I’ve a couple of poems in PURPLE PATCH No.120
The mag still only costs £6 for 3 issues. Cheques made payable to Purple Patch.

The editor is Geoff Stevens and Purple Patch can be found at
25. Griffiths Road, West Bromwich B71 2EH

Six pounds, two pints if you’re lucky. You know you deserve to treat yourself.
Geoff’s editorial is up its usual standard.
PP has been going over 30 years and I’ve a badge on my PC to prove it!

Beyond the Salt Grass

a cut-out horizon,
rail trucks bundling together,
like my past
oscillating somewhere between.

On a field a man and boy
kick a ball back and forward:
I am there.

Grey clouds puncture muted blue sky,
as a lazy wind
trawls through scrub grass.

Tonight cold bites dreams
I survive, just.
Memories are bound for nowhere
you care to mention,
night becomes blacker.
That’s the picture.

Tom Kelly

JARROW TUBE WORKS

I worked in an office
inside the works,
daily treated to the sound barrier,
metal-on-metal
then into a portacabin,
fitting in like a Russian doll.

Here was Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills,’
and Lilliput,
men grappled huge metal tongs,
hauled great iron billets of steel
out the furnace.

The Reamer drove home:
a rampant bull
straddling white metal.

I made phone calls
on a black Bakelite phone,
progressed orders
in the year England won the World Cup.

This is part of a dream sequence
I happened to live.

Tom Kelly