Old Fragments.

What are these poems?
How did they originate?
What thought processes
kicked them into life?
Neither thought through nor completed,
and just left hanging here
like scraps of ancient music,
echoes of old songs
suspended in mid air,
hung out to dry.

I found them in the loft.
Pegged up like negatives
in the corner of a dark room.
Their contents scratched or faded,
smudged or pencilled over;
one crudely cancelled out.
They bring to mind lost children
discarded without mercy,
abandoned upon an island.
They cry out to be rescued,
to be safely housed and loved.

I quietly scan the writing
and try to fit the words
into coherent patterns
that might make a little sense.
But I cannot break the codes,
they are adolescent products
from an era half forgotten
that does not seem relevant to these times.

And yet the handwriting is mine.
These are my tees and aitches,
the commas big fat blots.
When a boy I wrote for hours
in secret under the covers
for night after lonesome night.
This was my secret ritual,
my substitute for prayer,
my imagined contact with the big wide world.
But I was an innocent blinded
by a plethora of arcane symbols
dug out of library books.
A whirlwind of conflicting ideals
that my hand to mouth vocabulary
could not question, nor articulate.

But I shall guard these scraps of poems.
Perhaps one day they shall be better understood.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 21st. - 23rd. 2016.
February 4th. 2017.