Your body draped across the spiked railings,
A sleeping bag heavy with broken dreams
Dropped from a bedroom window. -
Drama was always your forte, your reason
for surviving
The weird excesses of Fitzrovia,
The hunger and the cold, the countless swigs
of whiskey,
The not too cheap champagne.
Also
The independence Modigliani helped you
discover
When you were both at home in Paris
Seeking individual ways to shape the modern. -
You could have been a spectacular artist, but
The lure of whiskey and wild nights
Clogged your brushes, wrecked your steady eye,
Separated your life from the remnants of talent
Too quickly swabbed away. -
This familiar portrait of you in the Courtauld
Institute
Shows a pensive face, thoughtful but secretly grieving
For a loss you dared not share, or perhaps were scared
to name
To yourself, or sozzled friends in the Fitzroy Tavern. -
Your death was terrible, painful beyond imagining,
An unseen fall from a high up open window
In the quiet damp chill of morning.
"Why don`t they let me die", you whispered to the doctors
Who already knew they had no means to save you,
But dare not give that final dose of morphine. -
I was a schoolboy in grey suits at that time, but already
knew
The sinuous darkness of Soho, the bustle of Charing Cross
Road.
I think I saw you once, a slightly hunched old lady
Lost in the noisy crowds, childlike, far from home.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 24th. - 25th. - September 4th. 2022.
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