Once worked

Where I once worked
Now just a desk, a seat and phone.
Posters still on the wall
But drawers empty as
Notebook pages.

Where once I worked
Now new desks and ringtones
Gossips still in the hall
But not about me
Not for ages.

Once I worked where
Passion and policy collided
Service was still a call
But then it went unanswered
No messages.

Just feeling?

Love is a feeling
No, no it's about willing actions
Demonstrating and serving
Not self gratifying
But self giving
Until you are empty
Unloveable
Perhaps
And unforgiving.

Surely love is fiery passion
Thats burns into actions
Maybe reckless
Foolishness
Not self conscious
But Other focussed
Until they are consumed
Unloved
By any other
and unforgetting.

On Michael Jackson's death

A living legend dies
And we autopsy his dysfunction
As the virally broadcast loss
Dissects our griefs outpoured in public
Over songs and dances that were shared
Millions of times over
While he's beat it
And sleeps
Never to be harmed anymore.

Inspiration

Why is melancholy so inspiring?
So many sad songs
Is happiness too fleeting
That prose can't capture it?
The froth, fizz and the hours
That whizz by?

How can pain make such art?
Bittersweet symphonies
Does the masterpiece
trap and contain it?
Bound up in oil and glaze
Never to harm us again?

Midsummer

Midsummer in Scotland
Heat trapped in houses
Still light
Till nearly midnight
Windows open but no
Exhaling of the stifling air.

Midsummer in Scotland
Endless evening
Two days in one
Sometimes sun!
Nowadays barbeque, patio and
Decking are standard fare.

Midsummer, Scotland
High altitude clouds etch
New coastlines and oceans
Solsticed
and soul stirred
At the vast map of possibilities
until sunset burns them bare.

Normalcy

It’s a blanket
Reassuring and cosy sometimes.
With her cousin Constancy
Always there.
Not changing much
Maybe fraying and fading
Taking you to the source of memories
When things weren’t so bad
When the sun shone
With halcyon rays
When things were normal.

Daily enveloping
Your body’s state of being
Regulating it
Innoculating you from the life of risk
From unexpected outcomes
Closing off the world of dreams
So that they stay dreamlike and
Not normal
Not everyday experience
Neither achievable
Nor desirable.

But can normal ever quite be the same
as it was before things strayed
from whatever was last recognised
as normal?

Learning comes from mistakes
And the shattering of norms
Risk it or sleep to dream.

Catalyst

A change maker
Yet not changing
Or making anything

A precipitate
Chemically speaking
that makes a reaction go faster
without
being consumed in the process

Precipitating
events and chains of events
happenings and altering relationships
In the people around you
Sometimes without even knowing,
By strict definition ‘especially without being involved in
or changed by the consequences.’

That last part
Humanly speaking
Is hard to practice
Too much precipitates

Flash past

Californian sunshine
Bathed Kilmarnock one day
Momentarily really
Dusty dry street, broken glass glistening at the kerb
Struck by the wheels
Of the first skateboard my eyes set upon
It clunkered and thunked
Making an alien rhythm
Flashed past
A thing of US import
Really in Kilmarnock?
Could I ever?
Seen on TV only
Now on my granny’s street

I was not that boy
That flashed past
No early adopter
Could I ever?
See on TV only
Wouldn’t really actually
Have a go
Could I ever?
Watched it, flash by
Never thinking
That I could ever.

So much flashes past
Signals to other lives that
Needn’t bounce off and be repelled
It seems ‘Roger that’
Would be better.
Sometimes
To say ‘received’
Instead of mute watching
And later wishing.

Worsening forecast

Al Gore video on worsening climate crisis
Al Gore presents updated slides from around the globe to make the case that worrying climate trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on ‘clean coal.’

Astoundingly beautiful lyrics, sounds great too.

"Marching Bands of Manhattan" Death Cab for Cutie

If I could open my arms and span the length of the isle of Manhattan
I’d bring it to where you are making a lake of the East River and Hudson
If I could open my mouth wide enough for a marching band to march out
They would make your name sing and bend through alleys and bounce off all the buildings

I wish we could open our eyes to see in all directions at the same time
Oh what a beautiful view if you were never aware of what was around you
And it is true what you said: that I live like a hermit in my own head
But when the sun shines again I’ll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound
But while you debate “half empty” or “half full”
It slowly rises: your love is gonna drown

plans - death cab for cutie

I am what I am

Whatever the genetics, nurture and environment that go into making us what we are there is the constant inner ache that we are not what we should be. This seems to be a universal human condition. I am not what I ought.

After last Sunday's service I was given these simple profound verses. A response to my reflections on the verses in Romans 7 '"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

I am what I am
I am not what I follow
If I am what I follow
And I follow what I am
Then I am not what I am.

Descending order

After a long longing I have finally found out more about my family tree. I am descended from farming stock! Its really surprising to find this out and not what I expected.
In this photograph is my great great Grandfather Archibald, with the horse and cart at the back of the picture. He was a dairy farmer and is pictured here outside his own dairy buildings at Rhu, near Helensburgh on the north Clyde estuary. In front of him is his son John, about whom we have no dates or records yet, so guessing John's age in this picture to be about 30, and taking a date between his siblings, Neil,(b.1867) and Isabella (b.1872) then maybe this picture was taken in 1900. Maybe a special occassion to mark the turn of the new 20th century?

So now I am a little less lost and have my descending order;

Neil McLellan (Ploughman)
Archibald McLellan (Ploughman, then Carter) b.1839-d.1910
Neil McLellan (dont know occupation) b.1867
Archibald McLellan (Doctor, Captain British Army) b.1900 d.1942
Neil McLellan (Doctor) b.1931 -
Gavin b.1970

Between

I am between jobs just now and in this verse I have tried to capture the various moods and phases that I've been experiencing recently.


Between jobs feels like
the gap between Trailer and Feature.
A departure and a lounge.
Relief comes in making the announcement, disclosing;
'I am leaving.'
Then an ebbing of one's power,
'When I'm gone'
Especially when making the surreal expression
'for my successor'
Then maybe that can be done, or maybe not
Suddenly one's opinion is inconsequential

Then comes the revelation of your real Identity
of one's true Companions,
staying with you after the Emmaus road.

With breath withheld
Comes the silence of Critics,
after the gavel drop proclaiming your verdict;
'I'm done here.'

Messages surprise
warm the doubtful, wavering heart.
Doubt flutters and fades,

Then Importance suddenly shows herself,
Priority crystallises,
Promise glitters
and Resolve beckons.

Defining Hope

Brazilian theologian, Ruben Alvez, described hope in this way:
"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. "But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

Photo I took on my trip to Palestine of YWCA workers in Jericho polishing locally grown dates for sale.

Random commentary verse #1

This is a mash-up rip-off scrapbook poem composed from random phrases taken from press commentary on the current economic meltdown.


We are living through
first intimations
of crisis, crunch, collapse
nobody has been able to understand.
Each attempt to deal
consumed by an irresistible,
often concealed within the balance sheets,
abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.

The last came
triggered
by oil price spike
dramatic rises
to inflation
ending a long boom
after the war
consolidation.

Now
we are living
through price hike, triple spike, off mike
commentary
narrating Google streets
everything public
but no-one rules the world
after the squeeze.

Jesus came to my house

Another imaginative worshipful challenge from Iain. Many of us at wgnc have written about Jesus coming to our house. Here's my offering.

Jesus came to my house today. I really wish he hadn’t. Don’t misunderstand me I desperately wanted to meet him. Its just I’d rather have gone along to an evening at someone else’s house, a kind of fireside chat, some selected friends and, wow, Jesus would be our guest!

But he wanted to come to my house and said so publicly. Why did I climb the bus shelter to get a good view of Him? All the way from Byres Road we traipsed to my house, everyone and Jesus, every hanger-on.

I must admit the days have passed so pleasantly and peacefully even with everyone around, so many visitors! So many people I don’t know and yet I have become host and slightly hostage. I’m captive and captivated.

I don’t know how He does it. Everybody’s name He knows, and the conversations! It should be startling and set us on edge but you know the way he knows all about you? He says exactly the right thing to everyone every time. Even through the window to people outside in the rain.

I’m not stressing, but get this, every time my wife Shirley and I go to the fridge for supplies as yet more guest arrive, it remains provisioned. It hasn’t expanded Tardis-like. It just has an undiminished abundance. We have wine, of course, pouring out of vases, bottles and plastic cups.

Sometimes He just looks you in the eye. Smiles gently and sweetly. I can’t articulate the energy and rush of feeling this gives. Not goose bumps, more like an inner earthquake. So much said without words. He laughs a lot too! With us never at us.

I opened my bedroom curtains the next morning and there were three tents in my front garden. I waited 20 minutes for a homeless family to finish using the bathroom. I hadn’t seen my own children yet. When I did there was my son is sitting on His knee. The stories He can tell! Everyone was spellbound.

He did some dishes with me and then helped Shirley hang out some washing and without warning said He needed to go.

I gushed out a declaration that I would give half of all I had to the poor and repay all my rotten debts to everybody I’d wronged. I didn’t meant to, it just was drawn out of me like a long withheld breath. Yet I feel it rung true and I can do it.

He smiled beatifically and said “salvation comes to this house today.” I really, really think it has. I wondered, momentarily about following, dropping everything, but it didn’t feel that was what He wanted. I left it unsaid. I was still looking out the living room window hours after He and all the followers had gone. I remember Him looking back, straight back at me, smiling, crying, praying all at once it seemed.

The phone rang, my anxious boss wondering why I wasn’t at work. “I’m sorry,” I said, “ Jesus was here, is here, He came, he really came, and.…I’m alright now.”
“Right so you’re coming back today then?”
“ No I’m all right, all right, everything! Totally everything, its just …”
“What!”
“Its not like a funny turn or anything, its just, well I’m not coming back!”

An iphone poet

Looks like new tech is recultivating the old art of poetry, or maybe just making it feel easy and accessible. Here's an offering of iphone poetry from blogger Michael Toy

iphone-poetry-from-university-ave

Random IM verse #2

A jammed printer
shouting swearing obscenities
not usually heard in the office
wasn’t the real distraction
instead for those with eyes to see
maybe the tautness of my face
victim of exposure to the harshness of the sun
I forced myself to breathe deeply,
sucking air into my lungs
to blow the printer and monster away

but to no avail
just mere breath can't change things
or can it?

What words can move mountains?
Empty phrases surely?
Can they really?
Change the world?

Lapsing back into the tyrannical tedium
I 'cancel print job'

Random IM verse #1

My good friend Linda and I experimented with some poetic co-creation. This is the result, the first co-authored random verse through the medium of instant messaging, line by line. Hope you like it. The link below gives the topicality.

Ed is so brilliant
a wizard on Ning
no bad thing
but not really social
one silent night
it was too hard to listen
even owls took flight
without a hoot
into the deeply dark sooty sky

logging on gave no clarity
he mourned a lack of parity
on tax and havens
he climbed the highest mountain
searched optimally for justice
wondered if U2
like him
suddenly found themselves
friendless

U2 and tax havens

Gaelic is endangered, should I care?

According to UNESCO's 'Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger' Gaelic is 'definately endangered.' A language is endangered when its speakers stop using it, or use it less often and stop passing it on to the next generation.

There were just 58,552 Gaelic speakers left in the 2001 census. Thats about the population of a town like Dunfermline.

This Times article lays into the "Gaelic triumphalism" which "surfaces whenever the little that remains of the culture comes under threat of further erosion, at the same time as Gaelic is crowbarred into an ever-increasing number of crannies in lowland life."

At £20m a year for BBC Alba? Sounds a lot but still only £350 per head per speaker. But taking in the wider public spending (£50m) on 1.2% of the population this rises to about £850 a head.

But consider this.

Koichiro Matsuura, Unesco's director-general, said: "The death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes."

How important is it to know that Bheinn Mhor means 'Big Hill?'

Africa needs God?....

I've been getting peeved at the over-use of Matthew Parris' recent Times article, "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God," by evangelicals in church sermons. If you missed it then Google it but essentially he has done a confessional piece saying that his experience of mission work in Africa confounds him as a diehard athiest. " I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa" he writes.

His main interest is not so much in the cause but the effect leading him to conclude "a whole belief system must first be supplanted."

An unbelieving colleague was appalled and made this blistering critique which I find hard to challenge:
"Unfortunately this article doesn't really go into that debate but peddles some really racist stuff - I'm suprised it was allowed to be published and surprised at Matthew Parris. Traditionally in parts of Africa people don't look you in the eye as it's seen as a mark of disrespect - those who do are likely to do it because they have been around lots of Western people, not necessarily christians. Africa has
had a lot of crap imposed on it from the West - and I would argue Western democracy was one of them. Democracy in the west took centuries to develop along with the civil society that shaped it. Imposing democracy on other cultures has undermined traditional systems some of which are much closer to the true concept of democracy. The idea that as Mr Parris suggests we should now "supplant a whole belief system"
completely appalls me - he must have missed the whole climate change debate if he thinks the west still has good ideas for the rest of humanity.

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier!

A revelation today. My son, nearly nine, has expressed a new life aspiration, to be a soldier! I'm shocked to the core.
"Because so many people are dying!" And he wants to help. Not for King and Country. Not in the killing, he wants to help. There's something noble in this. To Fight, to Protect, to Defend!
I hadnt thought through any desire to be in warfare or a battle with any sense of justice any sense at all of a positive putcome, surely there must be sometimes. Or is liberation usually just a transfer from one tyranny to another?
Can a combatant be a subversive peacemaker?

Secular Sunday

We had a secular Sunday today just like the majority of our neighbours. Slept in, had a brunch of baguette and scrambled egg and ham, filter coffee, just eased into the day, glided around the house. Then all of us out for a family swim after walking the dog along the Clyde for a little stretch. (Just to be clear we swam in our local pool not the Clyde!) After that a very late lunch in IKEA; the ultimate secular temple.

It was wonderful and one of the most restful Sabbaths of long while. Why should this be so? Obviously the novelty factor, then the absence of pressure, the lack of challenge. But I'm wondering what else. Why would anyone give that up to go and be part of a church worship service?