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. 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
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
fhpowellwriter.bsky.social
@hool415.bsky.social
#promptcombo #workinglove.
November 14, 2025 at 6:10 PM
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
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
Hi @hool415.bsky.social Ju, here's my fourth response to your marvellous #promptcombo #workinglove. Another from my collection "Please Take Change":
PIED WAGTAIL As I pack another’s bag He says I were a packer down pit. Tha’d have made a good packer. I set each odd shaped stone in place to hold back debris hold up the pit roof so others may have space to work. As I pack her bag She says Aren’t they beautiful. The pied wagtails She watches their skitter and bob outside the shop window. My dad were a blacksmith in the pits. Well, he was a farrier, But when they got rid of the ponies he became a blacksmith. He allus told me Pied Wagtails nested in pit prop piles stacked outside the pit. My pit prop holds up the roof that others may safely work. The pits are all closed their memories are all open, a black and white skitter and bob. Packer: Pack - Roof support made of stone. Large stones at the front, built up like a dry stone wall. Packer (1) - One deployed to build the pack walls and fill behind with debris. Packer (2) - A big piece of stone to use in the pack wall. Packing - Act of building a pack wall and filling a void. Packhole - Void at coal face to stow dirt either or both sides of the gate from the ripping lip. 76 Paul Brookes
November 13, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
markantonyowen.com
For @hool415.bsky.social's #workinglove #promptcombo this week, a new thing about new love. Inspired, I think, by those older couples you see in parks on office lunch breaks: acting like teenagers, rapt in each other, obviously falling in love – all anticipations visibly laced with their anxieties.
Why do only new lovers kiss? You see them everywhere: anxious teenaged lovers in their thirties, forties, fifties. Kissing with dry, garlicky mouths. Flush with wanting’s terrors. They promise eternity – that gift that needs no receipt.
November 13, 2025 at 7:50 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
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
fhpowellwriter.bsky.social
#PromptCombo #Workinglove
@hool415.bsky.social
#love
November 13, 2025 at 6:25 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
vignettes.bsky.social
Thanks @hool415.bsky.social for this weeks #promptcombo
#workinglove
This is about the overworking that occurs both in writing and in this case baking. My emotions, the frustration sometimes spills over into my creative efforts. I need to learn when to pause.
Proofing It begins with care, measured, exacting, each motion arguing with air. I knead the doubt in, fold too long, too hard. It stiffens, hums an amber ache. In the oven’s sepia roar, it lifts, then falls a bruised collapse that sighs of trying.
November 12, 2025 at 4:57 PM
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
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
Hi @hool415.bsky.social Ju, my third response to your excellent #promptcombo #workinglove is another from my collection "Please Take Change", again talking of the tools of the trade:
DUSTPAN and brush are poetry. Brush is my pen sweeps all the words dust, ripped plastic packaging, used sucked lollipop sticks, shop receipts, religious pamphlets sausage roll pastry, used product labels into a neat pile, position the dustpan to receive the words. Carefully flick the words towards a dustpan page. Inevitably, some words are swept under the page. I have to rescue those. Sometimes the page is the floor. Sometimes the pen cleans away a chaos of words to leave a poem.
November 12, 2025 at 7:51 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
mwplovesmusic.bsky.social
#promptcombo #workinglove #poetry @hool415.bsky.social

“Believing this is the day of their demise”
November 11, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
hareontherun.bsky.social
I Hope all #promptcombo folk will forgive one of my very occasional forays among your number 🙏..... just couldn't resist the current #workinglove prompt from @hool415.bsky.social !!!
Surely you've felt more than just paperclips between us, more than just occasional sharing of Blu Tac? Us, us meeting with such propriety at the photocopier, maintaining such decorum waiting patiently for the kettle to boil in the office kitchen - it's blowing off of steam surely hinting at more than the filling of a stained cup.
November 11, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social
Hi @hool415.bsky.social Ju, here is my second response to your inviting #promptcombo #workinglove. It is from my collection "Please Take Change":
THIS MOP AND BUCKET are poetry to me. My pen is a mop I stick in a bucket of disinfectant floor cleaner pull out mop sodden with words and splash them backwards and forwards slop lines one after the other Until the floor fair shines, My mop is dry, needs another dip. I squeeze out the gunk back into the bucket. More the floor shines, dirtier the bucketful gets. A good poem is a clean floor
November 11, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
davidbirch.bsky.social
Many thanks @hool415.bsky.social for this week's #PromptCombo #WorkingLove. Hope this one fits, albeit obliquely! Looking forward to catching up with others later today.
November 11, 2025 at 10:25 AM
Reposted by Julian (Hool)
daveashleypoet.bsky.social
#PromptCombo #Workinglove #measure #vss365
@hool415.bsky.social #magrigal #love
November 11, 2025 at 10:32 AM