First Love.

You come into my room

Feet silent

                 like falling

                                  petals



The red leaf rests

                           at last

                      upon the lake

Next month the snow



 Your smile expels the night

Cherry blossom in black rain

 Two Larks            in flight


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
28th. - 29th. October 2012.

Betrayals and Redemption. (Revised).

Infidelity creates poetry,                but don`t try it.
Love that is certain overcomes pain and treachery
But innocence is kinder, less wearing to the nerves,
And in no way corrosive.
We fuck ourselves up when we sleep around, so true
                                                                              My Baby,
Must I remind you? No, not really, and I am not angry about
                                                                   those other men,
Their expertise in the sack is of little concern to me,
Nor the bitter legacies they have scattered far behind them,
Like dropped newspaper cuttings on the sidewalk.-
                                                            I am just a little narked,
That is all;
                Well, that is all that I can ever dare admit to.
I know that you have coveted them in some shallow, simple way,
Like the bling proffered by rich men on the make,.
But our love has always seemed much less provisional than that,
                                                                              my lovely,
Or at least I hoped to think so.
& yet my behaviour has not always been so perfect ,
                                                                           believe you me,
Accepting inferior offers when they just happened to catch my eye
Like off the shelf Lost Leaders.
But I have always only                                      ever wanted you,
My only full term lover.
And so kiddo, perhaps we should now snuggle up and get our act together,
We have broken all the rules, but from now on, let us keep them
Inviolate and certain.        We have never lived at peace without each other.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
13th. November 2012. - August 23rd. 2014.

When reading my poems it is important to know that my first love is Theatre..

Homage to Karole Armitage.

Blonde dancer
Express with living sculpture
A clarity sublime

More cogent than simple messages
Sprayed on concrete balustrades
Of cramped    hermetic   tenements

Blonde dancer
Shape the energy
Of disorder into line

Re-defining warped conventions
Of outgrown      ancient memory
Into modern metaphors -
Graffiti etched in time

Sharp schemes
That refine the grace of nature
Expressed by Watteau`s Lover 
Into fluid     caustic     rhyme

More cogent than simple slogans
Daubed on concrete balustrades
Of cramped   hermetic   tenements
Graffiti shaped by mime

Blonde dancer
From urban squalor
Retrieve the classic line


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
25th. November 1985 - 7th. November 2003. . 

Loss in November.

              1.

White sunlight slanting
Through cracks in the door
Late roses in bloom


Blind
The old men shuffle
On sticks and stones
Rag Dolls in the wind
tottering           falling
Prisoners to fortune
All bones broken
          Carcinogenesis


Red leaves
                  humped high
On smoking cones
By laughing children
Eyes bright and clear
Tinged     with malice


             2.

       Now listen
I sit by the door
       consulting a void
Glass smashed
                on the carpet
Old photographs
                           faded
The song of your voice
Lost from the hallway


Without you here
The autumn is hateful
A shadow of ash
Smeared on a window


It is five years today
Since we burnt our letters
And you walked through that door
Alone


A touch of your lipstick
Traced     on the mirror


Trevor John Karsavin Potter 
November 7th. - 10th. 2012.;  

My American Sweetheart in the Movies..(Revised Version)

& now that you are everywhere but here
I sit and moody about you night and day
When I should really be well out of the house
Working, going to the Mall, seeing friends;
Buying that new TV,
                 promised but never purchased;
Pruning the roses.
One programme seems to dominate the rest,
A look back in time grooved on permanent replay,
Never letting up,
                          Never letting go,
Always on show at the personal Multiplex,
The at home flea pit,
                          The screen that never dies.
& just the one visual treat recovered out of that backlog
of mesmeric in house movies; petrified DVD dreams
In the Odeon of my mind,
                           Your smile the last time that I saw you
As you pulled down the Bedroom Blind.

Yes,          & here you will always be discovered,
                            forever lovely,      forever cool,
Sitting so carefully upright on the polished floor,
Legs stretched out in front of you, ankles crossed,
Hands dropped into your lap, sort of Buddha like;
As though you just lived to meditate, or quietly to
sit, An observer of mischievous life.
                         Spell bound               I listen to you
Like a Fan at a private recital, a compliant devotee,
Your elegant New England accent sings in the room
Lark like,
        Much sweeter than my blunt North London prose.

And then at night, in the privacy of true compassion,
The only lover who has ever completely known me,
Making me laugh and cry in a single ecstatic moment;
Your long and elegant fingers

    Laid resting over my heart.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 31st. 2012. - February 18th. 2013  
Written for a very special person.  

September Poem. (Completed & with picture).

                           She loved me
                                                 and in September
She wore the curling leaves in her hair
                           As we walked by
                                                 the mist hued waters
Where geese with clipped wings dipped their beaks for bread

                           and later
                                                 in the park she held me
while the red moon rose while buzzed the night crazed gnats
                           and great boughs
                                                  dropped noon ripe apples
Into our open palms

                         
                           Then quietly
                                              Hands clasped
                                                                      we drifted
                   Towards the dying embers of the sun
                            Out through white gates
                                      into a city
             Where hi tech threads of neon lights were spun
                                 into a flimsy tent
                           Out dazzling faded stars
                                  Until autumnal
                                         mist
Dissolved all sense of wonder - and proved our love talk
dumb

But now you smile                  More loving than at night
And spill a sudden clarity             Into the morning light


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 7th. 1965.  Final two lines September 23rd.1982. 
Revised October 12th. 2012. - August 29th. 2015. _ April 26th. 2022.

The Artist. ( In appreciation of the work of Marina Abramovic).

So this is what you meant by art
Throwing your self at a pillar until you bleed
Like a prisoner consumed by anger,
Or a child screaming for parental love
Against the blank of a locked door
Slammed tight in a small apartment.

So this is what you meant by art;
Just twenty years after Auschwitz,
The cities of Europe reduced to concrete constructs,
The Berlin Wall newly built.
So this is what you meant when you talked so calmly to us
In a Soho Coffee Bar.
That stark red star you etched upon your stomach
With a flick of a safety razor. Red star of blood
Encasing your womb with unreal barbed wire
While the child that once you were kicks hard and weeps
Within your imagination.
Oh let the prisoner free from the concrete cell
That never opens outwards to the sun
But remains forever snapped up tight
Like a Rat Trap in a metal box.

These are not the images that I could live with
As I tried to voice my pain in the newborn world
Of desolate bomb sites and sterile tower blocks,
I lacked your absolute grasp of truthful imagery.

So this is what I wrote when just gone twenty -

Ask me no more to portray these sordid townscapes 
You Managers of the cruel metropolis. 
A Rauschenberg type horror perforates 
The squared design for living
And sends me running........ 

I can quote no more
My response was real, but just not powerful enough.
I open my heart to your bravery, Maria Abramovic.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
October 19th. - 20th. 2012. 
Plus edit of an unfinished poem sketched 27th. May 1966.