Jay Hulme

Love is an active thing, you know?

You know what I love? Gifts you use every day.

I got a bookmark for Christmas and every time I read I'm reminded of the love of the people who gave it to me.

And this effect doesn't wear off. I got a frying pan as a housewarming gift years ago and I still feel warm and fuzzy when I use it.

A Saint Dies Beside the Nidd By Jay Hulme - from 'The Vanishing Song' Prostrate before God a final time I reach out my arms to the earth. This stone blooms with the millennia, this soil burrows with chitinous song; life bursts from the death of another — each earthly thing I've loved is fossil-rich, renewed, re-created, recycled, returned. Soon, I cannot consider the miracle, only this moment, so wholly my own. The breeze in the trees reminds me of the song of my mother’s womb; though I’ll only realise that later — after I’ve gone.

"Prostrate before God a final time
I reach out my arms to the earth.
This stone blooms with the millennia,
this soil burrows with chitinous song;
life bursts from the death of another —
each earthly thing I've loved is fossil-rich,
renewed, re-created, recycled, returned."

A Saint looks up from his prayers to discover he’s been dead for some time For St Robert of Knaresborough By Jay Hulme - from 'The Vanishing Song' After he retired to the cave prayer grew in him like a forest, sowed its seeds inside his psyche, rewilded his heart. He didn’t see that centuries had passed without him. One day he looked up, hearing requests for intercession, and the woods were older than expected, the riverbanks shifted by the years — and as he knelt before the altar in his hermit's church, his knees disappeared below the edges of his emptied grave.

"After he retired to the cave
prayer grew in him like a forest,
sowed its seeds inside his psyche,
rewilded his heart. He didn’t
see that centuries had passed
without him."

Jay sits cross legged on the floor by the altar and pulpit steps, gesturing as he speaks. Someone sits in the pew in front of him listening (hopefully)

Someone visiting St Nicks: "hmmm, I wonder how old this church is..."

Me, a small and gnomelike creature that lives in the walls, appearing silently and from nowhere to say: "let me tell you the secrets of this ancient and sacred place."

Me, walking into St Nicks: "anyone wanna hear a fun fact?"

Everyone in the building: "is it? Actually fun? Tho?"

Me: Absolutely!"

Me: "the architect of our north aisle died in 1885 when he tried to get off a train before it had fully stopped, and he fell between the carriages and got decapitated"

AMERICAN POETRY FANS: If you're interested in my queer folkloric poetry, you can pre-order my book (with free international shipping!) through Blackwells blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro... 💚

The Poet Laureate of the UK is famous for his translation of St Gawain and the Green Knight, and Kym once got up on stage, looked him straight in the eye, and then performed this.

Unsurprisingly enough, every time they've encountered each other since, he's remembered them.

I do not think the police have ever raided the Quakers and been on the correct side of history

A brick wall with slightly ajar double doors coated with brick to camouflage them

Actually? I love this. I want more of it. Now pls.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Some nights I simply have to turn out all my lights and succumb to my craving for candlelight.

Highly recommend wandering around with a candle in your hand to light your way through the darkness. It'll heal something inside you, I guarantee it.

Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?

Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found

stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.

A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚

Giant snake on an info panel about to eat a screaming child

The Museum of Scotland using small children in size comparison info panels is absolutely sending me.

Also most NHS practices that *do* monitor hormones keep trans patients on a lower dose than is healthy, leading to health problems, so banging on about the safety of NHS vs DIY is bullshit at the best of times.

Buy Kym's book. I promise it's so good you're gonna want to eat it. Consume it. Let the words populate you like an infestation, or a haunting, or both and both and both.

I'm telling you, Knaresbrough is a special place that drives everyone who spends time there gently and wondrously and inexorably mad.

requiem for vanished birdsong

did have to stop myself reminding them that sucking isn't a protected characteristic.

"We can always tell" woman fails to identify Chinese Intelligence Asset she married.

My FEAR with covid is that I'm an accidental typhoid Mary who tests neg and has no symptoms and is just spreading it everywhere.

Like, I got exposed to it SO MUCH. ANd yet... Nothing.

The trick is to grow up in a highly unhygienic atmosphere. It gives you incredible disease resistance. One of my friends came up to me a few months ago like "...you've NEVER been sick while I've known you..." And I was like "yeah. I just don't get ill. It's a thing. I never even got Covid."

Oh I put on the linen shirt, but the wool one is hanging on the wardrobe doorknob ready for tomorrow.

(it was food poisoning. I continue my unbroken streak of not catching diseases and only getting ill from things I stupidly did to myself)

That first shower after spending a few days ill and stewing in pyjamas in bed honestly hits DIFFERENT.

Incredible scenes as I put on a wool shirt and IMMEDIATELY have to change out of it like...

Is it? Linen? Season? Already???

If you ever want to read a paper for free and can't find it otherwise, email the lead author and politely ask for a copy. You will not be bothering the person. You will in fact make their whole entire day. I have had scientists get so excited I asked they sent me everything they ever published.

Landscape ecological restoration. It can be done but we need to get a move on. This is Carrifran where the sheep were removed to allow this native woodland to take over.

(post gets 4 likes from my friends) i'm an internet sensation