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

ALT Bin, By A Trestle Table, Taunton Dean Services (M5 Northbound) Service-station crow with a strange wing, feathers on one side, distinctly Mohican: a birdy-arm, but dressed in a rush, probably with a label still showing the earlier fuss; patrolling the pillbox, underneath a black and yellow constantly-rebraiding, aerial barbed-wire, then suddenly, flying: the disappearing soot of a diesel van’s noisy backfiring. Julian Cason 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

ALT Drive I could drive right now: far out of town, where a distant hours’ dusk would backdrop unrecognisable silhouettes of passing forests or still warm factories and then, once harnessing the momentum only provided by the rush of a nighttime motorway, further still, till in the small hours stop at some random service station, with the other moon-pale waifs, who hide or simply burn under the constant day-glo lights, who sit alone at plastic sticky tables to waste or maybe try to shift their own parked-up time, missed among the legitimate HGV drivers and amid all those many unfilled sad burger wrappers. Julian Cason

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT aw 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT A Balance Of Sorts I don’t believe in any karma, but generally, men act marginally worse than women, and interestingly, do tend to die statistically, just that little bit younger. Julian Cason

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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

ALT 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