(1).Christmas Eve - Fermanagh. First Version. (2). O Zone.

                      1.

Christmas Eve - Fermanagh. (First Version).



There are no bright colours here -
The sky - pale as a shroud
Wet from weeping -
The sun - a dim white eye
Half closed among vast clouds.

The bone thin winter trees
Reach up like gnarled hands
Pleading -
Old saints at prayer
With few hopes of salvation. -
A blank horizon pressing down
Onto the ancient landscape -
Unremittingly -
Mocks this fragile sadness -
The pale sun fading
As a thin moon rises.

Cruel escarpments -
Mist sodden mountain walls
Melt like unquiet ghosts. -
Christmas Eve - Fermanagh -
The stillness gathers all unto itself
As evening settles. -
Clouds spread wide like canvas sails
That once drove famine ships.

Awaiting their congregations
The grey stone village churches
Stand like border forts -
The symbols of partition. -
The shadows of ancient grief -
Of martyrdoms and oppression -
Deeply stain their walls.

I was not born here -
But I might as well have been. -
I am at home in a frontier landscape
Where nothing is ever certain.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 24th. - 25th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.
Last four lines, January 2nd. 2015.
Belcoo and Enniskillen. For Eithne. 

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                      2.

                O Zone.


The river of love bore you
Laughing
To an early death

May La tour Eiffel never cease
Weeping
Nor your gold winged Christ hit the ground

Happy New Year
Dear Angel
Guillaume Apollinaire


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 24th. - December 31st. 2014.

(1) The face of the Virgin. (2) Ghosting. (A Song). (3) A Shared Nightmare.

                      1.

      The face of the Virgin


Your face - pale in the church window -
Pensive among gold angel wings
Spread to shield the derelict stable
From the stiletto thrust of desert winds
Cutting through the cold back streets
Of war stormed Bethlehem.

Your face - neither Arab nor Israeli -
But North Italian - if my guide book is right -
Portrays to perfection the love of Mother Mary
For her boy child - born that violent night -
The shrieks of racists echoing through the city -
The flames of rockets arcing through the sky.

Your face - pale with love that defeats ideology
Shimmering among shadows in a patch of light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
16th. December 2014.
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                        2.

         Ghosting. (A Song).


over our footsteps
criss-crossing the snow
your shadow drifting
obliterates mine -
black upon blackness -
we fold over the whiteness
a singular darkness

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you

your hand on my shoulder
you whispering softly -
I turn to hear you
against the storm -
but your voice cannot magic
a path through the white wind
that shatters all calmness

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you

over our footprints
criss-crossing the snow
your shadow drifting
with infinite deftness
interacts with mine -
two shadows ghosting
in the raw white wind

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
First Sketched November 5th. 1978.
Revised November 3rd. 2010 - December 17th. - 18th. 2014.
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                           3.

         A Shared Nightmare.
      


Through a glass darkly I dream you
Dream hopes I must forsake

Flecked by sombre shadows
The mist dissolves the lake

I fear that we are drowning
and yet we dare not wake

I reach out to find the mirror
To touch but not to take

Your voice cries out forlornly
Cries out across the lake

Our hands meet in the darkness
A cold dawn starts to break

Your fingers melt like icicles
Melt back into the lake

Through a glass darkly I dream you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 7th. 1980. - March 14th. 2014.
August 2nd. 2014. - December 18th. 2014.

(1) December 6th. (2) Pavane. (3) The Shortest Day.

                  1.

         December 6th.



Winter comes in without warning.

Children larking on new ice.

The sun laughing between cold clouds.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 8th. 2014.
-----------------------------------------------

               
                   2.

              Pavane


Dancing a stately pavane
We rarely touch,
But the heat of your nearby body
Warns me
That civilisation is only skin deep,
Much like that twisted scratch of a smile
That sometimes marks your face
For a moment or two,
Giving hope to the stranger
But frightening away the wary.

Your uncle was very certain that you loved me,
But I am not so sure,
Preferring to keep at a safe distance
As we parade down the centre of the hall
To the strict tempo
Of the courtly music.

Dancing a stately pavane
We rarely touch,
But the paradoxical shifts in your persona
Remain on view
Despite the orderly progress of the music
And the whiteness of the masks.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 8th. 2014.

-----------------------------------------------------

                    3.

       The Shortest Day.



Winter -
The stone I toss into the pond
Creates no ripples

Even time is frozen



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 11th. 2014.

(1) Faltering Encounter. (2) Japanese Garden. (3) Autumn in the Park. (4) The Parting.

                  1.

     Faltering Encounter.



The moment that you opened the door
Your smile

(A fragile dance of light)

Tripped up the darkness
And laid it flat

Knocking me out in the process


                   *


No longer a stranger
And recovered from the sudden blow

I noticed that you dared not look at me
When I entered

But your smile was deftly reflected
In the verve of your body

The chirrup of your girlish voice

The tilt of your elegant neck
As you flounced down the hall


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
November 23rd 2014.
July 8th. 2015.

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                     2.

         Japanese Garden.


     It is enough
 that a single word
is spoken beautifully


        Rock



Tree



       Water



Girl



       Silence



     It is enough
That someone listens

Trevor John Karsavin Potter
April 1964.
December 2nd. 2015.

--------------------------------------

                  3.

     Autumn in the Park


      Mist on eyelashes
      Fine frost of tears
       When we kissed



Trevor John Karsavin Potter
December 4th. 2014.
--------------------------------------

                   4.

         The Parting.


  Whispering goodbye
  Now we are strangers

  Black hair disordered
  Eyes deep in shade

  The dawn wind stirring
  Tugging your sleeve



Trevor John Karsavin Potter
December 4th. - 5th. 2014. 

Night Train.

           Night Train.


Outside the carriage window
The night has become spectral,
A ghost factory of forensic arc lights
Into which we are locked
While apparently speeding by.

I vainly search for houses, hedgerows, trees,
But the rural scene has been made invisible,
Disappeared behind a dazzling cage
Of hallucinatory razor wire.
I wonder where the stars have vanished to.
The people at the stations that we pass through
Look like stranded outcasts.

They stand upon the platforms in small groups
Staring pensively at flickering monitors,
And rarely interacting with their neighbours.
I dare not visualize what they are thinking,
But not one single passenger seems at ease,
Stood under the clock to await the London train.

The view from the window has become almost intolerable.
I close my eyes and try to think of home,
But can recover nothing to give me comfort.
Prison search lights piercing every secret
Penetrate the sanctuary of my dreaming
With the cruel precision of a surgeon`s scalpel.
The  death camp mauer stretches on forever.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 20th. - 21st. - 27th.  - 29th. 2014. 

(1) Red Table.(Trevor). (2) Triptych, Three Short related Poems. (3) False Dawn.

                     1.

      Red Table. (Trevor)


Suddenly, there on the screen
Was the portrait;
Myself, disguised as a drifter,
A South Bank down and out,
Mournfully contemplating my freebie breakfast
On a February afternoon.

I stood stone still
In the cold grey light
Studying a dessicated double egg and bacon
That the artist had thrown down
On a bright red table cloth
And allowed to rot for a week.

This, however, is not how I would publicize myself
If given half a chance.
I would bin that old string vest for a start,
And wear a more elaborate watch,
Perhaps I would even shave,
Comb my curly locks.
But I had little choice in these matters,
I was down upon my luck
And the artist was forking out some wages
So I had to lump it and like it.

If I had been granted a choice
The medium would have been music
Not paint on canvas,
A symphony perhaps
Or a contemplative string quartet,
To portray my mid life angst,
(My mother had recently died
And the old man was playing me up).

Something by Schnittke maybe?
Something with crashing brass
And sonorous violins,
The occasional vibraphone,
Such a neatly controlled dissonance
Would have best suited my state of mind
And revealed my inner Monk.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. - November 1st. - 19th. - 27th. 2014.
Recalling modelling for Justin Mortimer at the Slade in 1992.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                            2.

Triptych. Three Related Poems.

                  
               (1) Untitled.

                   
                      Well
                I do love you
                       But

                
                (2) Manikin.


             Too perfect
             To be perfect

              Model with a made up mask
              Marble white
              Polished

              Reflecting the setting sun
              On the clear surface
              Of a curved mirror

              Dazzling
              The admiring crowd
              Of chique onlookers

              Too perfect
              To be plausible
              To be perfect

               Ice white
               Burnished

               Could you be
               The hum drum girl
               From County Clare
               I knew last summer

               Nails chewed
               Hair uncut
               Matted

               Face unwashed
               Crimped by spots
               And scratches


                (3) Futurity.


   When we kissed
   I thought we glimpsed the future,
   A smidgen less happy than I had hoped,
   But always with you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 16th. - 17th. - 18th. 2014.

-----------------------------------------------

                        3.

               False Dawn.


               
                   Sunrise
         The moon now silver
             Just like my hair


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 20th. 2014.

Premonition of a Winter Wedding. (Newly Revised).

Lady disdain
Under the rim of your hat your eyes sparkled
Reminiscent of dancing fireflies.

You had not heard a single word of the sermon,
Nor scanned the book of my mind,
But your smile was exquisitely prescient.

It was certainly somewhat strange
That you should enter the crowded chapel
At that very moment.

The minister had just mentioned weddings
And I suddenly thought of your name
For some inexplicable reason.

Perhaps I was recalling that time
When we stood hand in hand by the river
Overawed by a black cloud of starlings.

But sometimes I manipulate a memory,
And your conduct has often proved shady,
Especially to me and my friends.

And perhaps our shared interest in scrying,
The holiday visits to a recondite gypsy
Was partly to blame.

I remember the cards we picked over
As we sat among guests at her table,
Yet I rarely believed what she told me.

Your opinion however was different,
You took notes of all that she whispered
To dissect her poisons at leisure.

She revealed you would light up all venues,
But why should you take this as gospel
In every conceivable detail?

You are not an interesting actress
Although at times you would like us to think so.

Speak truth sweet lady, slyness suits infants merely,
Not adults with love on their mind:

Fireflies light the woods at midsummer,
In winter they vanish away.


Trevor John karsavin Potter.
November 10th. - 12th. - 15th. - 17th. 2014.
February 15th. 2015. - May 25th. - June 3rd. - 20th. - July 7th. 2015. -September 8th. 2015.

(1) The Return. (2) Her Timed Entrance.(New Version)

                    1

           The Return.


Hugging you close tonight
After two years absence

The coolness of ocean currents
The desert winds forgotten



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
5th. November 2014.
--------------------------------------

                     2.

   Her Timed Entrance.


Quietly through the labyrinth of time
You followed the clues I had scattered;
Your footsteps, although muffled,
Discerned at ten years distance,
Their soft sure tread
Praised from the first.
Your gently whispered words,
A far away enchantment;
Your slim elfin face, a shadow in my mirror.

And now you have arrived
To the minute,
On the very day expected
At the meeting of two paths.

Give me your hand, my nerve is strong,
Your sense of purpose certain.
The way ahead is narrow, dark, unsure,
Disrupted by twists and turns,
Our destination not yet on the map.
The maze retains some mystery,
Shadowed by ambiguities
That we must navigate to find the centre.
Please do not turn away, I am no stranger,
We should talk freely, learn to help each other
Now that our paths have crossed.
Give me your hand, we are powerless when apart,
For lone travellers the journey could prove fatal.
Empathy has long since been our guide,
We can surely reach the sanctuary together.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 23rd 1966. - December 29th. 2012. November 7th. 2014.

For J who was with me when I began this poem in 1966. 

Halloween Haunting, A Cryptic Poem About Southwark.

Only good whores become saints.

The black cat with a human face
Stared out of the shadows of Park Street
Like a Winchester Goose turned bad.

I ran for the shelter of the market
But sensed that I was hotly pursued
By a girl in a crimson dress
Wearing a steeple hat.

This was the moment that I decided
That marriage is a safer option
Than wandering the streets at night.

I have been trying to avoid you for some time,
As you have me,
But please now accept that my motives
Are entirely chaste and honourable,
And that I have never meant you harm.

The brushing of your fur backwards
That Saturday afternoon
Was merely a simple accident,
Not the revealing of my true motives.

Love always comes at a price,
Especially for social misfits,
So don`t you dare alter to please me,
I prefer the rough edges intact.




Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 3rd. - 4th. 2014.

Sunflowers.

After we had made love for the first time
The old gypsy women wrapped you in a thick blanket
To keep you warm, there being no fire in the room,
And heat thought of as necessary
To guarantee conception.

I was barred from hugging you close for most of that night,
And lay quite still at the edge of the bed weeping
While you slept soundly, snug in your nest of wool,
A safe calm world
Sacred to you alone.

For the rest of that year we rarely saw each other,
And then one morning came a call from the hospital
That sent me dashing out into the rain.
Your smile was radiant as a garden filled with sunflowers
When I walked quietly into the ward.

Holding our new born child while a nurse taught you to breast feed
Behind a white curtain, shut tight to hide our fears,
Helped me to blank from my mind those many nights
When I walked, without friends, through the empty streets
Calling out your name.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.

(1) .World. (Revised Version). (2). Tragic Song.

                       1.

                   World.


I listen for the true voice of the world
That appears to me like a frozen heartbeat
Suspended in the solitudes of space.

The hawk returns to my hand when I call
And accepts the hood as I slip it over her head
Having no notion of the hangman`s knot,
Nor fear of my intentions.
She has been hunting above the long hedgerows
While I stood here on the empty moor
Watching the wind shake the autumn grasses.

In this place I feel strangely haunted,
The voice of Gaia seems to resonate
In a rough primordial language
Through the fissures of the rocky landscape.
Her words lack form or meaning,
But I know that she is mourning
For the pains her children give her.
The slights.The savage wounds.
The broken promises.The near annihilation. -
I sense her pain, accept it as my own;
I feel as fragile as the half scorched moth
That once I tried to rescue from the gas lamp
But accidentally crushed between my fingers.

I should not have lingered on this rugged outcrop
To watch the orange sky fade into black
As the sun dips out of sight.
The tethered hawk fiercely grips my wrist.
Her lungs are aching. Her eyes are sore.
Her tongue curled hard and dry.
A raw fog tainted with the stench of diesel
Is seeping slowly through the autumn air,
Blotting out the stars.
I long to let my hawk go, to take her flight,
But we are long term prisoners to mans folly,
Trapped on a dying planet, and cannot now escape.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 20th. - 22nd.- 23rd. - 24th. 2014.
Revised June 30th. 2015.
A poem for Emily Bronte.

----------------------------------------------------

                          2.
               
                Tragic Song.


The world is my sustainer,
My true mother,
But I am not so kind,
I do not love her
And could, without due care,
Annihilate her
As easily as my goshawk snatches rodents
From between the broken branches.

This night is free of cloud.
I scan the sky
With my binoculars
To watch the winter stars
But cannot find them.
The raw lights on the distant motorway
Dazzle my aching eyes,
They are all that I now see.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 23rd. 2014.

Music is the Heart of Sorrow.

No my friend,
Your guitar is just too raucous for
                               such moments,
Cutting through the silence of the
                                       mourners
With a cruel jest,
A screech that mocks the inevitable.
Today we have been forced to remember that
Your hatred of Swan Lake had once facilitated
Your conversion to Heavy Metal.


This spare electronic music screams
A parody of sweetness
Through the hushed congregation
Blotting out the morning bird song
With corrosive quadraphonic sound;
                                       But
The soft gestures of the swan are perfect
                                      To express
                                      With piety
Such immeasurable desolation.


The wounded swan
               (An arrow in her breast)
Soaring one final time
                 Before falling,
Touches the heart profoundly;
Unlike the bland informality
Of this agnostic funeral rite
Accompanied by such dissonance and fury.


Farewell old friend,
You deserved a chieftain`s burial,
Not this clinical transformation
Into a heap of ashes
Inside a gas fired furnace.


Better by far that, on this cold September morning,
You had been folded gently into the earth
Unencumbered by the legacy of your music.
Rock a byed asleep in the loving arms of Gaia
Much as the wings of the wounded swan fold gently
Over her shivering body
To hide her time of dying.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 17th. - 18th. 2014.
July 17th. - 18th. - 20th. 2015.

Remembering a funeral lacking dignity and blighted with inappropriate music. The funeral took place at a utilitarian crematorium, all plain glass and off white concrete. The surrounding countryside was a picture postcard mixture of gentle hills and deep woodland rich in wild life.

In the Library.

Reading is listening.

A voice in the head
Telling a different story
To that we imagine.

Although he has been dead one hundred years
The poet sings deep in the skull
Of the student
Who studies his words.

The inner voice of the student
Is the voice of the poet,
But to the reader only,
Not to those who observe him.

If the student spoke
The poems out loud
He only would speak to us,
Not the poet.

It is in the privacy of our minds
That the writer can communicate
Without an intermediary.

Then we almost touch the hand
That scratched the words
In a hurry
On scraps of paper.

Moving the pen
To the pulse of his breath,
The knock of his heart.

But that is only imagining,
Not true listening.

The truth is a different story.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 15th. 2014.

Written in response to the play Bronte by Polly Teale.

October 10th. 2014. (Revised).

In this pale October sunlight
I find myself almost blind.

Diverse townscapes merging into sameness,
A blur of glass and concrete
Vanishing
Like a smog tarnished dream.
Nothing original sacred,
Allowed to remain
As it was
Before this strange disintegration.
Once pristine contours
Half rubbed out, smoky,
Their subtleties ironed into a flatness
That ice cannot emulate.

Blue sky fades like old embroidery
Exposed to too much brightness
On a Monday afternoon.
November is knocking on the door
With a gloved fist,
A cough,
A coarse laugh,
Cigarette breath blown in through the air vents
Choking the ventricles.
My heart stops for a moment
And then resumes
Fitfully
To a sombre music.
Your voice heard down the answer phone
Reinstates the fallacies of hope.

When a student
I would like to sit at home
Reading Keats and Shakespeare
Half way through the night;
Red Bird on the turntable
Introduced the clear cut modern
To my careful listening;
This jazz and poetry rip-roaring through my mind
Like a tonic.
In those days I had no fear of death,
Only this fear of your extended absence.

Now I sit and write from dawn to dusk
Poems that paraphrase a dislocated existence.
Please look me up tomorrow; please keep your long term promise,
So that I can pull these torn threads back together.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 10th. - 11th. - 12th. 2014.
July 22nd. 2015.

(1) Easter 1966. For J P....(New Version). (2). Wild Cat Poem.

                               1.

                   Easter 1966. For JP.


Girl
I remember the warmth of your love in a cold house:
The April wind rattling the sash windows:
The street dogs yelping.

We seldom linked our fingers, cuddled or kissed;
For hours we lay side by side whispering ballads,
Their words long since forgotten.

One night we wove two wedding rings from strands of cotton;
But the plaintive wail of the passing trains
Told of unplanned journeys.

Twice we consulted the cards, measured our life lines.
Your fate seemed tied to the north,
Mine to the south, hard by the docks and the river.

Girl
This poem is an intimate letter
Encrypted into the dark
On the keyboard of my computer.

I have not, for one moment, ceased pining,
And time does not value compassion.
Please send a few words tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. 2014.
Rewritten October 7th. - 8th. 2014.
Sightly revised April 6th. - july 22nd. 2015.
                       
                       ------------------

                               2.

                    Wild Cat Poem.


           Brendan Parker - Odell
           Cat of a thousand claws
           Why have you never caught a mouse
           In your multifaceted paws?



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 13th. 2014.

Your Mother? Oh Yes, I do remember your mother.

Your mother displayed the nerve of a cormorant
That was noted for skewering its victims unawares
As they skirmished through the turbulent dark
Atlantic waters            That scudded and swirled
Beneath the jagged rock she plummeted from
Like a stone dropped by an expert marksman.
This was the method by which she ruined the lives
Of all who came between her and her need
To be the best known chancer on the basalt,
The absolute mistress of all that she surveyed.
Thus utilizing her Jurassic hunting instincts
She smashed and bashed a shoal of frail young hearts
By snatching her prey from under their partners noses,
While keeping her own thick skin unscathed in the process.

Your mother? Oh Yes, I do remember your mother.
I hope to God I never meet such another !



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 6th. 2014. - July 22nd. 2015.

My Ideal Funeral.(Revised).

             
When I die
Let there be
No curtained Hearse
To carry me
Along the Hampstead High Street
Elegantly.
But on a market barrow let me go,
Big Band drummers tapping
Quick - Quick - Slow
On muffled skins and cymbals
Ecstatically.

And when the Party`s over,
Late at night,
Dig a deep deep hole
Well out of sight
In boggy Kenwood
Surreptitiously.
There leave my corpse,
Secreted after dark
Beneath beer cans and ferns,
Blackberries - condoms - fungi. -

Then plant a willow tree.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
Sketched Spring 1962. - Lost, then part remembered 1st. - 2nd. October 2014.
Completed as originally imagined 13th. June 2020.

(A). Fragments of a Dark World. (B). The Woman in the Moon. (C). Lines Written in the Cloister of Westminster Abbey.

                       A.

     Fragments of a Dark World.

Red tooth and claw. Red tooth and claw.
That is all life is. That is all. That is all.

                      1.

Arctic Owls have been observed attacking prey
In the sharp clearness of the northern day
Leaving red traces on the melting snow,
Bleak warning signs, or the discarded debris
Of smashed up lives in a hostile landscape.
Only the clear eyed Naturalist knows the worth
Of all that is lost in an instant.

                     2.

Darkly flies the hunting Owl.
A shadow stretched across the moon.
A blur of wings. A skull cracked open.
A trace of murder staining snow.
Darkly flies the hunting Owl.

                      3.

Locked in my hideout I fight the weight of these nightmares
Forcing my injured body down onto the concrete floor.
I grasp my camera as though it were a rifle.

The circling Hawk does not mind the strain of the long wait,
The dawn wind rocking his body,
His talons aching for prey.
                       
                      4.

Trapped in the ruins a journalist scans the rooftops.
The morning quietness is splintered by rifle fire.
Somewhere a child is crying.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
Fragments sketched between 1971.- 1984. 
Partly rewritten September 25th. - 26th. 2014.
Section 4 written September 25th. 2014. 

---------------------------------

                      B.

The Woman in the Moon.        (After the watching the satirical play by John Lyly).

You came into my room
Not a ghost, not a dream,
But real as the face in the mirror
That spoke to me.

I turned my back to the window.-
The image of your face
Shattered into diamond dust
When I closed my eyes.

The moon that I spied through the glass
Was pocked and ill favoured,
Not like Pandora`s dream
Of a matriarchs sanctuary.

I miss you, but fair maid, we were not for each other;
You degraded Utopia with your forthright inconstancy.
My flocks are scattered,
The fruit trees unladen.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 20th. - 24th. - 25th. 2014.

---------------------------------------

                     C.

Lines Written in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey.


Something permanent, elusive, but clear,
In cold stone leaps the fire divine.
The spires fathom the quiet air,
The sunlight steeps the glass in wine.

Break not the bread, I`ll take it whole
To ease the conquest of my soul.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 20th. 1972. - December 7th. 1980.

Three Short Poems For Aunt May.

                         1.

                  Endgame.


There are no poems in the eyes of the dead
Only the shadow of a sun gone out
Ash white and drifting


=========================
     
                         2.

          Fractured Thoughts.


Girl
Afraid to look at my wounded hand -
A broken bough
Not yet cut down

Can`t you accept the world as it is?
Red leaves descending upon a worn path -
The stumps of felled trees
Overgrown by saplings


==========================

                        3.

            Harvest Moon.

Tonight the moon drifts among clouds
A ghost ship
A lonesome bird without wings


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 18th. 2014.

Three poems to be read together, written in memory of
May Langdon nee` Odell, who died during the night of
the 16th. - 17th. September 2014.

A Portrait of Myself at Twenty.

I seeking the cut of man
Have worn out floorboards at Promenade Concerts,
Marched from Aldermaston to London,
Listened to speeches at Speakers Corner,
And have ended up none the wiser.

I have sat in a pub for half the night
Quietly reading Ginsberg and Shakespeare,
Chasing girls when I had a mind to,
Occasionally getting slightly drunk,
But this did not do me much good either.

I was in hot retreat from the world that I loved,
In retreat from the spotlight and live theatre,
The itch of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd,
But that is my life, I can live no other.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. September 2014.

The first two lines were written in 1963, the rest was composed 11th. September 2014. 
For much of my life I have tried to live as part of the crowd, live as an observer, but really I am a natural performer. 

The Private Photo-Shoot. (Revised).

I lift your photograph off the shelf
with a nervous hand.
I should have smoothed back
that wild tangle of auburn
before I adjusted the close up lens
and flicked the shutter open.

I was creating an icon of you
with diffused lighting
and muted greys and blues;
But an icon can never be more
than a simple mirror image
of what the camera sees.
Such beauty must remain
an ephemeral abstraction
artfully arranged
on a glossy scrap of paper.

I study deep the fragile mysteries
of startled, half closed eyes,
black in their hooded alcoves,
small elemental fragments
from the dark side of your moon.
This is the only trophy of that long ago weekend
that remains now in my keeping,
An image, mostly fiction,
that can be shredded in an instant.

Consistency is something I`m not good at,
which makes me, sometimes, hard to get along with,
but we had always vowed to keep in touch,
and even maybe share a house together,
But, as you see, none of this has happened.

I kiss the faded outline of your lips,
Then place the photo back upon the shelf
Where it usually resides, almost unnoticed,
Between a stack of old unanswered letters
And a pile of half read books.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 1st. 2012. - July 18th. - 19th. 2014.
September 8th. - 13th. - 15th. 2014.

A re-write of Midnight Goddess.

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling Queue. (Revised).

                       

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling`s Queue.


Fragments of the past come to the surface
Just like matchwood splinters
Breaking out through skin.

Recollections tend to be like this:-
Suddenly the stones beneath my feet
Echo to different footsteps
Than those of passing strangers,
I mean, those strangers who happen to be passing
In this lived in moment,
Faces locked on phones.
They are indistinct apparitions, shadow puppets
Merely,
Ghost pale and indecipherable,
Whilst persistent images from my distant past
Hit my eyes with the vehement power of neon.

Your face Jo Jo - in particular - is always on my mind,
More aggravating than my arguments with the Bank.
The fact that we rarely slept together - Jo Jo,
Remains a sore point after all these years.

Suddenly I am back in the Thatcherite nineteen eighties,
You in tow, exploring the derelict South Bank
Searching for that legendary pie and mash shop
Your mother never stopped waffling on about.
(She had lived hereabouts right through the Hitler War
But did not realize how much the world had changed).
To this day I have no idea if that shop was real.

You were chattering away nineteen to the dozen,
That being your custom - Jo Jo -
Never listening but talking for hours and hours on end.
Eventually you moved - on a whim - to San Francisco;
And there has not been a single phone call for twenty years.

GET YOUR TICKETS READY.     STAND IN LINE.
I am shocked back into the turbulent twenty first century
Where certainty is a farce that no one believes in,
And daily life less real than a West End Show.
The queue has shuffled forward onto the steps,
It is a cold wet night to view A Comedy of Errors,
And I have left at home my hat and purple woolly.
You once told me you would not be seen dead in a queue,
But it was de rigueur to be spendthrift and spoiled in the nineteen eighties,
As though the future would be fun filled -  warm and cosy,
A safe place to look back from.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
5th. September 2014. - October 14th. - 15th. 2019.

Sketched while queuing to see The Comedy of Errors. 2014.

Alma of Sarajevo. (Revised Version).

The most beautiful smile in the world -
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing the snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his grave.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day when she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.-
Hugging her pregnant belly
She begins the long slow climb back to her home
High on the swart hill.
An irrational fear of losing her unborn baby
Numbs her fraught mind. She exists without true hope,
Nihilistic, empty.

Reminiscent of gunfire
The splintering of a hewn oak
Stings the air.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just as her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

It is hard to keep a footing on this path,
The surface falls away, disintegrates beneath her;
It is porous,  grey like ash.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. - 12th. - 24th. January - 8th. March 2013.
Rewritten 28th. - 29th. - 30th. August  - 2nd. - 4th. - 13th. September 2014.  

For all brave women caught up in wars.

(1) Bleak Evening. (2) After the Run (New Version).

               
                  1.
         Bleak Evening.

The familiar is now strange and hostile.
I crouch down by the darkened window weeping,
Head pressed against the glass.

You walked out of my room when the clock struck seven,
Clunky sensible shoes scuffing the carpet
As though it were the enemy, an impediment to your departure.

Stunned by irrevocable loss
My mind grows blank with fear,
Equilibrium destroyed.

You had begged me not to watch you leave,
To turn my face to the wall and close my eyes,
But the imagined is always more cruel than the simple truth.

Outside the streets are empty, lashed by rain.
The violence of the night wind shakes the casement.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 14th. - 25th. 2014. 

-------------------------------------------
                  2

       After the Run.

The night the Play closed
The imagined characters vanished like dry ice
Blown on the wind.

The actors were left to fret and mourn
For a loss more poignant than the deaths of friends
Or the parting of coleagues revered and adored.

It was hard to relinquish the love that they felt
For personas created night after night
As they trod the unforgiving boards.

Even the cascades of excited applause
Could not fill a space now dark and empty;
Nothing, in fact, could assuage such sorrow.

The bunches of flowers thrown down on the stage
Tumbled like snow that would melt tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 25th. - 27th. 2014.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who reads my poems, especially to Malcolm Evison who has encouraged my writing and painting over many years.

Rose Alley.

I am a friend of the rose,
That is why my garden is full of blooms
Making a theatre of colour.

Shakespeare would have understood this surely
Speaking of the sweetness of a name
Tongue in cheek, Pen poised like a rapier.

He crammed the whole of life into his sonnets,
Speaking for Everyman in cryptic verse
That cut straight to the heart and stung the mind.

His London now lies deep beneath cold concrete,
And only the names of streets and ancient churches
Bear witness to the mayhem that he knew.

There is little room to draw breath in this city,
Let alone write a sonnet. For me, alas, this garden must suffice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
22nd. August 2014.

For Emily who taught me to love the sonnets. 

Falling Asleep by the Crystal Mirror. (Revised).

Winter nights offer no solace to the solitary.

I look deep into the mirror by my bedside
While trying hard to conjure something tangible
Out of the thickening dark,
The interwoven webs of threatening shadows
That hold clarity in pawn
And turn the crystal eye of memory purblind.

I imagine the materialization of my dreams,
A physical restoration of old hopes
Upon the murky surface of the mirror.
An ill defined image of my lover
Haunting the edge of consciousness
Where the sanctified and the sacrilegious meet.

I imagine a realization that I can almost touch,
Hold in the tenderness of my fingers
Like a cinematic image that seems so real
That it becomes real on the surface of the mirror;
A reflection clearer than a 3D picture
Projected down into the tangled dreamscape
Like a soft light filtered through a smoke filled theatre.

Stunned by your loss, the absence of your laughter,
It is your love that every night I search for
As I look deep, deep into the darkening glass.
I scan for your face behind my reflected face
In the sombre gloom, the veils of shadow,
The transposed inscape of the dusky mirror
That draws me deeper, and yet deeper, and deeper
Into the compromised sanctuary, the festering solitude

Of a savage hopelessness.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
20th. June - 4th. November 2003.
14th. - 18th. August 2014. 

Ladbroke Grove 1987.

I broke my promise.
I did not visit you.
I sat all alone in the pub
Nursing my self regard
Like a pampered pop star.
Disturbed by your candid awkwardness
I had become afraid of intimacy.

You waited all day in your room,
Staring out of the window at the passing crowd,
Hoping to spy the visitor who never came.
The day cooled and darkened,
A shower sluiced the streets; wild rivulets of mud
Gushing through the gutters,
Flooding pot holes and making the cross roads dangerous.
The weather mirrored your mood with uncanny precision.
You slammed the window tight against the driving rain.

Your friends told me that you cried then;
Turned your face to the wall, tore at the curtain,
Broke a glass.
You had never shown me your tears,
Nor your anger, nor your love,
But your silence was familiar to me.

The next day I arrived on the doorstep,
Dishevelled, unkempt, just like the weather.
You said nothing, your face was a stern mask,
A parchment scraped clean of writing.
My greeting was treated with a quiet contempt,
A deft glance at the door mat. - Frozen out
I snatched some chit-chat with your neighbour,
Snippets of news and some general tittle-tattle.
You were watchful, aloof; but hunched by the fire
took note of my every statement, thinking.

And then you stood up, head lowered, just like a nun,
Or maybe a Pre-Raphaelite priestess nursing a grief.
Gently you brushed my face with your index finger
As you passed by me, not speaking, to your room.
I stared at the lino, now noting how worn it was,
Spotted by cigarette burns; a decade of greasy staining:
One corner was scuffed up and broken.

Your father put down his newspaper
and brushed some crumbs off his sleave.

The door closed slowly behind you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 16th. - 19th. 2008. - August 2nd. 2012.
Re-Written and re-titled August 8th. - 18th. 2014.

A version of this poem titled London 1966 was published on my Blog in 2012.
This new version more accurately represents the events, place and date. 
The poem is dedicated to a wonderful person.

(1) West Hendon Murder.. (2) Cut Out. (3) A Shared Nightmare. (Revised) (4) The Angry Voter.

                1.

  West Hendon Murder.


The War Memorial in York Park has been smashed down.

Soon the Park will be buried under apartment blocks.

Lip service is given to remembering the fallen
while the good life that they died for is squandered under concrete,
White slabs fit for graffiti.

The Poor Kids Playground, laid out where innocents died
By a Borough Council that cared for the plight of the lowly,
Makes way for penthouses built to appease the toffs.
An uneasy silence has supplanted the laughter of children.

The War Memorial in York Park has been smashed down.

The grandchildren of the fallen have lost their heritage.

They have been sold down the sewer by the Council
that should have worked Hard to protect them.

Farewell high ideals and sanity,
You are no longer required in a world grown rabid and  venal.
Welcome forgetfulness and anarchy.
Welcome the Paradise of the Fool.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 5th. - 6th. - 10th. 2014. 


-------------------------------------------------------------      

                2.

          Cut Out.


Matisse
The bee does not sting as fiercely as you,
Your Colours drive me wild.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 4th. 2014.

-----------------------------

                  3.

     A Shared Nightmare. (Revised)


Through a glass darkly I dream you
Dream hopes I must forsake

Flecked by sombre shadows
The mist dissolves the lake

I fear that we are drowning
and yet we dare not wake

Your voice cries out forlornly
Cries out across the lake

Our hands meet in the darkness
A cold dawn starts to break

Fingers melt like icicles
Melt back into the lake

Through a glass darkly I dream you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 7th. 1980. _ March 14th. _ August 4th. 2014.
Revised December 18th. 2014.

------------------------------------------------

                    4

       The Angry Voter.


          
           X


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
1965.

(1) The Gardener. (2). The Cathedral.

                     1.

          The Gardener.


Blue Hyacinth for Mr. Thompson
        who died last night
   when the north wind skirled
          in shrieking fits
        that woke his wife
and smithereened the lattice porch
       beneath his window.


 A pompous man who, every Christmas,
sprinkled wine and words over seed trays
to invoke his dream of Easter, and then.
 white chubby fingers working overtime,
  stuffed spring bulbs into treacle tins
   and gave them to his neighbours.

  Blue Hyacinth for Mr. Thompson.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 4th. 1963. - July 29th. 2014.

           ====================

                     2.

          The Cathedral.


        Twilight over London

A red streak masked by a black thumb


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 20th. 2014.

Midnight Goddess. (First Version).

I lift your photograph off the shelf
with a nervous hand.
I should have smoothed back
that wild tangle of auburn
before I adjusted the close up lens
and flicked the shutter open.

I was tracing an icon of you
through diffused lighting
and muted greys and blues;
but an icon can never be more
than a simple mirror image
of what the camera sees.
An ephemeral abstraction
discretely articulated
in the briefest
breath of time.
Such beauty must remain
a piece of fiction,
a smudge that mars the surface
of a simple square of paper.

I study deep the fragile solitude
of startled, half closed eyes,
black in their hooded alcoves
of drear October shadow,
small elemental fragments
from the dark side of your moon.
And now I quietly wonder
as I lift the picture up
to kiss the faded outline of your lips,
If you can still recall the vows you
whispered
that long, myth laden night
of rain and thunder,
before you left my house that final time
to catch the early train.........................



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 1st. 2012. - July 18th. - 19th. 2014.

Futility. (New Version).

I cut open the Gourd
to reveal a wasteland of seed

One thousand plants that shall never be grown

Ten thousand mouths that shall not be fed

A taut womb barren
but cursed by hope

Mothers crouched among the ruins of Gaza

Eyes bright with hunger
Lips black with pain

Ten thousand veiled faces
imploring the sun

Ten thousand scarred hands
lifted in prayer

The voice of Rachel shrieking in Ramah

The beauty of Iman calloused by gunfire

I cut open the Gourd
to expose the raw flesh

The skin is rough to my fingers like sandstone

The small oval seeds remind me of tears


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
July 10th. - 11th. - 14th.  - 15th.2014.

This is a poem of protest, within the history of my family there are, and have been, Christians, Muslims and Jews. There are also secularists, and the family is mainly left wing or liberal in politics. I feel torn apart by the conflicts in the Middle East. The nations with the most efficient, brutal and powerful armies do not get my vote. It is the oppressed civilians I care about. The blood soaked children crying in the hospitals.

Three Poems. (1). Sufi Meditation. (2). June Night. (3). Post Modern Beauty. (I am the Duchess of Malfi still....).

                        1.

              Sufi Meditation.


Muted colours of a Pastoral Symphony;
The language of simplicity.

Fingers touching the hem of a sleeve.
A glance that does not need explaining.

All things straight forward,
Stone walls defining territory.



But that is in a far off country;
A distant time zone.

Here we only know the desert,
Contours splintered in the heat haze;

All things roughly covered over,
Nothing straight forward.



I draw the face of Rumi in the sand;
A gust of wind scatters the fine grains.


Trevor John karsavin Potter.
June 20th. - 21st. - 24th. - 25th.- 27th. - 30th. 2014.

========================

                        2.

                 June Night.


Last night
Midsummer rain awoke us

Black petals
Softer than eiderdown.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 23rd. 2014.

============================

                       3.

         Post Modern Beauty. 

(Duchess." I am the Duchess of Malfi still".
Bosola. "That makes thy sleep so broken". 
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi: Act 4.)
                       =====

Mona Lisa`s face without the smile, yet flawless,
never to be scarred by age or exposure to the sun.
Groomed for the cat walk, the camera`s prying eye.
A fashion plate image refracted through amber glass
as the doors swing open wide, spilling the wintry air
deep into the pub. She was not seen to enter then, but
for a moment her face flickered in the alcove mirror
like a faded video image.

                         Candle light obscured her finest features,
Giovanna moved among the deepest shadows.

                                     Unsure for a moment where dreams
begin or vanish, or when reality transmutes into an impromptu
theatrical performance, I put down my glass and left the sanctuary,
hoping to spy her in the milling throng.

                                                                           Was that her
there, dancing among the shadows? Dancing alone in the ribald 
crowd?

The Barflies jostled each other like madmen in a Tragedy.
                                                       
                                                          I reached out to touch her shoulder;
but only the air seemed tangible, seemed real. I turned back into the alcove,
lonesome and defeated.

                                                       Something within me had died.
That delicate hint of perfume was perhaps the trace of a memory,
and yet I am certain that someone did mention her name. But then 
again, my hearing is somewhat decayed, I could have been mistaken.

Her face had quit the mirror.             The door slammed shut in the wind.

A shrill laugh echoed in the porch outside.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 5th. - 6th. 2012.
June 28th. - 29th. 2014.

The One Tun, Part Eight. New Rewritten Version.

Devon blue. The sunlight frisking flecks of dazzle across the waves. Torbay placid, the yachts gently bobbing, Moses Cradles resting on the waters.I am sitting on the harbour wall waiting for the sleeping town to wake up. Barely one hour after dawn in June, the sun already hot and brilliant. I had traveled overnight by train from London, the rail carriage stinking of stale smoke and damp. In 1965 British trains were, to my knowledge, the dirtiest in Europe. It was good now to be out in the fresh air sipping Orange Squash and eating the last of the sandwiches. The food had been packed for me the evening before by Mrs. Harris. I was trying to locate her runaway daughter. A rumour of a possible sighting had hastened me down to the West Country. I sat on the harbour wall trying to focus on my next move, but I was almost too tired to think. A crowd of seagulls were clamouring overhead, keen to steal some remnants of my banquet.

I was no stranger to Torquay. I had family living in the centre of the town, but today I did not want to be seen by them; I could not be diverted from my mission. Zoe had run away from home once before; my task was to try and locate her before the police were informed by her father. Her family and friends did not want her to be locked away as a young offender. She was a feisty, articulate and highly intelligent fifteen year old, not a feral street kid bereft of hope and ambition. The law enforcers did not always recognize the difference. Unfortunately the boy she ran away with was rumoured to have a heroin habit, so we had to act quickly. I could see the keys turning in the locks and the iron doors slamming tight, the guard dogs barking.

She had left London holding a small travel bag and a kitten. We had all been together in the Classic Cinema Tottenham Court Road. Her artist brother paid for the tickets. The kitten behaved remarkably well. From time to time he would wiggle and take a peek at the giant screen, but made no attempt to break free and scarper. This fur ball was not my friend however, I received a small scratch when I tried to hold him while ice cream was purchased. Suddenly Zoe announced that she needed the toilet. Apparently both the kitten and the bag had to accompany her. She did not return.

I became uneasy after just a few minutes, but her brother was so deeply engrossed in the film that he hardly noticed the time passing. Once out of the cinema however he rushed straight to the nearest phone box and started to ring as many relevant numbers he could think of. No one could tell him where Zoe was. We enquired at The One Tun, but the early evening crowd were clueless, a state of affairs that we should have expected. Some did know the truth however, but were sworn to secrecy. She was at number 12 Tottenham Street, a five minute walk from the pub and her obvious destination. So obvious in fact that we did not think to search there. That tenement block was the bolt hole of Fitzrovia`s remaining Beatniks and illiterati, probably the most bohemian address in London. Zoe and her companions remained there for only one night. They were soon on the road to Devon. At some point on the journey the kitten decided enough was enough and took his own route to liberation. Cats and hitch hikers are not good companions. The boy friend did not last much longer either, which was probably all to the good.

Rufus and I returned to his parent`s home to break the bad news. and within a few hours we had both commenced our travels, separately searching for his sister at opposite ends of the country. I did not find her in Torquay, but just a few miles along the coast in Plymouth I caught sight of a note she had penciled on the wall of a pub. "I am the only sane person in this place," a typical Zoe observation. She was probably right about that sweaty hole in the wall.

After nearly three weeks of travel and living off her wits she returned home to Hyde Park Mansions, tired and unrepentant. Within hours the police were informed, and she found herself locked away in the Young Offenders Institution a sort of naughty school kids zoo in a quiet part of Paddington. Fortunately she did not have to stay there long, A relative she greatly loved became her official guardian. She moved into his home in Kingston Upon Thames. He took her on camping trips to Istanbul and Afghanistan. He was a Hippy before the concept had been invented. Zoe had won the freedom to be the person that she wanted to be, a gift that she prized above all others. She remained an extraordinary person for the rest of her unconventional life.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 19th. 2014.  - August 9th. 2020. 

       .    

Two Poems (1) West Country Woman. A Song. (2) The Painting.

                1

West Country Woman.


West Country Woman,
Hair wilder than moorland bracken,
Face redder than solstice fire;
I will not forget your peppery laughter,
Your sealskin hands,
Your restless eyes.
You touched me to the quick
With your snide and insolent words
That Sunday last November.

You had lit a flame in the heather,
A raw, storm frenzied beacon,
To draw my barque to the shallows
Where the jagged rocks lay waiting,
Stone dragons concealing their claws.

I had once dreamed you were my lover,
But I now know you are merely a robber,
A snatcher of hearts and of chattels,
A wrecker of ship loads of lives.

I once dreamed that we two should marry,
But your tongue is a thorn bush of lies.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 10th. - 11th. - 12th. - 13th. 2014.
Torquay, Devon.
Amended January 11th. 2020. =============================

                  2

        The Painting.


black on black on black on black
black dissolving into grey
black on black on black on black
white
grey
blue evolving into grey
white
black on black on black on black
grey
blue
no semblance of a human face
no trace of me or you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
June 16th. 2014.

Recalling a visit to an art gallery with Layla.

Four Poems (1) Californian Buddhist Wedding. (2) A Fragment. (3) Dreaming in October. (4) Human Traffic.(Revised)

                        1.

Californian Buddhist Wedding. (Revised Version).


The cicadas in the distant gardens presaged heat.

In those moments the world seemed transfigured by hope
As we stood side by side on the tranquil beach
Hands barely touching;
The silent stars spun a glittering web beyond our niche in time.

Speaking few words
We watched the moonlight shimmering a fragile path
Upon the surface of the waters,
A magical path that few have dared to follow.

Like discarded fragments of our former lives
The stones that we collected on the shore
Were flicked across the tops of breaking waves.
Bad memories should not linger to deceive us.

Suddenly you kissed me,
A tentative kiss, like those that children give.-
Slowly we climbed back up the concrete stairway
And entered the quiet house.

That morning when we whispered our solemn vows
In that Buddhist Temple high on the green hill,
We had been changed forever by simple words.
No secular laws were needed then to bind us,
Only our fearless honesty.

But now grey walled Manhattan claims your time;
And here I sit and watch the London rain
Darkening the cold window.
December nights are long and strangely empty.
The pallid moonlight seldom splits the clouds.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
17th. - 30th November 2012.
5th. - 6th. June 2014.

==========================. 


                        2.

               A Fragment.


The fragility of moonlight frosting your face
Reminds me of swans drifting through mist
Upon still waters


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
May 10th. 1984. - September 28th. 2012.

==================================
                       
                        3.

           Dreaming in October.


Dust motes drifting in sunlight
A soft veil of quietude.


Will I hear your footsteps on the garden footpath
Before the leaves have fallen?


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 1st. 2012. - June 4th 2014.

===========================
                   
                        4..

      Human Traffic.


Tinned meat
Pressed into cars and buses
Fly blown in the sun

Travelling can be fun

Free born Human Beings
Trained to taste defeat
Victims of our produce

We are what we eat

Trapped in mobile boxes
We eye a copper sun
And sizzle in the heat

Travelling cant be beat

Reduced to scarecrow fillets
Spit roasted
Overdone

We await the quick denouement

Neatly packaged
Trussed and hung


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 6th. - 7th. 2012. - June 5th. 2014
June 7th. 2015. - January 7th. 2016.

The One Tun, Part Seven. Revised Version.

Colonel was a fawn Great Dane, docile but loud of bark. He was also as tall as a man when standing on his hind legs. He lived at the Duke of York, a bohemian pub situated at the end of Charlotte Place, a darkly atmospheric alley in Fitzrovia. Whenever I ventured into that alley, Fagin and Bill Sykes came to mind, especially on foggy autumn evenings. I found the atmosphere so oppressive that it cut deep into my imagination. I saw footpads and burglars everywhere, skulking among the transvestites and moody beatniks. I even convinced myself that a real life Nancy was being done to death as I passed beneath her window. The buildings were jerry built Georgian, just the right style and period. I never felt at ease in Charlotte Place.

Colonel was a celebratory far and wide. He had starred in the 1959 Hammer Horror film The Hound of the Baskervilles. Sherlock Holmes had put an end to his reign of terror. Colonel looked wonderfully fierce in his gruesome mask, and played dead with due decorum once the blanks had hit home. Not fully grown at the time, he none the less appeared huge and dangerous on the big screen. We who knew Colonel loved him to bits; strangers were less sure of his safety record and tended to keep their distance.

Colonel was now an old stager, long retired from cinema glory, but his charisma was undiminished. He had a party trick that few dogs, however highly trained, could hope to emulate. He barked Time on cue.He placed his forelegs firmly on the bar, raised himself to his full height and deafened the nearest ear. Strangers would promptly drink up and flee. Regulars barged through the melee to hustle a final pint.

My relationship with Colonel was polite. We acknowledged each others existence, and once or twice he allowed me to accompany him on his daily stroll. As with most city dogs, pedigree or otherwise, the carefully organised outing rapidly disintegrated into a grand tour of all the local lamp posts. However, to walk out with Colonel was accounted a great honour. In his glory days he was the best dog to be seen with in the whole of Central London. Crowds parted to let him pass. Any human seen in his company was accounted a personage of some distinction. He conferred lustre on whoever strolled beside him.

One day, walking serenely and alone down Charing Cross Road, I was suddenly made aware of an excited hub bub in the vicinity of Leicester Square Station. I turned to observe the commotion. Something was causing the crowds milling around the entrance to jump and scatter. "Is there a fight taking place?" I thought. "Perhaps a murder". No, it was Colonel, thrusting through the throng, head down, tongue lolling. Some distance behind him my friend Anna clung to the lead for dear life. "He saw you and took off", she said laughing. This remark instantly boosted my sense of self worth. Colonel had not only recognised me, he had decided that I was worthy to be seen in his company. The exertion had made Anna thirsty, so we decided that a visit to a Coffee Bar was in order; but what to do about Colonel? After a few minutes dithering we concluded that the best place to try our luck would be Bunjies.

Bunjies was a Coffee Bar and music venue situated at the end of a steep flight of steps in a cellar. This popular establishment was staffed by students earning a little cash, and they tended to be tolerant of unusual situations. We decided that it would be polite to ask about the dog before he made his presence felt, so I left my companions in the street and rushed down the steps alone, hoping to find a waiter when I hit the bottom. I crashed through the entrance straight into the arms of a bearded student holding an empty tray. The poor chap was a little surprised. Fearing censure I blustered some rapid fire twaddle about not being drunk, and had just managed to gasp the word "DOG" when Colonel came galloping down the stairs, dragging a nonplussed Anna behind him. Two shocks in half a minute can unnerve the calmest man, the waiter was no exception to this rule. He stood frozen to the spot, struck dumb and apparently about to faint. Fortunately, after a long and nervous silence, he regained his senses, and use of his vocal chords. It turned out that he was a dog lover brought up in the wilds of Wiltshire. Indeed, he was so taken by Colonel`s magnificence that he allowed us to stay. He even presented the canine celeb with a bowl of water free of charge. Like most famous people, this Great Dane simply lived off his charisma.

Colonel quickly settled into this new habitat, took charge of his space. After just a few minutes he decided it was time to take a nap. He stretched himself out full length on the stone floor, blocking access to three large tables. A couple of unwary ladies tripped over him, spilling their drinks, but he did not turn a hair. As befitted a Hound of the Baskervilles, Colonel was completely at home in this subterranean environment.

The walk back to Fitzrovia was uneventful. I took my leave of Anna at Goodge Street Station. Money was in short supply so I decided to go home. Besides, my mother would have cooked a meal and I was feeling hungry.

Anna was a serious minded girl of Polish descent. We often sat together in the One Tun discussing philosophy and religion. I did not know her well, but was always glad of her company. Anna`s intelligence was more profound and acute than was common on that scene. Taking heed of her often acerbic advice steered me clear of difficult people and situations. A number of unsavoury persons mingled with the crowd, genuine thieves and footpads, and it was hard for me to judge the good from the bad. Anna was canny, she observed everyone and knew everyone; her judgement was infallible, or so it seemed to me. She was reputed to be nursing a broken heart, and this may have sharpened her awareness of the world around her. It was hard to believe that she was then barely seventeen. She could have been a decade older.

The last time that I saw Anna in the pub she had to rush away unexpectedly to sort out a domestic problem. She gave a little wave, and then was gone. Her other world, the one that I had no notion of, had finally laid claim to her.

Colonel was not the only celebratory in our midst. The One Tun was stuffed full of musicians including The Beatles. It was also frequented by actors from Olivier`s newly formed National Theatre Company. They enjoyed the love of freedom that made this place so lively. And then one evening Sir Laurence himself walked in, and my young life took a serious turn.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 29th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014. 

.    

Three Poems. (1).Glasgow, May 23rd. 2014. (2). The Mermaid.- A fantasy for Josephine. (3).Debussy.

            1.

Glasgow, May 23rd. 2014.


Suddenly perfection
Is burned beyond recognition,
A pile of blackened embers
Smouldering in the street.

Farewell my lovely,
A hundred years of history
destroyed in half an hour,
And ten thousand bright
                       tomorrows
Now can never be.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 23rd. 2014.

Written on seeing pictures of Glasgow School of Art on fire.
===============================================

            2.

   The Mermaid. (Revised Version).


You are my little fish
Darting through the black waters
Of the midnight river.

Stunned by your beauty
I plunge my arms deep into the swirling currents
To grasp your lithe energy,

Your liquid strangeness
Now weaving away from me
As though I were a hunter,

A fisherman with a net.-
"Gotcha!" I cry, as I snatch you from the waves
With a deft coordination
Of nerve and muscle.

You lie as still as a sick child
On the bank of the starlit river,
Eyes focusing on nothing.
I fear that you are dying.

I reach out to embrace you,
But you snare my outspread fingers
As though they were more precious
Than platinum or silver.

This sudden movement scares me,
Such elemental abrasiveness
Defeats all understanding.

How can I give you back to the dark stream
Now that your ethereal beauty
Has stunned me out of reason?


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 22nd. - 26th. 2014.
================================

                 3.

           Debussy.


Revealed by artifice and
moonlight
That gastronomic delicacy
A smidgen of freshwater snail
Sliding filigree arabesques
                       Delicately
Discreetly
Upon a pale blue port hole
In the melancholic midnight
Of the Esplanade Aquarium.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 10th. 2014.

The One Tun, Part Six. (Revised Version with additional passages).

Conning was the accepted way of earning some extra money. You simply went up to people in the street and asked for their loose change. It was surprising how many folk obliged, but then cynicism was not a popular mindset in the mid 1960`s. This was an era when the charm offensive worked a treat. We asked for the money politely, we did not shove out our hands and beg. We were being cheeky, and having a good deal of fun. Life was a game to be relished, but beneath our joie de vivre lurked a shadow, we could all be blown to bits by an atom bomb next week, or so we thought.

Some expert practitioners of the con game did not simply ask, but then they were after more substanstial earnings. They entertained their victims before fleecing them, much like cobras swaying out of baskets. They told wonderful hard luck stories. A certain amount of acting was required to accentuate the verbal skills. These were the professionals who relied on their wits to survive. My favourite story, one that I heard many times from hopeful con artistes, revolves around the fate of a sick child in Edinburgh. The gentleman requesting the money is the forlorn paterfamilias. He is trying to raise the rail fare to visit his dying child. Over several years this child not only never aged nor died, she acquired a host of remarkably different fathers.

Conning was the accepted method of acquiring food and drink in the pub. Ray was the expert at this. If he found himself having to buy a drink he would almost die of grief. He would seek a stranger willing to lap up his tales of Old Ireland, ancient Libel Cases, and for lovers of history, the Peninsular.War. If the required stranger failed to materialise, he would fix a cronie with a fierce stare and bellow, "Get up to the bar Now!" The appointed cronie usually obliged. But Ray was by no means a cynical creature, he was angry with God for being a spoil sport, and therefore he partied and partied. God did not appear to like excess, Ray could not get enough of it. He was in fact a very old fashioned person. Born two hundred years too late, he would have been at home in the Covent Garden of Hogarth.

Perhaps the makers of Primitive London understood that Ray was not truly modern, and that is why they did not feature him in their movie. Besides he was nearly thirty, and teenagers were their prey; but we kids knew that we were being exploited and laughed at. So when the interviewer asked, "Do you believe in free love?" the answer was always a resounding "Yes". We knew the rules of their game, and so we played it with gusto. The film makers thought that they were conning us, but as far as we were concerned we were conning them.  

I first learned the phrase "free love" from an essay written by Eleanor Marx in the eighteen eighties. Writing as a socialist she was considering the possible alternatives to Victorian marriage, a type of domestic entrapment for too many men and women. Eleanor was not advocating promiscuity, but in the nineteen sixties and seventies a number of self publicists were. These people were often a generation older than us and had lived through the Second World War, that time of terror and permissiveness. Many worked in the media and influenced public opinion. For this reason the sixties are remembered as the era of Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll, not as the decade when censorship was curtailed, homosexuality decriminalised, abortion legalised, racism opposed, feminism gained support, the Wilson Government stayed out of the Vietnam War, the voting age was reduced to 18, and capital punishment abolished.

The media guys were decades behind the government, but tried to look young and trendy. We kids despised those people, but had some respect for Wilson, despite his chameleon nature.

The so called sexual revolution shocked the pants off the pure and good. They thought that the devil had taken to the skies over England to bombard the young with evil ideas. This vision was more terrifying to them than the prospect of nuclear winter. A group of evangelical missionaries actually flew to London from Texas to fight this dark invasion. They roamed the streets of London collecting waifs and strays who seemed in need of salvation. The fact that these missionaries were armed to the teeth with cash made them attractive to the teenagers. London kids always know a good thing when they see it, and their ability to hit the jackpot is remarkable. Apparently all the young of the capital were addicted to sex and drugs, and this Texan money, stitched to the Gospel of St. John, was an inducement not to be sneezed at. Salvation suddenly became madly popular now it was seen to be allied to financial gain. The Catholics among the kids were a little puzzled by this, but they too came along for the ride. This crude amalgam of Christianity and capitalism was morally opaque, a neat education in double standards, but worked wonders for the weight of the purse. For a month or two the Pentecostal Churches of Central London became flush with young and eager faces. The Orange Street Mission was particularly popular. It`s Youth Club full to bursting on Sunday evenings. But when the missionaries returned to Texas, overwhelmed by their great success, the size of these congregations rapidly dwindled. They were no longer the flavour of the month. Some young people genuinely got involved with the evangelical movement, but the others were looking elsewhere for spiritual guidance and the benefits attached.

Like many people of an older generation, the Texan missionaries had completely misunderstood the youth of England. They were particularly outraged by what they perceived to be the decline in moral standards. But this apparent rejection of old time sexual taboos was primarily about individual people taking control of their personal lives, and therefore not being dictated to by restrictive custom. These social changes were very much a part of sixties feminism, a fact that is usually ignored. The advent of the Contraceptive Pill may have speeded up the process, but did not instigate it. The fact that certain unscrupulous persons took advantage of the new won freedoms is a profound tragedy, but this must not detract from the genuine benefits that this revolution has brought us. At the time we felt that we were witnessing the advent of an era bright with hope.and promise. The pristine Age of Aquarius. An enlightened age, fairer and kinder than the era we had been born into. That post war period when homosexuals were jailed, or chemically castrated; unmarried mothers treated like dirt; black people vilified. This was the world that the missionaries felt nostalgic for. A world superficially good and moral, but with all the awkward stuff swept under the mat. But this was the world that had hurt many of us during childhood, and therefore we were glad to be rid of it. One little story will explain why I hated the post war era. Having been born into unconventional families, my school friend Myrtle and I were fair game to the self righteous. A neighbour attempted to throw a pot of urine over us as we played outside her house. We were about five years old at the time. This neighbour believed that she was on the side of the angels, a guardian of public morality.

This woman had already wrought havoc in my family. When my father returned from the war in the summer of 1946 she informed him that I was not his son but the offsprng of an actor.

 "Look George, his eyes are blue, he was born two months too late".

She had stopped him on the street while he played with me on my tricycle.

He dragged me into our house, threw me across the front room then slammed the door shut. I crashed head first into the dinning table. He then attacked my mother in the kitchen. Tipped the hot dinner over her. Punched and slapped her. Swore he would kill her. Further violence was halted by my grandmother. She had been visiting our next door neighbour and was alerted by the shouting. She was a strong woman in her mid fifties, a political activist who had been widowed young with three children to support. George was no match for her. She promptly sent him packing, back to his mother.

"Don`t you come back here for two weeks!" She demanded.

George did not argue. He left straight away. He stayed with his mother until the storm had passed. But from that day on he burned with resentment. He loathed being put in his place by a strong brave woman. He also felt in his bones that he was not my father, and tried from that time on to mould me in his image. But my talents are different from his, and it took him until the last months of his life to accept this fact.

"I do enjoy the articles you write for the magazine", he whispered. And you are a good speaker at the meetings, better than me. Perhaps you should have gone on the stage".

I did not know how to reply. I just stared down at his hospital bed and mumbled some words of thanks. He had never encouraged my writing, and was hostile to my interest in acting. He had wanted me to be an office bod, just like him.

Myrtle`s family was more obviously strange and exotic. Her father shared his home with wife and mistress, a brood of six children, and an ugly mongrel bitch with orange hair, the mother of several pups. Only one of the children was male, a spotty faced youth disinclined to do National Service. All five girls grew up to be intelligent respectable women, disinclined to discus their origins.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 16th. - 19th. 2014.

Outside The Gates.(The lament of an old dancer)

Broken by age
I lean upon my beechwood staff
Fearing to move.

The tradesmen creep by me
As though I were
A dying slave,
Fit food for the dogs.

They load my sack with bread and salt,
The few that dare acknowledge me;
I, who once served the mightiest of princes;
I, who savoured his presence like wine.

Now I am old,
Cast out like a leper.
Now I am mocked
By citizens and guards.
My once supple body
Arthritic,
Contorted,
I, who once graced the Emperor`s banquets,
Now cursed and reviled
By the Plebian throng.

I, who once graced the rarest of garments;
I, who once rode like a queen through the Forum,
Must kneel before scoundrels
In the squalor of markets;
I, who once roamed the slopes of Parnassus
Plucking the sweetest fruits of the grove.

And tonight
When at ease
Upon a couch sheaved in silver
Among lovers and courtiers
Who ply him with lies,
Will the great Lord of Rome remember my kisses,
My graceful young limbs invoking the dance?


Trevor John Karsavin Potter 
February 15th. - 22nd. 1975.
May 13th. - 14th. 2014.

Although this poem is set in Roman times, it could, with only slight changes, equally well fit conditions in the early 21st. Century, this time of cruel ageism and strident capitalism. 

The One Tun Part Five. / Threnody./ Legend.

         Threnody.

Girls who stooped to prayer
On the ice flecked sand
Wept.

High above their heads
The sea gull crowded sky
Danced

Light upon their faces
Upturned to seek the sun. -
Gulls

Shrieked cascades of echo
Against the holy words
Rising

Up to meet their fierceness
From the ice flecked ocean shore
Quietly

Sung by the stooping girls at prayer
Trapped against the wave wall
Waiting

For the tide to brake and turn
Back towards the Arctic wastes
And silence.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
1965. -  May 6th. - 8th. 2014. 

------------------------------------------------

The One Tun Part Five.

We mourned for the London that we were too young to have known.We felt that our parents were lucky to have witnessed the pre - blitz city. My mother had often spoken of the old streets of Paternoster where she once purchased a delicate little wrist watch. Hitler had transformed the area into a warren of skeletal ruins, gaunt reminders of tragedy standing deep in the shadow of St. Pauls. In those days the Cathedral was streaked by the filth emitted by coal fires, the exhaust pipes of motor vehicles, the flaming of incendiary bombs. War and pollution had changed this formerly elegant area into a requiem for itself. Soon great blocks of concrete and glass would expunge even these stark reminders of more graceful times.

Until the Cathedral was cleaned I had believed that the columns in the porticoes had been carved from black stone. Now they glow pristine white in the smog free air. But diesel and petrol fumes continue to damage buildings and the lungs of residents and daily commuters. People do not seem to want to understand that the chemicals that visibly erode brick and stone also cut into their own fragile bodies. How children grow up healthy in London remains a mystery to me. In the nineteen sixties we thoughtfully added cigarette smoke to the concoction of pollutants. The interiors of public houses, restaurants and cinemas, were usually viewed through a stench of tobacco fumes. There were times when some people stuck in a crowded room would retch because the air had been churned into a thick grey fug.

The ceiling of The One Tun was nicotine yellow. When the pub was crowded I often found that my eyes stung and my nose felt bunged up. A pint of the black stuff could never clear these symptoms. A walk in the park was the only reliable remedy. Regents Park was not too far distant, and sometimes I would stroll by myself to Camden town across the manicured lawns. But if I wanted to meet up with my friends on a summer afternoon I would wander down Charing Cross Road to St. James`s Park, via the Beatnik stronghold of Trafalgar Square. I was never a Beatnik myself, I was half a decade too young and also somewhat sceptical of their inchoate world view. My mind had been fashioned by the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, and a little smattering of Eleanor Marx. I was also getting interested in St. Francis of Assisi, Omar Khayyam, and the Buddha. I did not discover Rumi until 1987, but the Communist Manifesto has lived on my bookshelf since my mid teens. Social change needed to be a structured revolutionary movement to succeed. It could not be brought about by hitch hiking around England and sleeping rough, or so I thought at the time. Nowadays I know that a component of improvisation informs every revolutionary movement. And the nineteen sixties were vibrant with an assorted plethora of social experiments. This was the decade in which life style choices became both possible and relevant. Social awareness in all it`s various forms, good and bad, went hand in hand with intense personal self development."Know yourself, but also know and (sometimes) love your neighbour". The Christian ideal of loving "thy neighbour as thyself" was not so popular, We were far too selfish and self indulgent for that. But somewhere deep within myself I knew this selfishness to be wrong, and tried, somewhat feebly, to resist it. My social conscience was already well developed, although I did not always act on it`s promptings. I would not then have described myself as a democratic communard, but that is what I was. I believed in equal rights and pay for everyone regardless of profession, race, age, culture or gender. An anti capitalist to the core, I refused to join any political party because I wished to retain the freedom to make up my own mind.

London in 1964 seemed like a backwater. A year later we thought we were the very centre of the world. By the time the Summer of Love came along, the impetus for change had become a powerful global force; almost as powerful as the pollution driven shrinking of the polar ice, a phenomenon as yet barely remarked upon ,except by one or two scientists. In 1967 it was a common belief that Gaia could be put in her place and bullied for the benefit of the human species. Capitalists and communists were intoxicated by this idea. Some of the Beatniks, and many more of the Hippies, were beginning to adopt a very different opinion.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 8th. 2014.

___________________________________________________________________________

        Legend.

Son of two fathers
I sit by the raging sea
Waiting for a single shout
To hale me home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 6th. 2014.