James
I swipe two cans of Coke
left for accounts,
crack one open as my train leaves behind a grizzly scene
of vacuum cleaners strangling each other
in a cupboard about to explode like an atom-bomb.
I sit back letting the fart-soothed seat
have its way with me.
I let out a slow soft-belch,
a satisfyingly baritone-emission
just inches short of where
my esophagus is big daddy
in the biological underground,
where tonsils are bagmen
who run from bars to bookies
to cafes and address cops as
Mr. Mulligan, Sir.
James told me this morning he believed
the difference between a Yorkshire accent
and a Lancashire one was a certain
buuurrrr
that clings to the final syllable
of each sentence.
This is how it goes down,
how it should be,
this is how we moved from a swamp
to a city, conquering all that dared stand before us
Yorkshire (formally known as the County of York) in northern England has long been recognized as a distinct geographical territory and cultural region. Its inhabitants have their own Yorkshire dialects and accents (once known as Broad Yorkshire or Tykes), with roots in Old English and Old Norse. In the early 20th century F. W. Moorman, the 1st professor of English Language at Leeds University, claimed that Geats, not Angles or Saxons, settled Yorkshire after the end of Roman rule in Britain, and this distinctive ethnic and cultural origin is the root of the unique status of Yorkshire today. One of Moorman's students, Herbert Read, claimed that until recent times Yorkshire, cut off from the rest of England by rivers, fens, moors, and mountains, was effectively a separate region. To its west lies Lancashire, parts of which were registered as part of Yorkshire in the Domesday Book census of 1086; the county was not established until 1182, later than many others. The rivalry between the 2 counties was exacerbated by the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil wars (1455-1487) for control of England fought between supporters of the House of Lancaster, represented by a red rose, and the House of York, represented by a white rose. (However, the name of the dynastic struggle did not come into common use until the 1829 publication of Sir Walter Scott's "Anne of Geierstein.")
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