Tom Kelly was born in Jarrow in 1947 and his poetry,  prose, plays, lyrics and musicals have appeared 
 on Radio Four, BBC TV, albums and in many UK magazines including, Stand, Rialto, Other Poetry, 
 Headlock, The Yellow Crane; Smiths Knoll, Iron, Red Lamp, Envoi and in the pamphlets 
 ‘Their Lives’ from Tears In The Fence; ‘In The Distance’and ‘That Time Of Life’, KT Publications; 
 ‘John Donne In Jarrow,’ Here Now; ‘Poetry from the North East’, Raunchland Publications.

 TV/ Stage work includes KELLY a musical with Alan Price, the subject of an Arena Documentary; 
 TOM & CATHERINE, a musical with John Miles and THE MACHINE GUNNERS, another musical 
 written with Miles’ and staged at the Edinburgh Festival. 

 Most recently SECRETS and LOVE IN NE32 a series of plays staged at The Customs House, 
 South Shields, which won over critics and audiences alike and broke box office records.

 He has only just completed a new musical DAN DARE (with music by John Miles), which will be
 staged at The Customs House in March 2003.
 		
 He now lives in Blaydon and works as a Drama Lecturer at South Tyneside College and is married 
 with three children and two cats. He is a lifetime Sunderland supporter.
 

The poems are dedicated to my dad

Not this bloody laughing

I am annoyed. I want to ask you so much:
why you are wearing your uniform,
in the Prisoner of War camp? 
How did the uniform survive? Did you not grow?
You were only nineteen with two more years
to grow into and out of the bloody thing. 
There you are at the end of the line
with what looks like a daft grin. Grinning
in a Stalag bloody camp! Come On. 
This is getting more and more like,
Carry On In A Prisoner of War Camp.
Is that Sid James in the front row?
Give me a break. I’ll re-read your story,
I typed it years ago, about the Frenchman
that hung himself and how you found him,
& saw other prisoners eating a crow:
not this bloody laughing.  


See
(To & For Dad
1937)

See I’m beside you:
eighteen,
winter everyday.

Your shoes
riddled with holes,
feet cold
as clay.

Sepia print the past
-if you dare.




Into Mourning 

You were smaller than I remember;
cold, your whole body pinched. 
You didn’t look me in the eye.

Wearing something grey,
a washed out charcoal, as if frost
was breaking into you, shuffling
into the kitchen, heading to the fire.

I was cutting into the day:
alarm on the horizon,
radio chattering 
but for a moment you were there.

I walked away from you
into mourning 
ten years ago.


I Tell You

I never told you this:
I didn’t make your life.
And spit in your handkerchief,
not on the ground,
don’t piss in the centre of the bowl,
drag phlegm from the back of your throat.
Don’t limp up our path
looking back at me
-I’m not blame.
Make this the last time
I tell you.


The fight to eat
(For Me Dad & a million or so more)

Born at the end of one war,
imprisoned in another;
hard life getting no easier,
making no sense of it all.

The Crusade leaves
waved into immortality
they could do without:
bread & lard; barefoot;
lodging houses; bugs eating walls:
poverty on tap.

The fight to eat
lived with you:
I see you sitting alone.


Chekhov’s Grandfather & me dad

Dad never bought his freedom
you were a serf:
labouring jobs, bottom of the pile,
low self-esteem your c.v.

You were always in the 1930’s:
harshness never far away,
like Anton, a hacking cough that never goes.

“Chekhov’s grandfather…”
you walk away
go to the club
you didn’t know him
never drank with him.