The Private Photo-Shoot. (Revised).

I lift your photograph off the shelf
with a nervous hand.
I should have smoothed back
that wild tangle of auburn
before I adjusted the close up lens
and flicked the shutter open.

I was creating an icon of you
with diffused lighting
and muted greys and blues;
But an icon can never be more
than a simple mirror image
of what the camera sees.
Such beauty must remain
an ephemeral abstraction
artfully arranged
on a glossy scrap of paper.

I study deep the fragile mysteries
of startled, half closed eyes,
black in their hooded alcoves,
small elemental fragments
from the dark side of your moon.
This is the only trophy of that long ago weekend
that remains now in my keeping,
An image, mostly fiction,
that can be shredded in an instant.

Consistency is something I`m not good at,
which makes me, sometimes, hard to get along with,
but we had always vowed to keep in touch,
and even maybe share a house together,
But, as you see, none of this has happened.

I kiss the faded outline of your lips,
Then place the photo back upon the shelf
Where it usually resides, almost unnoticed,
Between a stack of old unanswered letters
And a pile of half read books.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 1st. 2012. - July 18th. - 19th. 2014.
September 8th. - 13th. - 15th. 2014.

A re-write of Midnight Goddess.

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling Queue. (Revised).

                       

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling`s Queue.


Fragments of the past come to the surface
Just like matchwood splinters
Breaking out through skin.

Recollections tend to be like this:-
Suddenly the stones beneath my feet
Echo to different footsteps
Than those of passing strangers,
I mean, those strangers who happen to be passing
In this lived in moment,
Faces locked on phones.
They are indistinct apparitions, shadow puppets
Merely,
Ghost pale and indecipherable,
Whilst persistent images from my distant past
Hit my eyes with the vehement power of neon.

Your face Jo Jo - in particular - is always on my mind,
More aggravating than my arguments with the Bank.
The fact that we rarely slept together - Jo Jo,
Remains a sore point after all these years.

Suddenly I am back in the Thatcherite nineteen eighties,
You in tow, exploring the derelict South Bank
Searching for that legendary pie and mash shop
Your mother never stopped waffling on about.
(She had lived hereabouts right through the Hitler War
But did not realize how much the world had changed).
To this day I have no idea if that shop was real.

You were chattering away nineteen to the dozen,
That being your custom - Jo Jo -
Never listening but talking for hours and hours on end.
Eventually you moved - on a whim - to San Francisco;
And there has not been a single phone call for twenty years.

GET YOUR TICKETS READY.     STAND IN LINE.
I am shocked back into the turbulent twenty first century
Where certainty is a farce that no one believes in,
And daily life less real than a West End Show.
The queue has shuffled forward onto the steps,
It is a cold wet night to view A Comedy of Errors,
And I have left at home my hat and purple woolly.
You once told me you would not be seen dead in a queue,
But it was de rigueur to be spendthrift and spoiled in the nineteen eighties,
As though the future would be fun filled -  warm and cosy,
A safe place to look back from.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
5th. September 2014. - October 14th. - 15th. 2019.

Sketched while queuing to see The Comedy of Errors. 2014.

Alma of Sarajevo. (Revised Version).

The most beautiful smile in the world -
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing the snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his grave.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day when she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.-
Hugging her pregnant belly
She begins the long slow climb back to her home
High on the swart hill.
An irrational fear of losing her unborn baby
Numbs her fraught mind. She exists without true hope,
Nihilistic, empty.

Reminiscent of gunfire
The splintering of a hewn oak
Stings the air.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just as her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

It is hard to keep a footing on this path,
The surface falls away, disintegrates beneath her;
It is porous,  grey like ash.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. - 12th. - 24th. January - 8th. March 2013.
Rewritten 28th. - 29th. - 30th. August  - 2nd. - 4th. - 13th. September 2014.  

For all brave women caught up in wars.

(1) Bleak Evening. (2) After the Run (New Version).

               
                  1.
         Bleak Evening.

The familiar is now strange and hostile.
I crouch down by the darkened window weeping,
Head pressed against the glass.

You walked out of my room when the clock struck seven,
Clunky sensible shoes scuffing the carpet
As though it were the enemy, an impediment to your departure.

Stunned by irrevocable loss
My mind grows blank with fear,
Equilibrium destroyed.

You had begged me not to watch you leave,
To turn my face to the wall and close my eyes,
But the imagined is always more cruel than the simple truth.

Outside the streets are empty, lashed by rain.
The violence of the night wind shakes the casement.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 14th. - 25th. 2014. 

-------------------------------------------
                  2

       After the Run.

The night the Play closed
The imagined characters vanished like dry ice
Blown on the wind.

The actors were left to fret and mourn
For a loss more poignant than the deaths of friends
Or the parting of coleagues revered and adored.

It was hard to relinquish the love that they felt
For personas created night after night
As they trod the unforgiving boards.

Even the cascades of excited applause
Could not fill a space now dark and empty;
Nothing, in fact, could assuage such sorrow.

The bunches of flowers thrown down on the stage
Tumbled like snow that would melt tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 25th. - 27th. 2014.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who reads my poems, especially to Malcolm Evison who has encouraged my writing and painting over many years.

Rose Alley.

I am a friend of the rose,
That is why my garden is full of blooms
Making a theatre of colour.

Shakespeare would have understood this surely
Speaking of the sweetness of a name
Tongue in cheek, Pen poised like a rapier.

He crammed the whole of life into his sonnets,
Speaking for Everyman in cryptic verse
That cut straight to the heart and stung the mind.

His London now lies deep beneath cold concrete,
And only the names of streets and ancient churches
Bear witness to the mayhem that he knew.

There is little room to draw breath in this city,
Let alone write a sonnet. For me, alas, this garden must suffice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
22nd. August 2014.

For Emily who taught me to love the sonnets. 

Falling Asleep by the Crystal Mirror. (Revised).

Winter nights offer no solace to the solitary.

I look deep into the mirror by my bedside
While trying hard to conjure something tangible
Out of the thickening dark,
The interwoven webs of threatening shadows
That hold clarity in pawn
And turn the crystal eye of memory purblind.

I imagine the materialization of my dreams,
A physical restoration of old hopes
Upon the murky surface of the mirror.
An ill defined image of my lover
Haunting the edge of consciousness
Where the sanctified and the sacrilegious meet.

I imagine a realization that I can almost touch,
Hold in the tenderness of my fingers
Like a cinematic image that seems so real
That it becomes real on the surface of the mirror;
A reflection clearer than a 3D picture
Projected down into the tangled dreamscape
Like a soft light filtered through a smoke filled theatre.

Stunned by your loss, the absence of your laughter,
It is your love that every night I search for
As I look deep, deep into the darkening glass.
I scan for your face behind my reflected face
In the sombre gloom, the veils of shadow,
The transposed inscape of the dusky mirror
That draws me deeper, and yet deeper, and deeper
Into the compromised sanctuary, the festering solitude

Of a savage hopelessness.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
20th. June - 4th. November 2003.
14th. - 18th. August 2014. 

Ladbroke Grove 1987.

I broke my promise.
I did not visit you.
I sat all alone in the pub
Nursing my self regard
Like a pampered pop star.
Disturbed by your candid awkwardness
I had become afraid of intimacy.

You waited all day in your room,
Staring out of the window at the passing crowd,
Hoping to spy the visitor who never came.
The day cooled and darkened,
A shower sluiced the streets; wild rivulets of mud
Gushing through the gutters,
Flooding pot holes and making the cross roads dangerous.
The weather mirrored your mood with uncanny precision.
You slammed the window tight against the driving rain.

Your friends told me that you cried then;
Turned your face to the wall, tore at the curtain,
Broke a glass.
You had never shown me your tears,
Nor your anger, nor your love,
But your silence was familiar to me.

The next day I arrived on the doorstep,
Dishevelled, unkempt, just like the weather.
You said nothing, your face was a stern mask,
A parchment scraped clean of writing.
My greeting was treated with a quiet contempt,
A deft glance at the door mat. - Frozen out
I snatched some chit-chat with your neighbour,
Snippets of news and some general tittle-tattle.
You were watchful, aloof; but hunched by the fire
took note of my every statement, thinking.

And then you stood up, head lowered, just like a nun,
Or maybe a Pre-Raphaelite priestess nursing a grief.
Gently you brushed my face with your index finger
As you passed by me, not speaking, to your room.
I stared at the lino, now noting how worn it was,
Spotted by cigarette burns; a decade of greasy staining:
One corner was scuffed up and broken.

Your father put down his newspaper
and brushed some crumbs off his sleave.

The door closed slowly behind you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 16th. - 19th. 2008. - August 2nd. 2012.
Re-Written and re-titled August 8th. - 18th. 2014.

A version of this poem titled London 1966 was published on my Blog in 2012.
This new version more accurately represents the events, place and date. 
The poem is dedicated to a wonderful person.