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

ALT Watching My Mum’s Balcony Doors Being Done (From Her Sofa) Window-cleaner flamenco-dances fan-shapes, clearing soapy foam; underneath: thought darkened blackberries being washed… but just his mate’s vine-ish-vape creeping-up. Julian Cason

ALT Time I always try to save time: not put off chores, do the nonsense first, imagining a pool of lapping minutes slowly filling; it’s an anathema to me to task-delay, get it done, get it done now and even more seconds will form interest on my secreted hours’ earlier deposit, but of course, most days still manage to shiggle and squirm away. Like a morning, secretly yearning they’d been born instead an afternoon. Julian Cason

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT Battling (x3) Thin-man cycling fast: chained cranefly, passing; plane winning race with its roar; sweary roofers versus their radio… draw. Julian Cason

ALT 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

ALT 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