Just Poetry. Nominated for a Forward Prize, Best Of The Net (Twice) and Two Pushcart Awards, Black Bough (Silver Branch Poet) / Joint 1st New Simile Competition
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ALT Making Time Dreamt am placed in a pre-war clock factory, all tan overalls hovering over optimistic springs and quietly chatting cogs; rules state you wear no watch, so each of us holds our own time. The ticks and the tocks arrive in feral packs, gradually brought to heel by attentive circling hands; the very best trained allowed their tail of a mildly-friendly wagging pendulum. Julian Cason
ALT Storm Damage A branch lies amputated on the lawn; gusts have staunched the week’s constant bleed of leaves by scabbing them into corners: the grass now returns an incongruous violent-green; just this arthritic wooden finger, caught crawling, part way towards our house, pointing, like some schlocky horror’s attempted warning. The soundtrack of the wicked wind on a loop, doesn’t help; neither that the sky’s many crimes are desperately being crudely painted over. Julian Cason
ALT We Do Not Need Dr Dolittle The greatest sadness might be if we ever get to decipher dog or cat; for instance, I know my hound swears constantly, like a grizzled Govan antique docker, so, I prefer to anthropomorphise, see him sleeping, benign as a fully-sermonised rural Anglican vicar. Julian Cason
ALT Needed Accommodations Cathedrals are obviously built for the most hard of hearing, the same way our astronaut-ambassadors are pushed that little bit closer to see the stage, not much you can do to amplify touch, maybe pray for hours in a darkened, neutral buoyancy tank, though the trouble with senses is that they can overload then corrupt; there’s no simple discoverable answer to all of this. Julian Cason
ALT No Apples Available Must go to the G.P. today, for me, a suddenly regular middle-aged thing: barely noticed them when young; guess like hospitals in a decade or two, buildings which are special now but will become a hive of clinics to explore, scratch-card-corridors with their addictive numbers, all really, whatever the discipline, exactly the same: bloods, scans and waits, signs that a broken television/exhausted fan has already been appropriately reported, ranking or judging the plastic-seated ill, next beds: just kept in for odd nights of observation at first, then longer, till the full array of bodily functions, like visitor numbers, or the determination of doctors, gradually fades. Julian Cason
ALT Beyond Belief In infants' school we made paper-doilies, my intricate cutting-out an imagined twinkly-shape fell to nothing: papyrus shreds unable to support a hole’s weight; even then, no teacher’s bright and breezy sophistry worked effectively as borrowed glue. When adult, I emancipated the stars, hurling them away, far from all religions, constructing my own constellations: tiny knots of altar-cloth to fix my own homeless awe. So, I’m no longer torn by old-school revelations, and anyway, Pascal’s wager gets dubious odds in most high-street theological betting-shops. Julian Cason
ALT Weather Report It’s raining hard this morning, the dog’s first canter round the garden returns him readied kitchen mop, an outside water bowl plays best the tunes of the struck down drops, grass is packaged polythene, and the nearby trees stoically will take so much before periodically shaking their heads with a sodden shared disbelief. Julian Cason
ALT First Examined A storm can dredge up memory, guess El Niño events are the churning worst, but sometimes sedimented-thoughts surface without any obvious cause. Long ago, asked a girl for use of a pencil sharpener, my name immediately criminalised by a teacher thinking wrongly, I was stealing her math’s answer. This minuscule public opprobrium returned last night as burning slick, like once sunken barrels of spent then dumped radioactivity, grown tired of their historic seals; heat buried deep at a depth of half a century but still suddenly capable of viciously searing skin. Julian Cason
ALT Flammable Quackery You can’t be buried if, like me, you’re terribly claustrophobic, it’s not the flood of mud feared but a permanent coddling with the dark; I shall take the other option, and wander within the brief care of a cremation’s flame acting as a homeopathic, tiny time-limited flare: a nonsense remedy, but just possibly inoculating me against any much longer coming heat. Julian Cason
ALT Last Night, 2:10am, In Sleepy Suburbia A motorbike unzipped the night, an unwelcome streak of flapping-cockerel; mature enough to throttle-back my own persistent tut-tut-tut… Julian Cason
ALT Apparition I have had many dreams when I’ve snuck back into our old house, know it’s actually trespassing yet there’s never anyone about, other people now live there but with the same furniture; the barely musty air wafts a story simply paused rather than continuing. The stored wardrobe clothes are unchanged, the food in the fridge fully recognisable though with newer use-by-dates. I don’t feel at all a ghost in this world, it’s everything else, beyond this address, when I awake which shimmers insubstantially until around 11 o’clock. Julian Cason
ALT Morning I used to pre-wake to the clink-clink of milk delivered, a sound of glass banging step like the one-time use of half-hearted flints, then the cart’s protesting drone, never given enough time to catch its breath, now just the bystander birds, gathered on stave-ish of telephone wires, their notes shared, not like ours: the way we once hid them secretly, rolled up tightly in the empty bottles. Julian Cason
ALT Lourdes, France: For A Young Child The grotto, a near-empty eye-socket, suspended wooden sticks and crutches are redundant framing-lashes; most focus on the specular-highlight: the benignly hovering statue of Mary, but being just a frightened child, this worshipped rock fissure feels prised-open horror gushing crudely from the earth’s bowels; bobbing amid a flood of turbulent-prayers and foamy-forceful-whispers; below these jostling waves of surface ecstasy: a crowd’s deeper fear is sensed and like the cave’s remembered chill, it enters forever my all-absorbing, still developing, bones. Julian Cason
ALT The Problem With Love Poetry No one, truthfully, wants to know when love goes well and is absent drama: a time of fine, but uneventful weather; that meal summed up as genuinely simply being nice; the warm recognisable smile which isn’t always precursor to nascent guffaw; a tide filling up the bay so quietly, without any noticeable waves. Julian Cason
ALT Daily Post-Mortem If you could slip a knife right across the middle of late afternoon, a pathologist would need a flat steel dish to untangle non-judgmentally its very last (still undigested) early morning dreams, obviously weigh up its stopped heart as well, after peeling away any irrelevant aches, which might have originated long before the noon and record the actual time of death, which for most previously healthy working-days, is strangely almost always noted down as occurring at around 4:15. Julian Cason
ALT Three Thoughts Leafed-trees shiver without obvious weather. Bat’s hokey-cokey flying requires breathalysing. Rivers are both coffin and cortège for raindrops. Julian Cason
ALT The Slowest Forms Of Transportation Either, a wonky shopping trolley, where one wheel is the whining toddler who cannot be cajoled, or the elderly dog, where every ruddy thing requires a sommelier’s lingering pretentious sniff; we’ve even been known to back-track half a street for second whiff’s of particularly pungent uncorkings. Julian Cason
ALT Too Much Movement An age is reached when your full life can not be reviewed, simply passed through hands as a trailing ribbon of cinema-reel becoming instead just a record of staccato-marks: inspecting a road’s smouldering-rubber ECG of straggled-braking, like the elongation of a young meteor: that confident stub of light lingering long enough to change to mere decrepit finger, tapping shakily against its waiting wall of windowless atmosphere. Why too, even Victorian boxy-photography understood, you can only picture-perfectly the recklessly still or the still-cooling dead. Julian Cason
ALT You Won’t Like This But You Should Sometimes people are best seen as places, the one I love is pure Mumbles: a Newton Road, displaying its unfussy honest charm; that corner table too, snug at the back of Joe’s Icecream; where blue skies are always within reach despite the occasional and hurriedly bussed-through rain. Julian Cason
