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Julian (Hool)

@hool415.bsky.social

820 followers 660 following 3.2K 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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Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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

Julian (Hool)

@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