(1) A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).(2) Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved)

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A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).


The words on the page opposite
Are puzzling me.
I do not recognise her name,
Nor do I know the hand;
And the address scrawled quickly down
Is of a house I have never visited
In a street I have never seen.
My imagination fights to fill the gaps,
Some place on the south west coast comes to mind,
Far from the cut and thrust of Central London.

In 1952 I was only nine,
Rubbish at sport and not too good at maths,
And a good ten years before I bought this book
On a sudden whim one day in Oxford Street,
The poems of Yeats then being unfamiliar.
Perhaps this woman is someone I once kissed,
Or failed to kiss as I dawdled by her side;
Someone who thought it might be worth her while
To write her name down in my favourite book
As we talked like friends inside a crowded pub,

Or wandered out of doors in wind and rain.
I cannot now recall her speaking voice,
Or the cut and colour scheme of her dress,
Or whether a kiss had happened after all,
But I honestly don`t believe it.
All that remains now is this faded message
Adding interest to an undistinguished page
That the printer had left blank, redundant and unnumbered.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. - 13th. - 16th. 2016.

For all the would be friends we only encounter once.
This poem is an attempt at expressing the thought process in all its fluid movement and roughness.

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                         2

Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved).


Disguised as birds
Your sentences captivate my mind
Like cruel kisses
Making me your prisoner,
La victime de votre chanson.

Your inattentive lover
Commences chapter nine of
The Einstein Intersection
And coughs as he turns the page.

Wishing to re-evaluate
The beauty of morning birdsong
I scrawled El mirar de la Maja
On my borrowed laptop
As a note for future reference.

Could this be love at first sight?
I mutter to myself
While staring at the carriage floor
Strewn with weekend litter.

The clatter of your footsteps
As the doors slide open and shut
Expresses a tart response.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 9th. 1984. - April 3rd. 2016.

This poem was originally sketched in 1984 at the time of the breakup with my then a wife, and that breakup is alluded to quite clearly, especially in the reference to The Einstein Intersection, the prize winning book by Samuel R Delany that my ex wife was reading at the time, but I hasten to add that the contents of that book had no influence upon our relationship difficulties.