Just received a copy of the poetry, prose and reviews magazine, Mistress Quickly’s Bed.
I love the Editor, Alan Dent’s reviewing: direct and passionate.

Contributions with sae to
100. Waterloo Road
Preston
PR2 1EP

Subs £10.00 for 3 issues.
Single issues £ 3.50

And I have two poems in this issue which is number 3.
Here they are.

Jarrow Again

The town’s name: marsh, slake,

buried in half-truths, lies.

Bede’s distant,

an elusive dream.

The mixture’s heady-pride, anger-

like a ball in an arcade,

can’t settle on one feeling,

letting the hurt overcome me.

Tonight lights dim,

yesterday’s crippled,

I answer my heartbeat,

speak to you:

my home town.

The town’s a train, sailing out of my dreams,

I run out of track, but faces are drawn so clear, painfully true,

hunger and pain, companions in the town.

Strapped by memories,

a halter: hunger, The Thirties, grey, black pictures

marching to London.

My home town,

tell me no lies.

It’s time for truth.

Ellen was right, the town was ‘murdered.’

Shove the past under the carpet,

blood and pain

seep through years,

choke me.

Tom Kelly

Today: 1936

I am seventeen, standing by your door, squinting at sky,
right beside me, lifetimes apart,
that’s the picture. Hunger eats you,
shoes soak, you spit venom
at the pavement and cannot understand
what is not happening.

You decide to walk the streets,
shelter from rain by moving, not speaking to anyone
is the only way.
You feel your head is too heavy,
falling on your shoulders.

War on the horizon and streets make hate you can taste
like the nothing you are not living on.

I feel your arm, taut under your worn-out jacket,
face drawn, skin sprayed on. For the first time
you look at me closely and decide not to speak,
walk quicker as if that resolves anything.

Tom Kelly