(1) April 23rd. 1616 & All That.(2) The Lost Refugee.

                       1.

       April 23rd. & All That.

Theatre people do not wait for death,
They strive and play until the final curtain,
Then step aside when the spot lights dim.

Anne Shakespeare did not phone the press,
She simply laid her husband in the dust
Then moved on with her besom and her bed.

When my time comes, play the fife and drum,
Then lay me down among my fellow gypsies,
A dash of greasepaint tarting up my looks,

And at my head place thirty seven books.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 16th. 2016. 

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                       2.

         The Lost Refugee.


Freed from the security of the
                                        torture chamber
Street life frightened him
And he walked alone among the shadows.

Later,    on reflection, he thought
It had been so much easier to fall
                     among cruel thieves
Than to attempt this second birth.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
February 2nd. - May 1st. 1988.
April 3rd. - 16th. 2016.

(1) A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).(2) Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved)

                            1

A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).


The words on the page opposite
Are puzzling me.
I do not recognise her name,
Nor do I know the hand;
And the address scrawled quickly down
Is of a house I have never visited
In a street I have never seen.
My imagination fights to fill the gaps,
Some place on the south west coast comes to mind,
Far from the cut and thrust of Central London.

In 1952 I was only nine,
Rubbish at sport and not too good at maths,
And a good ten years before I bought this book
On a sudden whim one day in Oxford Street,
The poems of Yeats then being unfamiliar.
Perhaps this woman is someone I once kissed,
Or failed to kiss as I dawdled by her side;
Someone who thought it might be worth her while
To write her name down in my favourite book
As we talked like friends inside a crowded pub,

Or wandered out of doors in wind and rain.
I cannot now recall her speaking voice,
Or the cut and colour scheme of her dress,
Or whether a kiss had happened after all,
But I honestly don`t believe it.
All that remains now is this faded message
Adding interest to an undistinguished page
That the printer had left blank, redundant and unnumbered.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. - 13th. - 16th. 2016.

For all the would be friends we only encounter once.
This poem is an attempt at expressing the thought process in all its fluid movement and roughness.

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                         2

Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved).


Disguised as birds
Your sentences captivate my mind
Like cruel kisses
Making me your prisoner,
La victime de votre chanson.

Your inattentive lover
Commences chapter nine of
The Einstein Intersection
And coughs as he turns the page.

Wishing to re-evaluate
The beauty of morning birdsong
I scrawled El mirar de la Maja
On my borrowed laptop
As a note for future reference.

Could this be love at first sight?
I mutter to myself
While staring at the carriage floor
Strewn with weekend litter.

The clatter of your footsteps
As the doors slide open and shut
Expresses a tart response.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 9th. 1984. - April 3rd. 2016.

This poem was originally sketched in 1984 at the time of the breakup with my then a wife, and that breakup is alluded to quite clearly, especially in the reference to The Einstein Intersection, the prize winning book by Samuel R Delany that my ex wife was reading at the time, but I hasten to add that the contents of that book had no influence upon our relationship difficulties.

(1) Storm Damage. (2) At Belsize Park. (3) A Letter to Allen Ginsburg, Too Late for him to Read.(Revised)

                  1.

      Storm Damage.


I did not know the winds were strong enough.

The tree lay stretched across the road,
Blocking the tarmacked entrance
To the landscaped cemetery.
The weight of four hundred stately years
                             furrowed into the blackness.

This reminded me of that dead Roe Deer
I had observed with a coarse, outraged excitement
One misspent August Bank Holiday
                           half a lifetime ago,
Nature seemed then a barbaric province to me
And suave dreams of urban decadence
Had sanitised my nickle plated world view.

Remembering the torso broken in many places,
      The long black tongue festering in the mud,
I walked quickly by, kicking at the red leaves
like a small boy rejecting his favourite toy,
For no apparent reason
Except, perhaps, that human love seemed fallible

                And could not mitigate his savage grief.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - 7th. 2016.

In Memoriam Dan Coffey, a fallen oak.
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                  2.

       At Belsize Park.


A solitary girl inside the carriage.
A closed book dropped without much care.
A pressed carnation half on view.
Somewhere a cold wind blowing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. 2016.

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                 3.

A Letter to Allen Ginsburg, Too Late for him to Read.

(Written in response to Allen`s poem, Homage to Vajracarya).


Allen
you found the sun and moon on your plate
One red hot morning in India
And sat bold upright in wonder.
Allen, this sort of thing rarely happens to me,
But then I am not naive.
I am very un-American
And I just don`t have cosmic visions at the
                                             breakfast table,
Especially when I am late for the Thameslink train,
Or the tube to Covent Garden.
In fact I am very like the Han Chinese,
Practical to my boot laces,
But with a taste for Earl Grey Tea.
However I do still read your poems from
                                              time to time
To catch a view through seismic cracks and visions.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. - April 7th.- 8th. 2016.

(1) Don`t Deny Me This. (2) A Sad Farewell to Daniel Coffey. (Revised Ending).

                  1.

When I am about to die
Put me where I can see the stars,
The moon in her perfect beauty,
The sun set - the sun rise.                   


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 2nd. 2018.

                   *
                 
                   2.

Farewell old rebel dancer,
Dear Breathless Dan,
King of the soft shoe shuffle,
At last you have broken loose
From the iron chains of gravity,
The locks and bars of time,
To merge with the sunless morning breeze
Sashaying through the battered Cavan trees
That often swayed in line to your Country Music
Sent pulsing through them morning night and noon
From over the hated border.

Farewell old friend,
Farewell old nifty Jiver,
No more will the winding mountain path
Be graced by the delicate lift and tread
Of your air soft blue suede shoes,
Or the birds that swoop over your cottage roof
Be out gunned by Bill Haley and his Comets.

But the lakeside farm where you spent your early childhood,
That was your proper home,
Your intimate heart of Ireland:
A rural landscape shaped by wind and rain.-
The night long rustling of the farmyard trees,
The knock of the water nudging withered reeds
The nearest things to music.-
And for ever after the picture book of your life,
That battered album of refracted dreams,
Would be opened at these pages
Packed with tattered photos;
The broad loch crowded with a flock of islands;
The horses quiet in the mist grey meadows;
The orchard red with apples.

Farewell old Rock n Roller,
Fermanagh will seem less rich and rare without you.-
The spring flowers in your garden
Droop low in the morning rain.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 31st. - April 1st. - May 28th. 2016.
September 2nd. 2018.
For Daniel James Coffey, great Rock n Roller and Irishman of ancient family.Born 1941.Died Easter Day morning 2016.

Love Sonnet.

God spoke, and you were made.
God spoke, and all my future children touched the stars.
God spoke, and all that ever was became reborn today.
God spoke, and then the universe stopped still for just one night.
God spoke, and then you kissed me while I slept.
God spoke, and you and I became one person.
God spoke, and we were born and died and reborn in each other.
God spoke, and then I kissed you while you danced.
God spoke, and then you snuggled close beside me.
God spoke, and then we closed the door and made one single world.
God spoke, and then our world became a garden for our friends.
God spoke, and all our future children touched the morning sun.
God spoke, and then we worshipped.
God spoke, and I regained my life through you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 30th. 2016.

For Ivy.

The Woodlander`s Nightmare. A Fantasy.(First Version).

I used to love my work deep in the forests,
But now I hate it,
Vigilant packs lurking in dark places,
Red eyed, wolf like murderous hunters
Drunk on the spilled blood of their victims,
Any lost strangers who venture their way,-
Refugees stranded late at night,
Caught without friends, guards, selfless protectors,
Guides with maps and rudimentary torches,
The storm ripped trees crashing down around them,
Roots upended,
Branches shredded like ruptured veins.

I used to love my work deep in the forests,
But now the open spaces of the water meadows suit me,
Where I can walk at ease among wise children
Calm in their dreams of eternal kindness,
Fairy tale fantasies with no hob goblins
Their visions of Elysium,-
The cold lake lapping gently into tall reeds
Under the mauve shadows of the ancient Drumlins.

I used to love my work deep in the forests,
But now dark forces out of my control
Have cracked my feral heart into a thousand pieces.
My long term friends are changed to savage strangers,
Their gentle hands into great twisted knuckles,
Their kindly faces, masks of wounded hate.
But it seems I am the changeling, I am Heathcliff to them,
An undefined outsider,
Not counted one with them.
And because my long time lover is a Gypsy,
A girl with freedom etched deep in her soul,
They harass me with vows and two edged axes
To drive us both from out the woodland green.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 28th. - 29th. 2016. - April 16th. 2016.

I love the halfway land between dreaming and waking, this is where this poem comes from. But I am very much an outsider in England, I am British by default.

This Maundy Thursday Night.

Kneeling in the dark church
I study the blank walls where
My favourite icons should be
And sense infinity lifting me
On a cold wind of absence
Blasting the empty spaces
Where my childhood visions of a homely god
Once pulsed with light.

Now I know that Maundy Thursday
Is about the emptiness of loss
Of everything that I once cherished
Both human and divine, also the scientific,
Because all that I encountered in my childhood
Has dwindled into ash.

Tonight I kneel alone before the empty altar
And face the loneliness that is my inner self,
My central core of being
That frail old age has changed into a stranger.-
God is too vast to be portrayed in words
And even the weird maths that describe the universe
Confuse more than explain
The perspectives of infinity.

Faith is all that I dare need to go on living;
Faith is all that I now have to chart the silent spaces
That words cannot define.
But of one small thing I can almost be certain
That on this Easter Sunday morning
New light will once more bathe these walls in colours
More varied than the threads of Joseph`s coat,
And the icons now removed in purple shrouds
Will once more be on view
Enhanced by a mass of garden flowers.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 24th. - 25th. 2016.  
The Lady Chapel, St. Matthias Church Colindale.