(1) Afterwards. (Revised).

After our tender love making - only the memory - the stark emptiness.

You light a cigarette.
The Lighter flames an arc that for a moment seems to link us,
Pull us back together.
This is an illusion,
A deep loneliness remains.

Our hands reach out to heal the broken closeness,
To kill this intimate pain,
The ice blade to the heart;
To regain, through touch, the depths our minds cannot reach.-
We seem to abandon coherent language,
The basic tool kit of community
That had kept us close
so far.
Kept us thinking we were truly friends,
and that we understood each other.

The grey smoke drifts and curls between us,
A shadow shifting in and out of focus.
Your eyes interrogate the sullen distance.

Perhaps you were looking passed me all along;
Sex can create a distance between lovers,
Especially when love is new,
Not tried - not proven - not fully understood.-
You fetch my case, my coat, my shoes;
Our first full night spent at ease together
Cut short by bitterness,

Talking - and yet - not talking -
We kiss goodnight, unnerved, just like two strangers,
Then part to consummate our private griefs.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 19th. - 20th. 2015. 
December 4th. 2015.

(1) A Midsummer Night`s Dream. (2) Painting.

Sorrowful Titania
Lost in the torpor of an immense dark forest
At the hottest hour of summer;
Sleeping fitfully;
Waiting for the cool nights of yellow gowned September
To prise apart her eyelids
With the scintillating strobe blades of Autumn moonlight
Dancing through the stare
Of her ever watchful lover.

And the girl said to me. Nothing.
Walking out from the dark cold theatre
into the driving rain, back to her room,
Four white walls and a simple writing desk.

Well, you did return to me the Indian Changeling
Dressed in a coat of pearls, and riding on a desert camel,
But that is no reason to go all moony eyed
Over that woozy Ass of an Athenian
Who could not even ee aw for his supper.
Next time you think it expedient to be unfaithful
Please choose a better Actor,
Not a horny handed would be Matinee idol.

Well. All`s well that ends well,
and the sweet letter that you wrote to me
From the privacy of your white walled bedroom
Has brought some peace of mind.
But in future when I think of you, Titania,
It will be without the olde world illusions
I spun about your spotlight sculpted face.
The unspoiled ingenue sat in the dark wood
Watching the wild Thyme grow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
14th. August 2015.   

The Selkie. (Revised & corrected Version).

You did not rescue me.
You stole my life.
You stole my mind.
You stole my skin.
You stripped me to the bone,
The veins and sinews,
The small scraped skull.
You tried to break me,
Tried to remake me
Into a gilded image,
Into your private icon,
A reflection of your self.

But this evening while you slept,
And our children lay a dreaming
In the quietness of your chamber,
In the darkness of your house,
I found my skin,
I found my stolen self,
I found my long lost life,
Tied up in a battered bundle,
Tied with a yard of string.

And secretly I wore my skin again,
Disfigured as it was,
So torn and broken,
So scratched and red with sores,
So dry and rotten,
Corrupt with scabs and spores.
I wore my proper skin for just one hour,
But found that it still fitted,
Clung tight to flesh and bone,
To nerve and muscle,
My ain true self,
My home.

And tomorrow I shall wear my life once more,
And hearkening to the thunder of the waves,
Their chill and salty cleanness,
Run to the seal grey shore,
The tumult of the ocean.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 10th. 2015.

Based on the Orcadian legend of the fisherman and the Selkie wife.
He stole her seal skin so that she would remain on shore with him,
but she found it,and hating his dishonesty, which is a kind of cruelty,
put it back on and returned to the sea from which she had first come.

Four Paintings.

8 Paintings

Two More Paintings

Two Paintings