Halloween Haunting, A Cryptic Poem About Southwark.

Only good whores become saints.

The black cat with a human face
Stared out of the shadows of Park Street
Like a Winchester Goose turned bad.

I ran for the shelter of the market
But sensed that I was hotly pursued
By a girl in a crimson dress
Wearing a steeple hat.

This was the moment that I decided
That marriage is a safer option
Than wandering the streets at night.

I have been trying to avoid you for some time,
As you have me,
But please now accept that my motives
Are entirely chaste and honourable,
And that I have never meant you harm.

The brushing of your fur backwards
That Saturday afternoon
Was merely a simple accident,
Not the revealing of my true motives.

Love always comes at a price,
Especially for social misfits,
So don`t you dare alter to please me,
I prefer the rough edges intact.




Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 3rd. - 4th. 2014.

Sunflowers.

After we had made love for the first time
The old gypsy women wrapped you in a thick blanket
To keep you warm, there being no fire in the room,
And heat thought of as necessary
To guarantee conception.

I was barred from hugging you close for most of that night,
And lay quite still at the edge of the bed weeping
While you slept soundly, snug in your nest of wool,
A safe calm world
Sacred to you alone.

For the rest of that year we rarely saw each other,
And then one morning came a call from the hospital
That sent me dashing out into the rain.
Your smile was radiant as a garden filled with sunflowers
When I walked quietly into the ward.

Holding our new born child while a nurse taught you to breast feed
Behind a white curtain, shut tight to hide our fears,
Helped me to blank from my mind those many nights
When I walked, without friends, through the empty streets
Calling out your name.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.

(1) .World. (Revised Version). (2). Tragic Song.

                       1.

                   World.


I listen for the true voice of the world
That appears to me like a frozen heartbeat
Suspended in the solitudes of space.

The hawk returns to my hand when I call
And accepts the hood as I slip it over her head
Having no notion of the hangman`s knot,
Nor fear of my intentions.
She has been hunting above the long hedgerows
While I stood here on the empty moor
Watching the wind shake the autumn grasses.

In this place I feel strangely haunted,
The voice of Gaia seems to resonate
In a rough primordial language
Through the fissures of the rocky landscape.
Her words lack form or meaning,
But I know that she is mourning
For the pains her children give her.
The slights.The savage wounds.
The broken promises.The near annihilation. -
I sense her pain, accept it as my own;
I feel as fragile as the half scorched moth
That once I tried to rescue from the gas lamp
But accidentally crushed between my fingers.

I should not have lingered on this rugged outcrop
To watch the orange sky fade into black
As the sun dips out of sight.
The tethered hawk fiercely grips my wrist.
Her lungs are aching. Her eyes are sore.
Her tongue curled hard and dry.
A raw fog tainted with the stench of diesel
Is seeping slowly through the autumn air,
Blotting out the stars.
I long to let my hawk go, to take her flight,
But we are long term prisoners to mans folly,
Trapped on a dying planet, and cannot now escape.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 20th. - 22nd.- 23rd. - 24th. 2014.
Revised June 30th. 2015.
A poem for Emily Bronte.

----------------------------------------------------

                          2.
               
                Tragic Song.


The world is my sustainer,
My true mother,
But I am not so kind,
I do not love her
And could, without due care,
Annihilate her
As easily as my goshawk snatches rodents
From between the broken branches.

This night is free of cloud.
I scan the sky
With my binoculars
To watch the winter stars
But cannot find them.
The raw lights on the distant motorway
Dazzle my aching eyes,
They are all that I now see.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 23rd. 2014.

Music is the Heart of Sorrow.

No my friend,
Your guitar is just too raucous for
                               such moments,
Cutting through the silence of the
                                       mourners
With a cruel jest,
A screech that mocks the inevitable.
Today we have been forced to remember that
Your hatred of Swan Lake had once facilitated
Your conversion to Heavy Metal.


This spare electronic music screams
A parody of sweetness
Through the hushed congregation
Blotting out the morning bird song
With corrosive quadraphonic sound;
                                       But
The soft gestures of the swan are perfect
                                      To express
                                      With piety
Such immeasurable desolation.


The wounded swan
               (An arrow in her breast)
Soaring one final time
                 Before falling,
Touches the heart profoundly;
Unlike the bland informality
Of this agnostic funeral rite
Accompanied by such dissonance and fury.


Farewell old friend,
You deserved a chieftain`s burial,
Not this clinical transformation
Into a heap of ashes
Inside a gas fired furnace.


Better by far that, on this cold September morning,
You had been folded gently into the earth
Unencumbered by the legacy of your music.
Rock a byed asleep in the loving arms of Gaia
Much as the wings of the wounded swan fold gently
Over her shivering body
To hide her time of dying.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 17th. - 18th. 2014.
July 17th. - 18th. - 20th. 2015.

Remembering a funeral lacking dignity and blighted with inappropriate music. The funeral took place at a utilitarian crematorium, all plain glass and off white concrete. The surrounding countryside was a picture postcard mixture of gentle hills and deep woodland rich in wild life.

In the Library.

Reading is listening.

A voice in the head
Telling a different story
To that we imagine.

Although he has been dead one hundred years
The poet sings deep in the skull
Of the student
Who studies his words.

The inner voice of the student
Is the voice of the poet,
But to the reader only,
Not to those who observe him.

If the student spoke
The poems out loud
He only would speak to us,
Not the poet.

It is in the privacy of our minds
That the writer can communicate
Without an intermediary.

Then we almost touch the hand
That scratched the words
In a hurry
On scraps of paper.

Moving the pen
To the pulse of his breath,
The knock of his heart.

But that is only imagining,
Not true listening.

The truth is a different story.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 15th. 2014.

Written in response to the play Bronte by Polly Teale.

October 10th. 2014. (Revised).

In this pale October sunlight
I find myself almost blind.

Diverse townscapes merging into sameness,
A blur of glass and concrete
Vanishing
Like a smog tarnished dream.
Nothing original sacred,
Allowed to remain
As it was
Before this strange disintegration.
Once pristine contours
Half rubbed out, smoky,
Their subtleties ironed into a flatness
That ice cannot emulate.

Blue sky fades like old embroidery
Exposed to too much brightness
On a Monday afternoon.
November is knocking on the door
With a gloved fist,
A cough,
A coarse laugh,
Cigarette breath blown in through the air vents
Choking the ventricles.
My heart stops for a moment
And then resumes
Fitfully
To a sombre music.
Your voice heard down the answer phone
Reinstates the fallacies of hope.

When a student
I would like to sit at home
Reading Keats and Shakespeare
Half way through the night;
Red Bird on the turntable
Introduced the clear cut modern
To my careful listening;
This jazz and poetry rip-roaring through my mind
Like a tonic.
In those days I had no fear of death,
Only this fear of your extended absence.

Now I sit and write from dawn to dusk
Poems that paraphrase a dislocated existence.
Please look me up tomorrow; please keep your long term promise,
So that I can pull these torn threads back together.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 10th. - 11th. - 12th. 2014.
July 22nd. 2015.

(1) Easter 1966. For J P....(New Version). (2). Wild Cat Poem.

                               1.

                   Easter 1966. For JP.


Girl
I remember the warmth of your love in a cold house:
The April wind rattling the sash windows:
The street dogs yelping.

We seldom linked our fingers, cuddled or kissed;
For hours we lay side by side whispering ballads,
Their words long since forgotten.

One night we wove two wedding rings from strands of cotton;
But the plaintive wail of the passing trains
Told of unplanned journeys.

Twice we consulted the cards, measured our life lines.
Your fate seemed tied to the north,
Mine to the south, hard by the docks and the river.

Girl
This poem is an intimate letter
Encrypted into the dark
On the keyboard of my computer.

I have not, for one moment, ceased pining,
And time does not value compassion.
Please send a few words tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. 2014.
Rewritten October 7th. - 8th. 2014.
Sightly revised April 6th. - july 22nd. 2015.
                       
                       ------------------

                               2.

                    Wild Cat Poem.


           Brendan Parker - Odell
           Cat of a thousand claws
           Why have you never caught a mouse
           In your multifaceted paws?



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 13th. 2014.