“In a progress up-stream, moreover, memory is not inseparable. Memories gather about us, but against the current memory can be let go, and the stream will carry it away.”

Eric Linklater, The Dark of Summer

You can listen to me reading Southside (Slight Return) by clicking on the player below, or the text follows the picture of John Maclean’s memorial in the heart of The Shaws.

Walmer Crescent, smell of gas, mice
Reaching for lovely softness of fur
Indescribable agony of cat

Fourteen Twenty Five 
Pollokshaws Road
Iced windows, Vicks Vapo-Rub 

Coalmen rumbling cellar blackness
Constant coughing
Bloodied newspapers, my mother's screams

New sister
Dinky compensation 
I hit her with a Mini

Trams and steam
Inner Circle
Blue Trains sparking

Dad's downstairs dentistry
Wednesday gas, taxis
Lined up to catch bleeding mouths

(Upper and lower clearance:
A sixteenth birthday present
Begone, decay!)

Levelling The Shaws
Black blank tenements
Smashed and crumbled

Fireplaces
Stranded in the sky 
Teetering

Towers rising
Orange, pink
Vast tombstones 

Greenview Hall 
Muttering gospel
Store Your Treasures

Dirty Dick's junkshop
Coat tied with string
Lichty man at dusk

(1962 we left for the coast
Twelve years later, 
I was back)

A student room above fillings
And extractions
Four years of desperation, belief

Scrimping, scuffling
For God and guitars 
Shish and Vesta curries

Apollo Stones
A girl with Ziggy hair
Clutching Diamond Dogs

Rag and bone men, horses, carts,
Balloons to trade
57 Bus to Clayslapps Road

Kelvin Way, late for lectures
Car crash on Maxwell Drive
No seatbelt, split scalp sewn

Vicky surgeon, shaky hands
Smelling of smoke 
Boredom and whisky

Cold pies from City Bakeries
Well fired rolls
Dead fly cemeteries 

West End interlude, Lanarkshire
("Green phone", said the Telecom man
"You a Tim?")

Norham Street
Shawlands Arcade again, 
Crossmyloof ice

Woolworths 
For cutout import LPs
I got The Who Sell Out

The Cookery Book and Fergusons
Ripoff tubs of pasta,
Wholemeal in tissue 

As faith failed
Or I failed it, the last flourish
Of visions in Dumbarton

Before escape, a desperate falling 
To Auldhouse Road, 
A proper house

A home made homeless
By hurt and loss
Whence I wandered

Wondered, walked, despaired
Rode bad bicycles
Roaming icy streets 

Club book British Eagle 
Longing for a Flying Scot
Bianchi, Colnago

Maeto Musik in Clarkston, 
Selling  fantasies of sound perfection
Made in Castlemilk

And then refuge
In words
Hacking the wordface

Newsprint, beer, whisky
Lunchbreak dominoes
Strange churches

Auldhouse Park at 2.00am
Wasted on Sambuca
Trying to sober up

Fell by. Woke frozen to the ground
A shiver away
From nothingness

From grace to disgrace
Kenmure Street, Pollokshields
Shelter, anger, sorrow 

Then west and north,
Further and further
And furthermore 

Until the flickering beam
Of the Eshaness light
Warned, guided, marked

Now, on the edge of Nethertwee
East Ren, to be imprecise
All roads lead back to the Shaws

Looking for John Maclean
In the Old Stag Inn
Weavers' ghosts

The baths, drained
Shopping centre, gone
Test centre, failed

Shawbridge high flats, levelled
Bus garage, departed
Library lives

New houses 
Prim brick, Integral garage
Sold at closing date

But old shortcuts lurk
Cobblestones and tramlines
Peek through tarmac

Someone else's drill
Howls and screams 
At Fourteen Twenty Five

Back lane to Kilmarnock Road
Gated, locked
Hides secrets

Faint and sick
Where death brushed by
At Auldhouse Park

Paisley Road West cats
Bare their claws 
At Cessnock

My childhood terror
Of the White Cart
In spate

Everywhere
The past is pent up
Ready to resurface, flood

And swamp this flimsy present
Scour the southside
Until the old bones float