The Artist. ( In appreciation of the work of Marina Abramovic).

So this is what you meant by art
Throwing your self at a pillar until you bleed
Like a prisoner consumed by anger,
Or a child screaming for parental love
Against the blank of a locked door
Slammed tight in a small apartment.

So this is what you meant by art;
Just twenty years after Auschwitz,
The cities of Europe reduced to concrete constructs,
The Berlin Wall newly built.
So this is what you meant when you talked so calmly to us
In a Soho Coffee Bar.
That stark red star you etched upon your stomach
With a flick of a safety razor. Red star of blood
Encasing your womb with unreal barbed wire
While the child that once you were kicks hard and weeps
Within your imagination.
Oh let the prisoner free from the concrete cell
That never opens outwards to the sun
But remains forever snapped up tight
Like a Rat Trap in a metal box.

These are not the images that I could live with
As I tried to voice my pain in the newborn world
Of desolate bomb sites and sterile tower blocks,
I lacked your absolute grasp of truthful imagery.

So this is what I wrote when just gone twenty -

Ask me no more to portray these sordid townscapes 
You Managers of the cruel metropolis. 
A Rauschenberg type horror perforates 
The squared design for living
And sends me running........ 

I can quote no more
My response was real, but just not powerful enough.
I open my heart to your bravery, Maria Abramovic.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
October 19th. - 20th. 2012. 
Plus edit of an unfinished poem sketched 27th. May 1966.