Fleeting Monuments of Glasgow
Depicting Glasgows fleeting monuments in collaboration with a sculptor, textile artist and architect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I0Q5VR3xdk
A response to Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. Inspired by the works of Hilary Harris, Goldon Matta Clarck & Daniel Arsham.
spending 2.30 on bread
I began down Sauchiehall street
the doorstep of a boarded shop
A bearded man in tattered parker sat and read
Workmen leaned on their scaffolding
A bus passed
I thought if I was cold n tired, I’d like a smoke
I lit a cigarette
Got spotted by a tired looking man, also sat on doorstep
He asked for a cigarette
So, I sat with him
He told me of Mass and the amazing grace
How he was afraid of needles and that money wasn’t everything
recited the lord’s prayer after telling me of his family’s murder
I gave him some change and told him to get food
Apparently, he hadn’t eaten for eight days
I believed everything he said and still would,
even if I knew it was a lie
I left and carried on
the first monument to Glasgow west
I forgot to get his name
The end of the street
I looked up to the first tenements, West
A flight of pigeons circled
As woman waved her sheet out the window
They shared the same flap of the wing
Blown by the wind.
A fleeting monument, to the complete present
Never again.
I began to follow the A804
Alongside the tangle of roads
Through concrete pillars Holding the rush of commuter frenzy
Passed St Patricks Primary school
where the kids howled in play
a manic hum as the passing traffic
Past the highbrow stones of university
And its hollow steeple
Flocks of bingeing academics.
Heading to Great Western
The straight dash through the city’s map
A Romany man sits on a crate
playing his Stroh violin, to folk passing
tapping of foot.
A cacophony builds, all sudden sounds of the street
collide in an overwhelming gust
I slip back on to bank street
Where the sound clears to a hum
Another monument to the senses, captured in passing.
only great western.
To the botanic garden glasshouse
A monument to a Victorian colonial decadence.
I never went in just through the park.
Running under the pristine lawn
And leaf blown paths
Lay the disused tracks of the Caledonian railway.
The remains of the botanic station
under moss.
overheard men reminiscing of times playing tig in the tunnels
now a nostalgic memorial to childhood
marked with a blockade of barbed wire
it’s those lost places…
The cranes of Hillhead
metal structures framing the last of a view
The red brick held from falling
Down past the abandoned lot
where dried buddleia had broken through,
a concrete field, cracked
full of weeds
on my way to the Clyde.
Got to the Clyde,
the flowing monument that cut Glasgow in half.
all the water heading west,
to the mouth.
there were no boats,
just gatherings of bottles n sticks by the bank
crossed the bridge
took a right at quick-fix tyre services
arrived at Govan Dry Docks
it stood as a derelict headstone to the Clyde ships
Glasgow’s own.
All rusted steel bent upwards, the abandoned bow.
Three basins layed sombre in disused melancholy
A baron pier
sounds of roosting cormorants cut through the moaning city
the standing shell of the pumping house
I entered through a hole in the fence
Roofless with
The fleeting land of the everchanging
I entered through a hole in the fence
There lay a fading photo of the man
polarising opinions and dead dogs
Monumental vacancies that define without trying
the memory traced of an abandoned set of futures
An enid blyton book we were in
Climbing steep spires, stepping down into the dock's depths wherein
Lie the (floating waste) common to us all,
A familiar monument in an unfamiliar territory
Where all the world was one big playground
A child running around with creativity roofless
just like the pumping house
soon to be broken down
soon to be revived by rebellion
A trail of yellow paint lead me round the pacific quay
A cyclist and his glaswegian ways
Poem by Jack, Sculpture by Nilanjana and Maia
I began down Sauchiehall street
the doorstep of a boarded shop
A bearded man in tattered parker sat and read
Workmen leaned on their scaffolding
A bus passed
I thought if I was cold n tired, I’d like a smoke
I lit a cigarette
Got spotted by a tired looking man, also sat on doorstep
He asked for a cigarette
So, I sat with him
He told me of Mass and the amazing grace
How he was afraid of needles and that money wasn’t everything
recited the lord’s prayer after telling me of his family’s murder
I gave him some change and told him to get food
Apparently, he hadn’t eaten for eight days
I believed everything he said and still would,
even if I knew it was a lie
I left and carried on
the first monument to Glasgow west
I forgot to get his name
The end of the street
I looked up to the first tenements, West
A flight of pigeons circled
As woman waved her sheet out the window
They shared the same flap of the wing
Blown by the wind.
A fleeting monument, to the complete present
Never again.
I began to follow the A804
Alongside the tangle of roads
Through concrete pillars Holding the rush of commuter frenzy
Passed St Patricks Primary school
where the kids howled in play
a manic hum as the passing traffic
Past the highbrow stones of university
And its hollow steeple
Flocks of bingeing academics.
Heading to Great Western
The straight dash through the city’s map
A Romany man sits on a crate
playing his Stroh violin, to folk passing
tapping of foot.
A cacophony builds, all sudden sounds of the street
collide in an overwhelming gust
I slip back on to bank street
Where the sound clears to a hum
Another monument to the senses, captured in passing.
only great western.
To the botanic garden glasshouse
A monument to a Victorian colonial decadence.
I never went in just through the park.
Running under the pristine lawn
And leaf blown paths
Lay the disused tracks of the Caledonian railway.
The remains of the botanic station
under moss.
overheard men reminiscing of times playing tig in the tunnels
now a nostalgic memorial to childhood
marked with a blockade of barbed wire
it’s those lost places…
The cranes of Hillhead
metal structures framing the last of a view
The red brick held from falling
Down past the abandoned lot
where dried buddleia had broken through,
a concrete field, cracked
full of weeds
on my way to the Clyde.
Got to the Clyde,
the flowing monument that cut Glasgow in half.
all the water heading west,
to the mouth.
there were no boats,
just gatherings of bottles n sticks by the bank
crossed the bridge
took a right at quick-fix tyre services
arrived at Govan Dry Docks
it stood as a derelict headstone to the Clyde ships
Glasgow’s own.
All rusted steel bent upwards, the abandoned bow.
Three basins layed sombre in disused melancholy
A baron pier
sounds of roosting cormorants cut through the moaning city
the standing shell of the pumping house
I entered through a hole in the fence
Roofless with
The fleeting land of the everchanging
I entered through a hole in the fence
There lay a fading photo of the man
polarising opinions and dead dogs
Monumental vacancies that define without trying
the memory traced of an abandoned set of futures
An enid blyton book we were in
Climbing steep spires, stepping down into the dock's depths wherein
Lie the (floating waste) common to us all,
A familiar monument in an unfamiliar territory
Where all the world was one big playground
A child running around with creativity roofless
just like the pumping house
soon to be broken down
soon to be revived by rebellion
A trail of yellow paint lead me round the pacific quay
A cyclist and his glaswegian ways
Poem by Jack, Sculpture by Nilanjana and Maia