GHOSTS OF THE BROOMIELAW

*If you don't know Glasgow in Scotland, The Broomielaw runs along the river Clyde, where ship buidling resulted in Glasgow as becoming the most populated city in Europe at one point. So it was an extremely busy place. Now the Broomielaw is a vast space of modern architecture, and not many people. GHOSTS OF THE BROOMIELAW The Broomielaw in Glasgow where the silent wind blusters stands a figure whose heartbeats slow.He is releasing his misery in this cold metallic locale. For it was here his comrades lived their lives and here his comrades fell. They were the components of the machine. They were the reactions of the elements. They were the great unaware. This Broomielaw that now resumes. Its own opposite. Its own shiny, contemporary gravestone. The hordes now diluted down to a diminutive vapour of citizens, visible in the sunlight, but worried in the moonlight. The air hangs like miscarriages of justice on the gallows. The vagabond who pissed where the light of life glimmered, had no need to put thought to the antecedent ambience once so constructive, once so delightful. An invisible ache remains amid tin and zinc anguish. They tried to make it pretty, but instead they made it void. There is only the modern, living inside modern, who wait for a key that will peel off the roof and let out all of this amnesia. The smell of the river will bring back the ghosts. The solitary figure with his coat fixed to his body by the fast cold wind, walks to the river’s edge. In this emptiness his melancholy devil renders itself alive and drives the liquid from his eyes. The proud, the brave, the young, the old, the happy, the ill, the hungry, the characters, his comrades, they dance here. They don’t recognise the face he now has, but they dance with a smile. If not for their smile, there would surely be abyss, a black hole in the corner of a city. Those smiles of ghosts that for a flash make everything better. What could he think if not for them? He turns and looks at the buildings now constructed. The air that hits him is new. He doesn’t remember this chill ever existing. The cold was there, but not the chill. Is this the chill of the dying? The chill a soldier on the field knows at his last sight of the world. If only he could cry for his mother. A car pulls up at the side of the wide concrete plane. Two men emerge and come towards the solitary figure. ‘Are you ok Dad,’ asks one. ‘Come on Dad,’ insists the other. The figure takes his order. If only he could become an effigy, still and positioned to watch the dance of his comrades for all eternity. If only he could be built into this emptiness so that the visions of what made him could engulf him. His emotions erupt and he is weakened, forced to become a feeble ball on the seat of the car. He knows he will not return. All will be lost, even the ghosts of the Broomielaw.