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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 11/07/2026

I wrote a #poemsabout #poem, about a #happyplace, the piece made me happy— 'til I learned it was out of place. So I wrote another. Now there are two pieces. We are that much closer to solving the entire mystery. #poemsabout #powercut #prose #poetry #verse #kipling #literature #booksky #readers

The Mahdi cut Dick Heldar’s power;
he couldn’t run on steam;
it was an unsightly, unkindly loss,
if one could only see what I mean.

Dick drew the wars for London
and painted all he knew;
the Empire’s hands looked cleaner
when Dick improved the view.

Then darkness crossed his vision—
the physician read the signs;
there are faults no man can mend
by inspecting the front lines.

He painted Melancolia
before the current failed;
then Bessie spoiled the picture,
and Maisie took the rails.

Torpenhow supplied the friendship,
the whisky and advice;
but neither love nor medicine
could make Dick’s darkness bright.

So Dick returned to battle,
where bullets need no aim;
the light that failed went out for good—
Kipling kept the name. (ap•ld)

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 01/06/2026

I nicked this #midnight #prompt unprompted. As good a word as any, but far too late to #write. Artists need their beauty rest, not to stay up late at night. #vss365 #midnight #writing #prose #poetry #poem #MicroPoetry #poets #poetrycommunity #horror #gothic

The #midnight bells were jingling—
mere chimes, if one is strict.
They marked the stroke of twelve o’clock—
a point I won’t contradict.

They roused me from my proper rest,
and summoned me from bed;
a scholar should be sleeping,
not rising with the dead.

I peered into the outer dark;
the evidence was grim:
a pale hand tapped the window—
from the inside.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 10/05/2026

I am reluctant to disparage the judicial opinions of Samuel Johnson, since he is in no position to disparage mine, and the exchange would certainly lack proper scholarly balance. #poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity #shakespeare

It was a chance meeting at Moreton-in-Marsh, on the down-platform, in the heat of August. Her name was Abigail. She had been to a matinée of Henry IV, Part Two at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre — Michael Attenborough’s production, with Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, the one in which Falstaff’s rejection lands like a dropped tray.
We talked, all the way back through the Evenlode valley, about Falstaff. She held him a coward and a sponge, justly dispatched: Hal had at last become a king, and a king cannot drink with a thief. She had read her Johnson.
I cited Bradley’s Oxford Lectures, in which the rejection is taken rather harder — the fat knight being the one character in the histories who knew the histories for nonsense, and the sending of him to the Fleet an admission that Bolingbroke’s son could not carry his own conscience in motley. The sheep paid us no attention whatsoever.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 09/05/2026

The primary lesson Professor Harry taught was that the best information is drawn from the most reliable source, and never from anyone’s interpretation of it. This should provide ample reason not to trust anything I’ve ever said or written about anything credited to anyone else. #vss365 #misfit

An English Professor’s Lessons in Not Lecturing
L.D. Tudge
I was a misfit growing up — an old codger in young skin. I pestered and harried my instructors from Martley to Malvern, including Prof. Harry, a hands-off composition master who likely as not grew up listening to the bells of St Mary-le-Bow.
He assigned essays and expected us to think and write our own way through them.
I once asked the professor about Cicero’s De Senectute, and he replied, “Well, it’s all in the dialogue, ain’t it?”

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 09/05/2026

Mr. Richard Dreyfuss is certainly a capable actor in his own right. However, we should be wary of men who mould natural landmarks from mashed potatoes. #poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity #shakespeare #hamlet #classics

The published play, Sir Tom Stoppard reminded the reader, tots up to ninety-two by the final curtain; the film, which he had directed in 1990 and was therefore at liberty to revise, takes the matter up to one hundred and sixty-eight.
He gave no defence of the inflation beyond the observation that what is improbable on a stage is merely ridiculous on a screen, and that ridiculous scales, not unlike a pangolin.
Sir Tom’s programme note also included an assertation from American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who had no hand — nor even thumb — in the coin-tossing process, and whose opinion on the matter was therefore considered unreliable. Let it further be known that not a single florin was tossed during the events of Hamlet, not even in Branagh’s full-text Hamlet of 1996.
I had presented these discrepancies to the assembled crowd, suggested two additional readings and one more viewing, then caught a late train.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 09/05/2026

I hadn’t faced intense intellectual scrutiny over such conversational matters of authority since Benjamin Jowett challenged my Caesarean essay, “Brutus the Left-Handed Betrayer,” at High Table in Balliol Hall. #poemsabout #NamesNotNumbers #prose #poetry #writing #poetrycommunity

On Falstaff… Eventually
A symposium, a chance meeting, and a card — summer 2000
L.D. Tudge
Part the First of Several
I had been in Stratford to deliver a paper at the Shakespeare Institute — one of those August symposia in which a dozen of us took turns elaborating on a problem each had agreed in advance was small enough to warrant elaboration.
Mine was the bookkeeping of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: how many heads, exactly, the florin throws across the run of the play, and whether the count was what it not ought to be.
Sir Tom himself had addressed the question, in a programme note I had read one golden afternoon in the Bodleian, under the title On the Probable Inadequacy of Probability, with Particular Reference to a Sequence of Heads that Persists Beyond the Patience of Most Witnesses.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 04/05/2026

I'll depart when the spirit is willing, when it appeals more than flesh. #vss365 #poem #prose #poetry #phantom

The Ghost of Giving
L.D. Tudge
To a former haunting ground I paid a call.
Fifty quid to look about.
All I saw were phantoms,
wondering why I stuck around.
A familiar spirit bade me leave this place,
said “Mate… it’s time to go.
Yer welcome to rejoin us,
when you’ve given up the ghost.”

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 03/05/2026

My former accountant's sister boasted she could harvest the power of the sea. Rode straight through Charybdis on a paddleboard, she claimed, the paddle forgotten in most retellings. #afterthesirens #poemsabout #prose #poetry #writing #poem #homer #odyssey #literature #classics #reading #books

Even More After The Sirens
Part Three, with reservations
L.D. Tudge
No sooner had the song-spinning Sirens fallen silent than upon the wine-dark did later come a god-sent mist, a god-swirled whirlpool, and a god-knows-what — a multi-headed Scyllaean serpent of inconsiderate disposition, perhaps a teratological plaything of Amphitrite, the moist queen herself.
Such was the much-suffering Ithacan king’s Trolley Problem: his swift black ship the trolley, his — “But trolleys didn’t exist,” I hear you screech, like a whiny siren bitch who hasn’t tasted sailor since the fall of Troy.
How can one honestly test the deontological ethics of death-doomed mortals when Circe is trotting about the ancient world pulling on divine, dilemma-spoiling trolley levers? When the gods transform toil-worn human problems into prudence, they are turning trailers into spoilers, which is still, more or less, a lesser evil.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 30/04/2026

When summoned to deliver your robust opinions on blue jeans and beauty expectations, feign illness and excuse yourself. This may lead to further illness. #HaikuFeels #verse #DailyHaikuPrompt #Senryu #Haiku #HaikuSky #Poetry #MicroPoetry #writing #poem ##verse #prose #emoetry #vss365 #writing #shape

Of shape, fit, and size,
the denim clings, waist to thighs -
Jeans? Uncompromised.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 29/04/2026

Ancient golfers would shake their golfclubs in anger at the gods, furious with the nuisomesome #lightning strikes that disrupted their game. The wrathful practice was discontinued when the last of the ancient #golfers died due to an unknown lightning-golf related illness. #vss365

On Lightning
A private notation, after a prompt
L.D. Tudge
Lightning, you say? Well, I'd rather not say, thank you. You see, I'm not one to gossip about the weather, unless I'm certain it intends to listen, and the rumours are never traced back to me.
But to speak so confidently about the weather? To stare into the eye of the tempest and ask it when the ‘real’ tempest expects to join us.
“Sir, I must say your lack of tempestuosity disappoints me in a way no storm ever has before. I’ve felt stronger gusts from the last breaths of dying men. I wouldn’t trust you to whip up a smoothie.”
If you want to talk tempests, tropical showers, and thunderstorms, or you’re keen on sinking barometers and sinking ships — I suggest you take up with Joseph Conrad.
I tend to veer away from meteorological dribble—I avoid what lurks in the fog. I won’t lend further assistance to the fog-lurkers and their pursuit of becoming qualified purse snatchers.

061

L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 20/04/2026

My #prose was to be on the principles of #gravity, but I judged gravity's principles to be weightier than its morals, and then things got very heavy after that. So instead, I present a piece about a man who had some pull in the Latin department as well as the Latin Department. #poemsabout

On the Proof Being in Ovid's Pudding
L.D. Tudge
Robinson Ellis was everything asked of a teacher, several things unasked, and one or two things you avoided asking entirely, even after graduation.

But it was a lesson well taught: if you asked Mr. Ellis about the Ibis, you had better have brought receipts for the Ibis, which would have proven desperately and irrecoverably Sisyphean when Ellis owned every receipt of the Ibis and had receipts for those receipts to prove it. (ap·dt)

#prose #poetry #writing #vss365 #emoetry #poem

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 13/04/2026

The chambers' new sign "Barristers - Solicitors" legally affirmed. I no longer receive Decease and Desist #letters from those #lawyers mostly because they're dead. #HaikuFeels #verse #DailyHaikuPrompt #Senryu #Haiku #HaikuSky #Poetry #MicroPoetry #writing #poem #prose #emoetry #vss365 #writing

The chambers’ new sign
“Barristers - Solicitors”
legally affirmed.

#haiku #senryu #writing #poem #poetry #prose #verse

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 10/04/2026

I never developed a taste for swan. In fact, I have no swan-tasting skills whatsoever. I doubt St. Peter is #blind to my unswanly dispositions, but neither did I claim to be the patron saint of silent swans, roasted or otherwise. #vss365 #prose #writing #Dorset #England

On the Roastiness of Plump Unspeakable Birds
We had walked some way down Blind Lane, which is in Dorset, as anyone could plainly see, before it occurred to either of us that the mute swans awaiting our inspection at the swannery at Abbotsbury might, at some earlier point in their institutional history, have taken a vow of silence — or at the very least, a vow of relative quiet; which is, if anything, more Benedictine than total silence.
Whether St. Peter approved of the swan farming of Fleet Lagoon, he certainly knew the monks loved a fat roasted swan best of any roast.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 08/04/2026

The southpaw adjusts the sheet accordingly, lest they trail the freshly-laid #ink — an occupational negotiation familiar to any left-handed #writer of letters. #vss365 #prose #poem #poetry #verse #writing

An Indelible Thirst for Ink
Dale Tudge
O,what a drought is this that grips my hand!
My quill, once nimble, lieth still and dry,
The fountain of my fancy stopped at source,
And every page a desert in itself.
Speak, spirit — or if thou wilt not speak, then weep,
That I might catch thy tears upon this leaf
And call them ink, and call myself restored.
And then call my dear, elderly Aunt Hilda, who I fear has taken another tumble.

This time, I resolve to discover the name of this sotted aunt-tumbling scoundrel.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 08/04/2026

I repeat: there was no finer #writing potion than Stephens' Blue-Black. Yet the blue, the black—and the black-blue—were all of equal #inkly merit. *I am not, nor shall I be again, affiliated with the inky proprietor of 191 Aldersgate Street. I swear it on my own Stephens' crimson. #vss365 #prose

Vouchsafe Me a Pot of That Ink
Dale Tudge
The sheets on my bureau were thirsty for ink.

“O Muse, descend and lend thy gracious wit
Upon this trembling hand and barren page,
Pour down some measure of thy boundless store,
For I am parched, and there are no words
To quench our thirst.”
I was eager to write, to slake, to draft and to draught, to sate my droughty sheets. However, the pot of P. & J. Arnold’s was dryer than the Queen’s amusement. Also, I had chewed my quill to the rachis.

And I knew not what parch meant.

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 07/04/2026

An #ink could stain a reputation as readily as a page. But when you spotted Stephens' Scarlet or Diamine upon your copy, you knew the business was as serious as their #writing fluid. #vss365 #prose #poetry

My Answers to Correspondents submission — a curiosity item on the particular thickness of London fog — came back bleeding with editor’s remarks, a penny #ink certainly, the aniline red of uncertain provenance, smelling of coal-tar and dye-vat as one smells standing downwind of Hackney Wick on a fog-free afternoon.
The marginalia had bled through to the verso, where Alfred’s bloody second thoughts had leeched through to the recto in turn. My copy came back looking more Whitechapel victim than stretcher.
A house that will not spend tuppence on its own marginalia is unlikely to spend little more on its contributors. (ap·dt)

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L.D. Tudge @dreadfullypoorpublishing.co.uk · 07/04/2026

The woman emerged in a dripping jacket, #arms carried damp to the elbow. The legend on her sopping tee-shirt read I LOVE CANALS, though not in its entirety. #HaikuFeels #verse #DailyHaikuPrompt #Senryu #Haiku #HaikuSky #Poetry #MicroPoetry #writing #poem ##verse #prose #emoetry #vss365 #writing

As it so happened,
bike, pitched over dyke, into
water most brackish.

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