Combustion
SYNOPSIS
Combustion reflects on a childhood spent in a small Yorkshire mining town. It re-examines events through older, more experienced, eyes.
BACKGROUND
We lived in a back-to-back terrace. It had one downstairs living room and the kitchen was a gas cooker at the top of the cellar steps. The house had two small bedrooms. There was no central heating or inside plumbing apart from a sink. The toilets were in a block at the end of the street. We used a tin bath which hung on a wall. The only heat was a coal fire.
Nature didn’t play a huge part in our life. It was very much an urban, working-class upbringing.
Combustion was the first book written in the series. It seemed a natural place to start.
SAMPLE VIDEOS
SAMPLE POEMS
The Seamstress
I watched her eyes alight upon a thread,
her fingers quickly tack another line.
How much of what we know is never said,
those nimble movements crafted over time.
Her gaze would never falter on a run
except when strands would break or end too soon.
A tip of cotton placed upon her tongue
then twisted through the eye, she would resume.
A table by the fire a cramped workshop
with buttons, pins, and tape scattered about.
When working on new clothes would often stop
to spread cloth on the floor and mark it out.
Her hands stiffened with age and lost their grip,
warm water in a bowl the remedy.
But if she saw the smallest hole or rip
would grasp a needle, wield it perfectly.
Julie’s Strop
There you were in your whirligig blues.
People are stupid! The crap I put up with!
So everyone you ever knew
were drenched in that stream of invective,
immersed in Why me? and Why now?
The torrent of words unrelenting.
Paul (bless) trying to reason how
things were really much better, rambling
in that finger-in-the-dyke way he did.
You fixing him eyes cold and staring
realising that there, trussed and delivered,
was the sump for your rage. Then ripping
into him as if he was to blame.
And us, pissing ourselves with laughter
at the prey, who when the hunter takes aim
steps forward, instead of running for cover.
Polluted Water
For all talk of magnificent rivers
the Calder,
wrung from granite,
tyre necklace
and frame strewn shore,
never made the grade.
Topped with surface scum
a rainbow held in petroleum
the only lip service
to nature’s beauty.
Then a fresh curiosity.
Froth blowing
tumbleweed-style past the Chantry.
Cotton wool
skimming a pockmarked skin.
They would scour the tidal bowl
for the whorls of industry.
Not us, the cry
pointing to quirks of nature
which could bleach a shirt,
make detergent float by.
And Chantry – fingertips
clinging to bridge.
Class outing set to explore
four blank walls and sod-all more
suddenly
the prized vantage point to see
clouds of white foam
drifting illegally, downstream.
Portrait
She wore borrowed limbs.
Sweat bartered, paid for,
kept as numbers jotted
in carbon
from a stub pencil.
Her body
carved on-block from that flesh mass
used to build broad Northern women.
Square sides of trunk
and bell breasts
wrapped in an apron
under a sea of flower print.
Perfume
of feather mattress
and mantel hung with family glory.
At the factory gate
herds of her,
as if looms wove them
instead of dying cloth they spun.
Even then, the yarn unsold.
Even then, decay, loss,
progress, shifts into
new avenues of servitude.