Beatrice & Benedick, Premonition of a Winter Wedding. (Completed Poem).

Lady disdain
Under the rim of your hat your eyes sparkled
Reminiscent of dancing fireflies.

You had not heard a single word of the sermon,
Nor scanned the book of my mind,
But your smile was exquisitely prescient.

It was certainly somewhat strange
That you should enter the crowded chapel
At that very moment.

The minister had just mentioned weddings
And I suddenly thought of your name
For some inexplicable reason.

Perhaps I was recalling that time
When we stood hand in hand by the river
Overawed by a black cloud of starlings.

But sometimes I manipulate a memory,
And your conduct has often proved shady
Especially to me and my friends:

And perhaps our shared interest in scrying, -
The secret trysts with a recondite gypsy, -
Was partly to blame.

I remember the cards we picked over
As we sat white with fear at her table,
Yet I rarely believed what she told me.

Your opinion however was different,
You took note of all that she whispered
To dissect her poison at leisure.

She revealed you would light up all venues,
But why should you take this as gospel
In every conceivable detail?

You are not a formidable actress
Although you danced aged nine on the telly.
You have done very little since then.

Speak truth sweet lady, slyness suits infants merely
Not adults with love on their mind:

 Fireflies light the woods at midsummer,
In winter they vanish away.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 10th. - 17th. 2014. - September 8th. 2015. - 
April 23rd. - September 21st. 2016. - January 14th. 2017.

This poem has taken a long time to complete; it was only when I realised the connection to Much Ado About Nothing that I could complete it. When people are truly deeply in love they so often defend themselves against the inevitable because they are more scared of losing their independence than gaining their hearts desire. But a soul mate is a true mirror and cannot be put aside.

Hot Nights - Cool Love. (Revised)

   Hot Nights - Cool Love.

(With thanks to Birthday Boy Mr. W S).



Shout it from the rooftops?
No, do not do that.
Speak low when you speak love
And I shall hear you clearly.

Next time you lift the telephone
Just whisper a few words.
I do not need a Show Band in my lug
To know that you are with me.

A few soft words at midnight
Should calm the savage breast.
A mix of Jets and Sharks and Claudio
Just ain`t worth the candle light.

So lady disdain, please don`t bludgeon love with words,
If you read that loud is proud, go burn your library.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 24th. - 25th. 2016.

In both Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet true love is hidden until brought
into full view by disruptive and potentially violent social pressures.

(1) Palmyra Recalled. (2) The Rogue Doorbell. (Revised) (3) Cold Spring.

                    1.

       Palmyra Recalled.


I travelled down town to visit a memory,
A stone arch erected in Trafalgar Square
Untainted by the raw blood of Palmyra,
The heads of scholars mangled in the sand.
I touched the arch and dreamed the history,
The ancient texts and buildings we have lost,
Scrubbed out by the cruel winds of the desert,
Crushed to dust by crowbar, mallet, axe.

I count among my forebears western Shia
Who would not break a cup, a vase, a pot
Without recourse to tears, self recrimination
Because the labourers art had been defiled.
They could never bomb a town, murder a child
To sanctify this complex world for Allah.
For them divinity led them through the dance
And blessed the kisses husbands give their brides.

My family has always known that truth is beauty,
And not crushed ashes scattered under grass,
And so I touch this virtual Roman arch
To try and find the beauty we have lost.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 20th. 2016.

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                    2.

  The Rogue Doorbell. 


Ringing, without being touched
by the wind or an outstretched finger,
my doorbell, apparently with a mind
of its own, shocks me out of my nap,
my body curled tight in the Windsor chair,
my head pressed down on the table.

Perhaps my dream was a dynamo,
powering thought with invisible muscle
to ring the bell and wake me up
before my neck became permanently cricked
and my face was rubbed raw on the wood;
or perhaps there had been a minor earthquake

that displaced the delicate plastic buzzer
and shook the hallway with carillons.
I will simply remark, that when I lifted the curtain
there was no one in sight on the moonlit pathway,
the gate remained locked, the way I had left it,
with the latch pressed firmly down.

I settled back in my chair to think things over,
and then I recalled I had been dreaming of Leila,
an old flame I have tried to put out of my mind,
but my heart skipped two beats when I remembered her name.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 18th. - 19th. - 22nd. 2016.
August 29th. 2016.

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                    3.

           Cold Spring.


             Hazy moon
The eye of God full of tears
  Over the arch of Palmyra


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 21st. 2016.

Music Frozen in Lost Time.(Revised)

Listening to Satie
I dream the smile of my Sufi love
Who renounced me
To dance
                To sing her way
Into the the Hyacinth scented hands
Of Allah.


And I must sit alone at night,
A book of verse
                           A cup of wine
But Thou no longer with me,
Only the shadow of your smile
Sheltering my fragile dreams from moonlight
That would freeze me into forgetfulness,
                           Into a deep anarchic terror
As I sit at home
                           A reluctant hermit
Quarantined in my loneliness.


Listening to Satie,
Music frozen in lost time,
I dream the girl that once I knew
Skateboarding down a hill in Brighton
                            Fists punching scorching morning sunlight,
Hair caught free
                            By the salt white seaside wind
Of early summer,
My photo lodged inside her pocket
Then her secret talisman.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 16th. - 17th. 2016.

(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.