Dog, with one dark and one milk chocolate ear,
You come to me, seeking attention and offering love
And paws that scoop the Earth, and a wet nose
That leads you into trouble, often as not.

Runt of the pack, you trot along to rear in walkies,
Happy sniffing your own furrow and
Savouring simple pleasures, tail a windmill,
Your arse plastered with mud.

What was Parson Russell thinking
Whe...

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Still beautiful, in the way the rain over the marsh

Is beautiful, with its storm-light like the gleam

Of grey on an axe edge. Still beautiful,

As the howling of estuary gales through sedge,

A note impossible to replicate, and unexpected.

A note impossible to replicate, you are

Nevertheless, now you have come downstairs,

Still beautiful, with your Hitler Youth shorts

Yo...

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{a poem for Remembrance Sunday}

We were the shield-wall, here at the barrow’s edge

The first wave the enemy met, and broke on:

They buried us, when we had fallen, in

Earth, always the warrior’s last billet. When and

Where we had fallen. Sword, spear and shield

We held in death, as we had done in life –

Sword pommel still gripped in bony fingers.

Still ready, side ...

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Now that at dusk, the doors of the dimensions,

Glowing, are growing more thin and transparent

Like the seeds of Honesty, or Japanese screens,

I sometimes see, slightly by glancing, not looking,

Silhouettes of shadows, shades more real, more solid

Than those which feeble sunlight makes wane weakly

Here on earth.

These, seen only with the mind’s eye, lie outside the frame

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The days of feasting and hunting seemed unending:
The seasons passed: the hart in the woods bred
And reared its young year on year,
We ran after them, the spear sang a song
of whistling death. We joyed.

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At swim, two swans in the bay,

Under the mountains’ shadow

Where the buoy-moored boats

Bob to the tide’s rhythm,

The glinting waves’ glissando

And the wind’s insistence.

Then behind, stands of pines rise

In rows up the hill, dark marching soldiers

Until they yield the bare flanks of Goatfell

And the skyline’s crazy crags,

Last whittled by icebergs

There a...

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Clouds lie low down on the Sound

Today, cold blue silk, under a sea-fret,

The Mull of Galloway to the Mull of Kintyre,

Including the Firth of Clyde and the North Channel,

All tufted with white horses:

North-easterly, five at first, backing to three later

And the bent white wing of a wheeling gannet

Is stark against the dark hills of Kintyre.

This is the wind-road, this...

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The bees are busy, harvesting amongst the sea-purslaine

Despite being too heavy to fly, they drone,

Resisting force that pulls them back to earth,

Moving like monks on a mission, disciplined in work

A waggle-dance ensuring no omission:

Taking pollen again and again, drowsy and rotund,

Perhaps they sense that time may be short;

The quatrefoil flowers opening, their advent ...

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Now called The Staring Owl, it can be found on FACEBOOK at www.facebook.com/thestaringowl

The old blog, Bard Mousse, will not be maintained, because Blogger (ie Google) no longer supports the use of @ntlworld email addresses and Virgin, who are now owners of @ntlworld, don't give a stuff about sorting it out, and none of their proferred solutions works. The archive pages for Bard Mousse are all...

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Me, good dog, he often told me,

Warm voice, smell of tweed and leather

Warm voice: good dog, dog treat?

I look in his eyes, his brown eyes

See love for a good dog.

Yes, good dog.

Me like the mountains, clear clean air

Carries the echo of my barking, bark, bark, bark;

Cool streams to lap from, forests, walks,

A bouquet of pine-smells and almonds, sweet.

Me ha...

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Blue lights on the top road, I can see, over there,
Half way up the hillside, meaning trouble
Across the valley, through bare winter trees
With branches like the arms of bony skeletons
Tendril fingers scratching at the sky

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There are those who check the obituary

In the local paper, be it the Hull Daily Mail

Or the Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Before they decide to get up on a morning

(In T S Eliot’s day, it was the Boston Evening Transcript.)

These winter mornings, I know how they feel

Waking cold, to a grey dawn smeared across my window

But I have a technological solution:

I check my Face...

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The moon making a lattice of branches tonight,

Outside the window of my room

Seems strangely cold; Somehow, I wish that you

Were here to warm it. Impossible, though,

Even though tomorrow is your birthday,

Cancelled out by your being dead

Thirty-four years.

Thirty four years, full stop, and yet I feel

You still very close tonight, as the wind

Murmurs the moonlit bran...

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Halt! who goes there?

Maybe it’s just the darkness coming up the garden

Between and through the trees

Like Birnam wood, en route to Dunsinane.

I’’ll take first watch, I thought,

And here I am again, the lone sentry,

Just me and my little bayonet,

Holding back the dark

By staring into it, defiantly.

These nights, this time of year,

A feeble glimmer around

...

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http://youtu.be/B2YAEWHffhc

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http://youtu.be/PJ_knVdjruY

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Why do I do this, why torture myself

With these visions of summer hedgerows

Laden heavy with fragrant blossoms;

And Chichester harbour, the masts of yachts

At the bottom of opulent lawned gardens,

Roman palaces once found underneath;

Mosaics we once paid a pound to see?

Why do I do this, why do I even allow

You in my dreams and musings?

Even though I know you’re now

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Staring out at me over a gulf of sixty years,

Your glassy-eyed optimism, born of NHS specs

Your staid gaiety in checked dresses

Bunting fashioned from austerity

Displayed in glorious mono, black and white

Jostling just to have self-created fun

And celebrate a distant Queen you’ll never see.

How perfectly the instant caught you

Spots on the negative though

“Mam! Ther...

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Woods in May are made
For straying with sweethearts on
Winding paths with flowers between trees
Blue sky singing through branches overhead
And small clouds like birds perched on the canopy
Of leaves, green, deep light; and to come out
And look over evening fields towards home

Woods were never intended
For the death song of machine-guns
Whine and ping of bullets
Barbed wire like bramble...

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Thinking the unthinkable is easy;

Just ask any politician – in fact, don’t even bother –

I can think the unthinkable, right here, right now:

I can imagine, for instance, an elephant

In pink polka-dot boxer shorts,

Its vast, grey, crinkly arse, looming and ridiculous.

It’s unthinking the unthinkable that’s the problem;

Once you’ve thought it, it’s like shedding ...

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Which came first, mist or mountain?

No-one knows, no man alive, nor in the tombed enclosure

By the old Baryite mines: not even the dotted sheep, generations

Grazing on tumbled cairns, stone circles, chambered tombs

Or huts now dents in fields. No-one knows if one day

The mists thickened, or parted like veils

To reveal a maiden’s breast, or a jagged comb;

Or if one da...

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Mister Popinjay, up on his branch

Considers all the angles

Before committing;

Head on one side,

Matching the slant of light through branches

Jaunty but wary

Like a young lad, out upon the town,

Entering an unfamiliar bar.

Mister Popinjay

Brought me the summer

- a gift for which I’m grateful -

By decking his house with green

And wearing gaudy...

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Rooks, building high this year, aloft,
Flap from their airy, twig-perched palaces
Coarse, comic, voices - cawing in the cold,
Like pealing of cracked bells; these country fallacies
Say when their nests are high, the sun will hold
A honeyed glaze on sky farm field and croft:

So, let this moaning wind in telephone wires,
For want of choices, on this bitter day
When shadows cree...

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Touch my head,

Touch my toes,

Never go

In one of those;

My warding-off rhyme, as a snotnosed kid

Fear tightenng my chest

Whenever I saw their white shape weaving

Through traffic; or heard their urgent bells on the main road.

Always, it meant trouble - someone gasping on a carpet:

“Meat wagons”, my dad would call them, dredging up

Words from his war,...

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There will be two comets this year, they say;
Neither of which we’ll ever see again
Or so they theorise - nothing is certain,
After all. Things come around again.

The earth itself, cold as a comet today,
And the snow trails drifting out there
From upright rocks around the pond
Ice glazed as it rotates around its poles

Snow drifting across the garden in the wind
Like the ...

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No man steps into the same river twice – Heraclitus of Ephesus

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read anyway – Groucho Marx

Dog Days: I

Going back, to places we were happy, once
The fields, bare, along the roadside, en route
All flat, mown, sere, this late in harvest,
As summer piles a year’s confected clouds
On top o...

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And in whatever houses a cat has died by a natural death, all those who dwell in this house shave their eyebrows only, but those in whose houses a dog has died shave their whole body and also their head.  The cats when they are dead are carried away to sacred buildings in the City of Bubastis, where after being embalmed they are buried - Herodotus

Somehow, we’ve acquired a statuette o...

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Sometimes there are moments,

Like this one in the car park

An afternoon of eternity

Seems fixed in the moving of a cloud

Over the rooflines of town;

Or in that plane that droned across the sky

The morning of Aunt Sadie’s funeral.

Why should they etch themselves

Acid-deep onto the retina of memory

When all those other days

Days we’d looked forward to...

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IKEA is hell; or rather,

Hell must be very like IKEA.

It goes on, and on, forever,

All the signage is demonic, unintelligible

Written in Enochian or runes

Like the Lord’s Prayer said backwards.

They even sell black candles; to make things worse

The demons are all Swedish

With staring eyes like Moonies or Branch Davidians

And the torments include m...

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We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest
collection of poems by Steve Rudd

ALBION is available from The King's England Press directly at www.kingsengland.com at £7.95 (print edition, 9 in x 6 in, pbk., 59pp, ISBN 978 1 872438 65 8)

Or, if you prefer, there is an e-pub edition available from Lulu Inc at £3.99 (see button below)

Steve Rudd was born in Hull, East Yo...

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Free short story for "liking" my writer's page!

Yes - it's shameless self promotion time again!

Because I need to drive up the number of "likes" on my Steve Rudd author page,

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Steve-Rudd/221481391210989

I'm now offering a limited edition of a one-off free pamphlet of my short story entry for the 2012 Sunday Times Short Sto...

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OF THE MANY STAGS

All poems start with a lump in the throat

Said Robert Frost; well, the lump I’d speak, my lump,

Is a lump of rock, in Clyde water, fourteen hazy miles clear

Of the blue coast of Ayrshire; a granite knot

That binds up all my memories in a bundle.

A slice of my life, on screen now,

One-sixtieth of a second, Lamlash Bay, me and the dog

...

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On the day of the royal wedding (29th April 2011) and on the day before, the police arrested dozens of people pre-emptively. People who had not committed any crimes were arrested, often handcuffed, and detained in police cells.  – News Report

I’d like to race in the ‘Lympics
But I’m guessing I must stay put
Because I’m in a wheelchair - 
I have no athlete’s foot

I’d like to jump ...

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Those that tend fires require

A special form of patience

Watching through the window, winter-long

While the rain streaks; patience of a saint

Then, after bare grey days, at last

Catkins on branches unfurl daily until

The stumbling bee finally arrives

Late and cold like the spring at last

And the badger comes at night, or dusk

Rooting u...

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Getting dressed, in chill before-dawn dark

One of those dull cold mornings, cursing,

I put my foot straight through a trouser turnup:

Now, my pants hang, sag, sadly over shoe,

Adding to my general dereliction -

A stitch in time was needed, ah yes

If only we knew, with perfect hindsight

The point where we should have stuck

The needle in, to inter...

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Now that I’m pushing sixty, I spend time,

Much more time than I used to, looking back

Instead of forwards. Back, over my shoulder,

Down the hill of years,  there stand long-demolished pubs

Where we sank our first illicit pints;

Snogs at the bus-stop, or the last train home...

Was that even me, those years ago?

I’m not looking for my lost youth,

I know exact...

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Have they been wheeling and waiting for me, how long,

Over these bare February branches,

skeletons they will neither roost in

Nor pick at, wood-bones for which they have no use?

Waiting all the while the silver water slides as rustled silk

Right to left, under the old viaduct at Parton?

Driven by massive air

That I can only guess at, from Greenland, arctic, God...

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The only things that matter in life

Are time, and suffering, says my friend Maisie,

Herself a philospoher, with two degrees,

One in philosophy, so she should know.

And time is fascinating, she says; odd choice of word,

Personally, I used to have no time for time,

It passed me by like a river flowing round a stone,

Until I got my new clock; new to me, that is

...

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How strong am I today!

Says the wind in the chimney

Thrashing and trashing your trees

Whirling up leaves and buffeting

Birds like they’re being chucked away

By an unseen hand. Listen to the rain!

Listen to the rain drumming on your tiles

Causing you damage householder

Says the wind in the chimney.

You can’t stop me now!

Sings the wind in the chimney...

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The deceased’s last meal,

(Said the man with antiseptic hands

And water drumming in his metal sinks)

Was a cheese and tomato omelette

Cheap Red Leicester, mass-grown tomato,

But the eggs, they may have been free-range,

In keeping with his professed principles.

The deceased’s last words, we’d like to think,

Were something stirring for the Empire, but,

An...

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My entry for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Competition, 2012

http://tinyurl.com/5ttsyy2

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Who has the occult knack of materialising

When we need him most; like a wizard,

A pirate, or the fairy king in a pantomime.

Grinning, and with that twinkle in his eye,

He appears in doorways, denying his years,

laden with jars of pickles, home-made;

Tomatoes, rhubarb, pippins from his trees, in carriers, and

Balancing an improbable Geranium, in a pot.

...

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With anthracite, you need to get your airs just right

I muse to myself, digging the shovel in the bright

Copper scuttle of flaky black diamonds, and a flick of the hand

Hefts them right to the back of the grate; satisfied,

Happy that orange flames will lick, I spin the regulator,

Close the front, and leave the stove.

And go around the house, shutting the doors,

...

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I have noticed John, my neighbour’s apples

Bobbing on the branches in the wind; grown suddenly heavy

And tinted rouge, in a green vista down his orchard,

Across the garden, outside my window.

Their leaves, these apple-trees,

Now crisping sere with morning frost,

Conspired all summer; transformed showers to juice

Pips, stalks and sucrose, and there they are, now...

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We had no words for “metaphor” or “simile”

That night in the hall; the fire’s smoke

And crackle blazed colour into our faces,

The Skald sang ‘Edwr ran after the hart,

As swift as the river runs’, and that was that.

We feasted on its muscles, lights and guts

Ate ourselves full to stupor, then we drank,

Drenching our lips with honey of the kill;

Drew Edwr on the wa...

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The Haserot Angel

A paradox: the bronze eyes, blank of all compassion

Yet still weep, or seem to weep –

It all comes down to if you think

That everything you see, is all there is.

Explained away, it’s molecules reacting –

The stain of rain, just acid on metal,

Through a hundred smogs, etched supposed pain

For all those downturned torches, like the one

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DREWTON TUNNELS

Fourteen was a magical summer, sun hotter than

Any summer since, grass more green and more intense,

Green in the nose, as well as in the eyes,

And the chalk brighter and more white, even, than the fluffy clouds

Piled like confectionery on the horizon,

The sky bluer, and your adolescent girlfriend

More achingly beautiful every day,

Breasts bu...

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My old missus is a scary lady

She’s like Myra Hindley crossed with Ian Brady

Sits all night and channel-hops

Oxfam and Ebay are her favourite shops

Eats piccallilli, straight from the jar

Fell asleep and crashed the car

She knows where the wild things are

Her eyes are nothing like the sun

She never baked one single bun

Hardly ever ironed a shirt

Once sewe...

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An English Hairbag Foresees His Death

I feel completely crap today -

There’s nothing more to say:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere upon the plate below

Face-down among the sprouts; a heart

attack’s the current way to go.

In twenty-seventeen, the pump

Of muscle underneath my ribs

Will have a sudden dicky-fit:

I’ve shook a seven...

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