you see. We agree when enough is enough. I was born from my dead mam. So, hopefully my wife will become pregnant after we die.
December 18, 2025 at 7:05 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
fhpowellwriter.bsky.social
The horrors of deciding what to wear every morning. Any fashion tips welcome.

#promptcombo #dilemmas/decisions @hool415.bsky.social
December 18, 2025 at 7:37 AM
hool415.bsky.social
Hullo. This now corrected. Off to refind some zzz’s again. #night #poetry
Awake I cannot pray again, my part always easy: just to ask, yet nothing ever grasps my calloused-words other end; I have spent too much time fixated by this jaded Indian Rope Trick.
December 18, 2025 at 2:49 AM