Tuesday, 10 October 2017

Friday, 6 October 2017

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) Japan. Revised Version.(2) China Bluebirds.

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) Japan. Revised Version.(2) China Bluebirds.:                      (1)                  Japan. I did not know Mount Fuji was so large. The boats, four or five deft pen strokes, Fl...

(1) Japan. Revised Version.(2) China Bluebirds.

                     (1)

                 Japan.


I did not know Mount Fuji was so large.
The boats, four or five deft pen strokes,
Float on a pale blue bay.
A purple scarf of cloud surrounds the mountain.
Sometimes I press my ears close to the paper,
But as yet I`ve never heard the temple bells.

This is the country pictured in the photos
Posed for my ancestor in the nineteenth century,
An English country boy in a white pith helmet,
The bright red tunic of a bold marine.
This was long before grey concrete towers
Vandalised what was left of Edo.

The glass plates have long since been broken.
The prints in his book are black and white.
No voices have come down to us, just pictures
Of a world so still it may never have happened.
The sun has set over distant Fuji.
A strip of Prussian Blue depicts the sky.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 4th. - 6th. 2017.

    -------------------------------

                     2.

          China Bluebirds.


High above the empty footbridge
Two birds fly.
White sunlight on blue wings.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 3rd. 2017.

Sunday, 1 October 2017

Words I wanted to speak to my Stepfather, but could not. (Rewritten).


You emptied me out;
Spat in my face, hauled me over purgatorial fire,
Whipped me in the High Street because of my words,
My hatred of lies, my commitment to love.
I professed equal rights for men women and children,
For Gays and Straights, Prods Papists and Muslims,
Buddhists and Jews,
The Homeless camped out under the arches.

You emptied me out;
Kicked me around like a bag of old bones,
Of blood soaked rags, of skin and sinews.
You threw me into the path of wolfhounds, a phalanx of horses,
The heavy batons of visored policemen,
Their rubber bullets, their boots and sabres,
Their racist, fascist text book jargon,
Their anvil moulded faces.

You emptied me out,
But could not erase me,
Could not excise my deepest secrets,
Could not delete the tape of my dreams.
You left me lame and almost blinded, my intellect shuttered,
My razored lips a rancid purple, my mouth a hollow cave,
But when my heart was raked from the ashes,
It beat as though it could never be stilled.

I am the ghost of all you despise.
I am the ghost of the love you denied.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 30th. - October 2nd. - 12th. 2017.

Wednesday, 27 September 2017

Soul mates. (New version. Truth is a many splendored thing)


By the lakes edge
the flash of electricity in the air,
cracking the night sky apart,
breaking my window.

Your face, caught in the mirror
just before our first kiss
as we crashed out of our loneliness, landing softly
on the unmade king sized bed in the back room.
It seemed that we had fallen through our own reflections
like Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Free falling through a hail storm of disconnected images
of who we thought we were, our half imagined lives;
the kings and queens we dreamed up in our pre-teens;
the jolly Bodhisatvas that preached aeons before
the sceptics we now are.
Your face, caught in the fractured mirror;
pale moon between dark clouds.

For years my nights were troubled by inchoate dreams
Of a young woman that I had never met,
or at least I do not think so.
                                       Her perceptions were forensic.
She seemed to know every detail of my life style,
the ins and outs of my daily drudge,
and she spoke to me like a wife with many a bone to pick.
This was long before I bumped into you at the Casareccia,
when I nearly dropped my coffee in your lap.

Pseudo Romantics call this Loving at First Sight,
but I might suggest second sight would be more appropriate,
a thousand aeons of deep knowledge pre dating the kiss
that smashed to smithereens our preconceptions
and broke every mirror that reflected former times.

I turn out the light, we curl up close together, our tangled hair still wet
from the journey home, the road a torrent, a cudgel strike of rapids
warring down the hill, the traffic at a standstill.
That rush hour in the rain seemed to take a lifetime.
Ten decades fighting squalling head on winds.
                                         Perhaps a thousand aeons?
Or was it just ten minutes?
Who cares? What does it matter?
Folk tales of life and death, of dark immortal longings, don`t concern us,
and Bodhisatvas rarely come to Hendon.
This crumpled double bed is world enough.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 4th. 2016. - May 5th.2017. - September 27th. - 28th. 2017.

We all live in our dreams, our preconceived notions, that is our reality. Truth is a many splendored  thing.

Winter Night.