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Ju (Julian)

@hool415.bsky.social

1.1K followers 865 following 5.2K posts

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.

Posts Replies Media

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 11h

Hullo #poetry #whimsy

P.E.

Two school kids walk past the house
on opposite pavement sides,
an oval ball crosses the road
then rolls
ungainly
under my car.
One runs deep
into the drive to retrieve it,
the other stays back
and looks far too scared;
I played in his position:
in school,
you can always have
contactless
contact sports.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hullo #poetry This one for a loved Spanish cousin.

All The Passings Felt At Roath Park Lake

Under the wing
of missed-migrating formaldehyde skies,
autumn crunches and rips unseen
at ignorant foundations;
birds flowing away with such regularity,
like a shrugging tap’s
passive-aggressive leak of overhead drips;
the parked-up ice-cream van: its music, off-key,
a stale lament and so last season;
everywhere colours are brittle,
riddled with unforgiving, hateful corrosion;
those laid-out, opened conker-shells
with their shrunken and calcified
arrested hearts…
I know someone splitting too:
still lovingly tended,
but already muddy,
part-buried in
an ultimately unhelpful
hospital bed.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #smallpoemsunday Apologies, I changed this one a little.

Two Telephone Calls

Yesterday, my Aunt,
crying,
said on the telephone
you were close to dying,
she sounded like she was the last to know,
the very last one told;
not stupidity: a parent must never give up
and continually self-baste
in amateur, homemade hope.
I told her I had reached you
the day before,
but kept back the fact
it felt already
like a connection with heaven;
knowing you were weak,
and slipping away,
all my messages the previous month
dropped by your hospital bed
remaining unpicked-up…
so, it was ethereal and an actual afterlife
to hear that weakened, wispy voice
we love,
probably for one last time:
you fluttering still,
but only just finding
a final brush of light.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Hullo @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social and to @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social for #fragmentsfriday #poetry

Battling (x3)

Thin-man cycling fast:
chained cranefly, passing;
plane winning race
with its roar;
sweary roofers versus their radio…

draw.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #stars #pleiades #hyades

Resolution

There’s a moment when you realise
that the Pleiades
isn’t a cosmic smudge
but a tiny child’s yawn,
showing the milk teeth
of many different stars;
whereas the Hyades
is a net dragged from the sea,
still clinging
in a losing battle
to its last
pearly droplets.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #angels #whimsy

Rare Birds

I have time on my hands,
enough
to angel-spot;
for the record:
none have been seen as yet,
I might widen my definition
to include:
the uncannily polite
or those bearing
just pleasantly intense,
if unusual stares;
the kind of eye contact
only provided
by a dippy new lover
or perhaps,
some recently injuncted
and too persistent
stalker.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #love

Off-Shore

If love came from oilfields,
I guess
we’d all first seek-out crude:
an era of speculative drilling
using our new, over-eager pipes,
but we refine over time
to value a substance
less obviously visible to the naked eye,
it’s what we ultimately run on:
the sole resource
we must never seek
to diversify.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Tricky School Days

The first unparented trip to town
was with a friend, his elder brother, and his own late friend,
the younger two of us
going no further
than the arcade’s joke shop;
bought a plastic credit card
with the words Liar’s Licence on it,
(already set deep in my epoch of deviousness,
having asked the previous birthday,
unsuccessfully,
for a magic skeleton key,
clearly confusing what was commonly used in hotels.)

These are respectively the tools
of skittishness
with the truth
and of everywhere being
a potentially accessible
escape.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #hospital

Hospital

Once, in hospital,
during a two day period
with my real risk of dying,
there was no barging in
of a flustered God,
coming late but helpfully sharing worries,
which would have been
such a perfect use of allowed visiting;
suspect the breathless fellow
could have even charmed
the nurse's station
to be permitted a brief chat with me,
after dark,
during those small
longest hours.
Did have one strange dream,
where I was flying past
the gas giants:
just me,
alone
but fully grasping my unimportance
in a cold universe;
an experience
which cannot be retrofitted
to include the passing-by
of any disappointing
spirituality.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hullo #poetry This for @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social 18 word challenge of #fragmentsfriday

Saw A Flaming Meteor Die

Single skid-mark trail:
burning-rubber from a maniac
unicyclist,
who missed
the warning traffic-cones
of all our geostationary
satellites.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Hullo #poetry Apologies, some more #whimsy

Screen Violence

When I was young,
the television
was a wholesale fruit crate:
colours squashed and always slightly bleeding,
a stupid box;
we were all at fault,
abusing its warm wooden skin
for any insouciance shown
with the back of hands,
which understandably
it tended to quickly respond to.
For about a decade after
screens cowered:
small and flat,
with a crystal-clear unblinking anxiousness;
a staring rodent,
cornered in your room with ears flat…
but now they have returned,
breed huge and simply deafening,
to rightly thwart
any risk
of further violent bullying.
The only hope for us
to win this suburban arms race
is to get around
our increasingly obvious
built-in obsolescence.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Hullo #whimsy #poetry

Exchange

All the people I love,
love their telephones;
in an alternate universe
we would go to a former place of worship
to get a full signal
guaranteed,
for all our secular connections,
and instead,
just carry around
the latest flashy plastic means
(with their temperamental behaviour)
for flakey calls
of intercessory prayer.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #commence #poetry

Commence

You can have so many commencements
of the same thing:
that buzzing debate
in a tentative warmth
of the real first day of spring;
or thinking:
this is where love starts,
then,
no…
I was wrong,
that was different,
when sensing even more of it
taking root
and suddenly blooming.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #ghosts

Dim-Memories

It’s bothering me:
went somewhere with my wife, dog
and then young son,
usually, I remember things or resolutely not;
a simple light switch,
either fully on or off.
This is just an irritating flickering:
that piece of gravel permanently cosseting
my sock;
what all ghosts must feel
when summoned back
to talk,
but being effectively muffled
within an inevitably
amateurishly held
séance.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #shetland #unst #stars

Shetland Islands

A capacity still exists
in me
to crave
what I would not really want:
go on sites
to find a house
in the far north of Scotland,
including sweeps over grassy Unst,
where,
at the winter solstice
the sun is gone by 3pm;
just the thought of such short days,
those stretching hours
being so over-peppered with stars…
Even checked out
(prudently),
medical facilities
offered by its tiny hamlet
Haroldswick,
though in a sudden painful crisis,
understanding
I may even need
to travel further south
to Yell.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #whimsy #coasts

Coasts

Coasts
are the worn gums of a land:
the part for lengthy mastication,
we might clock
an occasional rockfall,
which is witnessing
yet another lost tooth,
and why
so much of a beach near the sea
is just dribble.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #telephone

Last Call

When a letter of wishes is finally heard,
it becomes the freshest words
of the dead,
in that little thought
is needed
to reach again the departed;
that brief airport call received
after safely touching down
within their wildly confusing new timezone,
still a throwback though:
just an incoming one-way text
at best,
as you were imagined
previously standing
in your foreign terminus,
desperately trying
those rows of old and always faulty
public pay phones,
seeking any sign of humming life
from a reassuring
but everywhere absent,
pulsing dial-tone.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #remembering911

Timing

I stood
on a perfect fall day,
nose against cold glass,
exactly where the jumping leapt
but my time
placing me there
nine years early;
now memories of that day
are hazed,
full of strangers
with catching whispers;
those poor pre-ghosts of 1992:
still climbing up their stairs
or ascending in
the very slowest
cruel elevators.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #esoteric #poetry

Esoteric

Once got entangled
with a girl
who thought she was
an esoteric novel;
it was exhausting,
though in all the wrong ways.
It’s hard to remember
but still think it her
who slammed us both
shut.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Hullo @tomsnarsky.bsky.social and to #smallpoemsunday Thanks for this. #poetry #soul

No Proof

A scientist
once weighed a body
so carefully,
immediately pre
and then when cold:
the difference being supposed proof
of our soul;
be like moving a heavy curtain
and briefly seeing
a tiny moth,
disturbed by daylight
as it awkwardly flitted
just by instinct,
back to some other
blinding darkness.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #weather #religion

Seasonal Theology

If a month were to act as the Reformation,
it’d be September:
tearing down in part
the doctrines of our high,
previously unchallenged
summer;
by November
the season of full Calvinism
has taken hold:
strict, stark and so unforgivingly
cold;
spring is the return
of all those street singing voices
from the most shouty and greenest Evangelicals.
Unusual events,
like snow,
are any tightly gripping cult:
chaotic and disruptive
with its brief taste of a believable new world,
but one which rarely ever
lasts.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #babies #whimsy

Fecundity

There is a difference between being
a parent
and an adult,
who for any reason,
is not,
but how much between those
who possess
just an only child
and all the other folk
with any more than that?
I guess
it’s not splitting hairs,
as empirically
contrasts must still exist
between the experiences
of those who raise
say,
merely five
compared to a less modest
six.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Dusty Work

Waiting
in my car with a dog
in the overspill parking,
saw a lad
mowing the lawn
round and round
the cremation remembrance gardens,
thought he had earmuffs on
but as he got closer,
his head was bobbing
and his mouth clearly mouthing song;
be nice to think
it was an incantation,
or antique prayer
for the arid folk in the ground:
a prime council requirement
for their job-spec,
along with far less important things,
like keeping
all the issued machinery
clean.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #woolacombe

Evening Lights, Woolacombe

Post dusk,
seated at the back of the lawn,
our phones
in night mode
turn the dune road cars
to oozing ectoplasm;
behind us,
an oil tanker,
static on the narrow horizon:
a snail with vertigo
regretting its choice of surmounted wall.
Not quite dark enough
for the Lundy Island lighthouse beam:
a constellation
of currently just one star
is under construction and being tested,
but a long way off
from needing cranes;
the hotel’s face comes alive
as bedrooms are randomly lit,
and like a waking mind
of jostling thoughts,
flares
as each becomes
purposefully occupied.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Days Of Sun

After the body boarding
we sat in wet suits
on a bench, next to the beach,
and I thought:
between these holidays,
there must be no clumsy second skins
and
that I will never
not want to steal that loudly painted
R.N.L.I. jeep,
as a means
and at a discrete distance,
to still always keep you safe
but I would leave their unneeded
klaxon loudhailer
for the nonchalant gulls
on the sand.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #intuition #poetry

Intuition

Intuition is a lousy tool:
an optician
dispensing
a misassessed glasses prescription;
that long fuse of firecracker-thoughts
leading to the keg
of wrong conclusions;
it’s the only way
the paranormal survives
in this modern world;
we have evolved much better senses
than to override these others
and rely instead
on guts.

A genuine story:
a friend once told me he knew his secretive wife
was having an affair,
even knowing the culpable neighbour,
when she was in fact
just planning his surprise and bountiful
fortieth.
(And they are still very much together.)

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #moonglade #poetry

Moonglade

It will be rippling,
under a biodome, (a giant contact lens
lost over a blinking lit crater),
but soon a moonglade will flow
over a tranquil lunar sea;
and there,
just take-in the rocky husk,
burnt-out and dead
of our murdered Earth;
a new corpse
permanently following
in its circling cortège
of remembering gravity.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Grey Holiday

We’ve had three days of slightly unseasonal sun,
but now it’s grey,
a training exercise
for a fire hose of foam
to coat the sky;
the outdoor pool lags
incongruously,
still swirling mouthwash blues.
This morning our drying bathers
made a dash
over the balcony rail:
they instinctively knew
the time arrived
for a tightly-folded hibernation;
a porter named Dan,
from Romania,
performed the needed rescue
with a strange pole,
whilst we talked of Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescau.
Now that was a regime that knew
how to pour over its people
an unrelenting grey.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #admit #poetry

Admit

You cannot simply choose your beliefs:
confidence in a creed
needs
not just accepting its vague social utility,
but a persuasion of truth;
if I’m later wrong,
finding myself without an admit
for those haughty gates,
then it’s all on the all-knowing god
for deciding to callously
and deliberately
withhold the proof,
that he has always known
would have changed my mind.
These are his stupid parlour games,
and I expected so much more
from the divine.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Woolacombe Bay

The trees here should have walking sticks
as they stand aslant:
puffed or not;
all back Lundy Island,
that anchored slab of strangely solid
enchantment.
The sea,
a relentless if fault-ridden factory,
its glassy waves
of prematurely-popped frothing-bottles,
the final fizz, with flat pounding palms,
sinks like a castaway
on tasting sand;
a shady fishing boat
creeps toward the shore:
some Russian trawler,
maybe…
in this new age
of a beached paranoia.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Indian Summer

Away, in the U.K.
on a late holiday,
just me and my son.
Late: it’s already September
and he’s suddenly in his twenties;
it’s the same hotel we went every year
till he reached about thirteen;
says the hotel pool
has got smaller
though I’ve not noticed,
and yet the sea seems much bigger to me,
having carefully pulled up
nearly all
of the parental fencing;
can’t even see him in the dips
between the breakers:
an open paperback
blowing fast through its pages
in the wind.
Says we can still go to the amusement arcade,
if I want.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #reconnoiter #poetry

Reconnoiter

Mostly,
we don’t carefully pre-assess
our route to love,
we charge in irrespective of the ground,
slashing at any blocking
undergrowth;
any thoughtful reconnoitering
comes much later,
finding that painless path
out of it.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #silhouette #poetry

Silhouette

High on a Scottish ridge,
see a lone figure
from my valley vantage point below,
not that expected muscularity of a silhouette,
those hostile stands opposed all light,
but a charcoal shape
flickering
against the curdling technicolour dusk:
a first tongue of black flame,
before the darkness
fully takes hold
and engulfs the land.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #elixir #poetry

Elixir

There are no pure elixirs
as little can be absolutely cured:
love, death,
even our own
floundering personalities;
the doses we drink or self-administer
are placebos
or at the very least
mislabelled,
being cruelly diluted.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Hullo #poetry #whimsy

Grounded

Bought a flight tracker app
just to see
a labelling
of the scratches overhead;
imagined what pithy words
would appear
for anyone in the air
casually
using the reverse app on me.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #console #poetry

Console

Surely,
for all of us,
there’s an urge to console
any emergency crisis
of public sadness;
it’s an unlearnt and basic first aid
technique
applied to tears,
maybe requiring
as well as soft words,
tourniquets of tissues
for those worst
and very deepest cuts.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Visitations

My Aunt saw a flying saucer
from an attic window,
she immediately drew the curtains,
fearing a dose of radiation.
I miss cassette tapes,
as I once held safe her crackling account;
a different reel wraps
my dead school friend's voice,
a day we both
were just mucking about,
resurrecting
his not-of-this-world laugh.

My head holds part
of the likely final spool
of a surely ninety-year-old,
heard in a department store,
as a child
in Bath;
her sweet broad rural accent,
so fundamentally alien to my ears,
and I know
I was only about seven,
when this searing event
occurred.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #lightning #thunder

Not Enough Signal

My charging phone lit up
last night,
in synch with every lightning flash,
the room briefly transfigured
Fatima-white,
while straddling two different times;
another age
might have thought
a tentative
then aborted
call from god:
miracles often being connected
to so much less;
no missed number left behind
but the delayed ring
of ominous thunder
went unanswered by all,
except
for our loquacious dog.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #broom #poetry

Broom

I’m not sure if it’s wrong
to broom
dust and debris
under the mat…
as long you stop
while it still appears,
albeit by squinting,
generally flat.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Hullo @tomsnarsky.bsky.social Tip of my hat for #smallpoemsunday once again, thank you! #poetry

North Devon Night

You expect fog to come with sound,
a slither
or dank hiss
but its consumption at this hour
is silent;
standing at the end
of November,
adjacent to this rotten bank of sea,
(without even memory of light),
just watching a floating parasite
sucking all life
from the unprotesting
pulseless
water.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #glove #poetry

Glove

Knew people
who would not gift gloves
for all the bad luck
that would then unfold,
but I’m entirely skeptical
about needing to navigate
around these quirks…
I do salute magpies,
enquire about the inevitably
missing
monochrome wife,
but that’s just
my inherent politeness,
and never ever any craven superstition
at work.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #birds

Bird

Bird,
tottering round
the smallest circle on the brown lawn
while I make an instant coffee;
its own slowly stirring spoon.
It does nothing else:
no speculative peck at the ground,
not even half a flap
as a concession
towards the forgotten
up;
retirement of sorts,
a time to gather nothing more
than morning thoughts.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #stars

A Place In Earth

Even as a young child,
any idea of heaven
felt ridiculous:
the idea that a purity of light
awaited,
all in one room;
each clear night
I still see how this thought was milled down
and processed
by an everlasting reminding
though the parsimonious spill of stars
against blank sky;
at death,
we will move no further
than our coffin lids allow.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #tissue. A fairly recent one, which made The Alchemy Spoon. #poetry

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.

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #nightdrive

Getting Through

I have driven far
past midnight,
chased by the hour’s unasked for
clarity;
where stars
felt through a cowering car window
are shifting
breakwater shingle,
mixed in with the wind and motor’s chant,
and the gibbous moon
is a broken lighthouse:
it’s warning beam
off kilter,
unable to meet my stare
head on,
but picking up froth
from a crest of clouds
breaking hard,
over the dark, still crouching
rocks.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #cinema

Audience

In December,
before the January death,
three or four of us
took our bald school friend
to the cinema,
it was Tom Hanks in Big,
and became the last trip…
but I remember nothing of the film,
just looking sideways
down the row,
and seeing even now
how the screen’s
ever varied bursting palette
gave your face
occasionally,
an unfamiliar rosy glow.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #poster

Poster

Any poster
is a dust cover
from a book:
information shared,
but in a blink;
the unexpected bulb
flash
of a new idea,
over head.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Hullo #poetry #trains #god

God Awful Train

This train rocks sideways,
just enough to remind
of our forced accommodation
with unwanted tracks;
my open palm picking up
from the table
small shivers of a distant anger;
listening:
the people around me
have donated all their thinking
to their phones;
my listing face inadvertently
bangs on glass,
nearly receiving a mark of faith,
as I travel as an atheist
but one who is always
secretly scared.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Hullo #vss365 and to #sponge #poetry

Sponge

From the balcony,
a weather front in real time
brazenly tramped
across Lave Vyrnwy’s skin;
just before the deafening percussion
of a timpani-rain,
I felt the air silently shift
to intangible
menace:
it hung low,
patient,
but pregnant
as an unwrung sponge.

Julian Cason

Ju (Julian) @hool415.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Slow Thoughts

At the traffic lights,
turning over, right behind a private ambulance,
I ring you
with one of those nothing, absent-content calls,
just routine stitching across the back of us,
though prompted by following so up close
that sad grey van:
its pouring exhaust of ghostly smoke,
still warm against the sunlight;
an urge to simply hear you,
so, routine words pay their respects
(it would scare too much if I spoke of love
at this hour, from the car),
but all the time, I’m actually thinking:
I want to stop and send
an old-fashioned, shiny postcard,
that would flutter first,
lost as a soul within the system
unfound by you, till at least Tuesday,
and leaving no fingerprints from this moment,
me then imagining you reading it,
slowly smiling;
a fizzing fuse lit and left
for a three
or even four,
brilliant day’s time.

Julian Cason