Benedict Canyon.

The moment that my key turned in the lock
your smile lit up the alcove where you waited;
a hundred watt tungsten light
suddenly turned on.


It is now half a century since that meeting
but, almost every night I think of you;
an incandescent, & yet monochrome, image
burnishing the screen;


or, outgrowing a love affair with Hollywood fiction
my memory reinstates a simpler scene,
a single rose bud glistening in a garden
gauzed in October mist.


Yet, perhaps that time we lingered on the beach
to watch the Dervish flight of madcap starlings
whirl in frenzied clouds above the pier,
scratching shadows on the sun


is more relevant to my understated heartache
than all the other mementoes packed together
In a single embossed album.


You took a new address in Benedict Canyon,
wherein one night psychotic strangers entered
and ambushed you into their savage dream world,
a trap from which there could be no awakening.


My life became a car smash when you died,
a constant swerving into road side barriers,
the slammed brakes high pitched screaming
and head lights turned full on, revealing nothing

except the exit signs.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
20th.-21st.-28th.-29th. October 2013.
17th. 18th. September 2015.