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.