ALT The Games We Play Driving rural back roads, though only when no-one else can be seen, I slip into this stupid game of a national hide and seek, imagining the starting point of Nelson’s Column then tasking myself to find the best place to crouch. Usually, I end up choosing the loft of some patently unused distant farm building. I’m pretty good at it but during his many turns of disappearing, I’m forced to accept that God is the better. Julian Cason

ALT Consuming We may believe we are caterpillars: consuming for an unknown but instinctively believed greater good. Yet the danger here is taking the branch to a squidgy toothpaste-grave, the issue of unsought angel wings, and having everything once clung onto prised away and left cruelly suddenly far behind. Julian Cason

ALT Just Four Of The Astronauts Who Walked On The Moon Are Alive Today The rest now breathe unvisored dust, lying laced with earned moonshine. Houston/Heaven: Godspeed these launchable-souls one last time. Julian Cason

ALT Luck I am interested in the mechanics of prayer: locking-in to a faint signal; our spewing ticker-tape messages sent; the recorded length of any long-delayed reply. A friend in school got impressive results staying more local, using a resolutely mute pocketed ancient coin. Julian Cason

ALT Eureka There is this home quite nearby, which appears abandoned, plants have muscled-in across the drive, half a gate plays recklessly, but at night a bare light bulb (absent shade or modest curtain) stares out. It’s how any house would act naturally, if left alone, just thinking hard, dwelling on its one great idea. Julian Cason

ALT St Govan’s Chapel And Well The hermitage, an over-sized mollusc, is stuck on limestone where starkness has taken hold and sprouts like grass, the sea, the wind and itinerant sun conjoin in a seasonless pact to scour and pare-back. So, prayer becomes elemental too, stripped of nuance or detail without even the clutter of words, the rough walls cradle the buffeted stillness as if a new-born flame. This cleave of rock disrupting the imperious cliff prises space, St Govan’s Chapel a pooling, stalling the westward flow of time. Julian Cason

ALT Evermore For any heart to satnav successfully to evermore, we need to locate the ghosts… by driving in our stillness, usually just a bumpy reverse around the nearest corner, where memories loiter and gossip of a freeing death or perfected love and all those so many intangible in-betweens. Julian Cason

ALT Falling When I fell for you, I felt like an owl perched on top and peering out a skinny tree, waiting in the always night, blinking my soundless morse, parallel only to the cold backs of haughty stars, till toppling down through the hours to the light, (forgetting use of my irrelevant wings): a kerfuffle of feathers, a rushing flurry to the beginnings of love and still not infrequently, rather wide-eyed about it all. Julian Cason

ALT Immediately, Post The Nightmare Bedroom strewn by crisscrossing vapour trails: memory mixed as a series of near misses; opening eyes cuts all fuel, the spent engine of dark becomes a calmer twilight-glide. Oxygen mask torn off, aisles return to the familiar cabin crew. I always think those who die suddenly asleep don’t end with peace, but a structure under so much stress crash terrified, somewhere alien in their own bespoke fireball. Julian Cason

ALT Victory You need binding to a cause for a victory: the rally to a banner needs a decision and effort to force which way the wind should unfurl; you can’t participate in any celebration if at the beginning shoulders missed their meeting with the grindstone and just instead half-heartedly shrugged. Julian Cason

ALT Shell The type that funnels the sea, listening: pure wind but maybe skimming across dead water; the bleached inside must reflect a chink of moon, working hard round the corner; a wedged tiny splinter, shows construction begun on a tentative pier idea. Julian Cason

ALT Gamble Some days each taken breath matches the metronomic click of a slowing roulette wheel and a look up captures the near bankruptcy of this wall-less house; croupiers with nefarious powers, like those compulsive gamblers, our geo-political major players.

ALT When My Dream Was Near The Moon… It had outpaced prayer by about two days: dreams travel wispy-light, but god-chat has an excess-baggage-fee from the always desperate over-pack. Imagine a properly-engaged Creator swarmed, ruefully stroking every buzz of stinging need, then returning each emotional-shard, duly calmed, to the constantly fidgety hive. Moonshine-balm: a dropped milk-bottle seeping over all our steps, pungent-wash among jagged revelation, properly witnessed only at a ridiculous distance; like the stars, we forever flatten and impound. All of nature daily within a springtide of surging yearns, we think divinely we just walk across the churn, instead roil inside taking with us anything grabbed plummeting down. Julian Cason

ALT Shocking A friend of a friend went to Antarctica, and apparently after only wanted to talk about the cold. I thought: it’s all empty bravado till you too are suddenly pulled-under a blow-up and unheated paddling pool, in a freezing British summer, by your oath-breaking child. Julian Cason