Two Poems. (1). The Scurrilous Doppelganger. (2). Ritual. (A response to the raw and honest power of Shakespeare).

                 1.            

The Scurrilous Doppelganger.

I am not what I seem.
I am that raucous old boy with a thousand sons,
And ten thousand daughters,
All looking like me
But not one of them bearing my name.

I am that old scallywag in an ale house,
Who swings like a ghost from the wall lights
And is sick down the backyard drains.
Well known in many a churchyard,
Black cap discreetly doffed,
Sighs weary and softly wind borne:
The wreath clutched tight in my fingers
Is made from wheatsheaf and thorn.

I have run madcap over corn fields
To chase Red Admirals and girls,
Fierce dogs swung high on my coat tails.
I have cantered all night on wild piebalds
Around the mid summer camp fires
Loud with rumour and song.
And when the clock castanets a loud warning,
Leaped lightly out of the dormitory
To rejoice in a dazzle of dawn light
Having sired a cacophony of strangers.

No, I am not what I seem
When I stroll through the red brick suburbs
Nodding to the passing locals,
The retailer and the policeman.
I am all that their dreams would concoct
If the sun burst wild over crushed pillows,
And broke through the windows with singing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 5th. 2014. - October 8th. 2014.

Written on Dylan Thomas Day.

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                    2.
                Ritual

My hair is as white as King Lear`s.
Should I now go raging
Across the wind torn Heath
To protest against mortality?
Common sense curtails this,
Or rather the fear
Of what my neighbours might say
If they noticed my indiscretions.

Life is a third rate comedy
Padded out with inane rituals
Designed to appease propriety.
Lord Titus understood this
When he slaughtered dumb Lavinia
To redress her anguish and shame.
A raped girl was rarely pitied
On the ruthless streets of Rome,
Where the weak were mocked and kicked,
Their frailties unforgiven.
It was better to die with honour
As her father`s pathetic offering
Thrown down in the face of the gods.

Thrown down like a bloodied challenge
In the face of insidious darkness
That was slowly eating his reason.
But Titus was old and world weary,
A devotee of a washed out idolatry,
Of custom now drained of all meaning
When, much like the wind blown Lear,
Without warning he dropped his guard
To fall,an outmoded puppet,
On the pyre of his final victim.


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

A meditation on two of Shakespeare`s darkest plays at a time when armed conflicts, civil strife and uncertainty are endemic in formerly stable parts of the world.

The One Tun, Part Four.

Kevin the Witch was a long haired visionary. He came from deepest Cumbria and could recite Sir Gawain And The Green Knight in the original dialect. To this day I cannot read the medieval language of that poem, but to Kevin it was fundamental to his native culture. He was a northerner at heart, and when in the Lake District would spend hours sitting motionless on a remote peak, watching the clouds and the distant glint of water. This was a meditation that helped him bring forth a deeply buried dream horde. In time these dreams took over his mind entirely. Kevin was nineteen years old.

Kevin also liked Irish Stout, and it was through the bottom of a tipped up pint glass that I first spied Kevin. He was obviously extremely intelligent, but dangerously charismatic.I was intrigued,but also a little sceptical; was this a well crafted persona or the real Cumbrian boy? I still do not know the answer to this question.

There was something Messianic about Kevin. I was a little afraid of this streak in his nature, and as it turned out, I was right to nurture such misgivings. Terrors caused by the nuclear arms race must have tipped the balance of his mind: he was certain that the world was about to end.

Kevin was also interested in the Vikings; the film and not the real thing. Once he had downed a few pints he forgot the world`s demise and got deep into broad swords, Wagnerian helmets, rape and pillage. Not that he needed to adopt the ways of the ancient marauders to enhance his status; the girls really liked Kevin, and for a while his lover was a high class model, ten years his senior.

One night Kevin entered the pub in a state of excitement. He and a German friend had each had an identical dream. The world would end in September. The catastrophy would commence in Trafalgar Square when a squadron of man eating pigeons would darken the skies and descend on the screaming crowds huddled below. The Righteous would stand on the steps of St. Martin`s in the Fields, secure under the shadow of the portals. Someone must have been reading Daphne Du Maurier.

I unwittingly supplied the proof, for Kevin at least, that these visions contained a spark of validity in them. Whilst strolling down Charing Cross Road in the direction of the Square, my companion and I noticed a curious phenomenon. Marks on the pavement seemed to indicate that a pigeon with one leg missing had recently hopped across the flat stones, also heading towards the Square. It now seemed certain that our lives were about to be cut short.

Came the day, Kevin and his friends congregated on the steps of the church. One or two seemed to believe in the prophecy, but the rest of us just wanted to keep Kevin company. Once before he had tried to kill himself when a similar dream failed him.

It was a beautiful late summers day. Crowds milled about in the square; children paddled in the fountains; pigeons hustled for crumbs. The hour of doom came and passed. Kevin was philosophical. He pronounced that a deep hidden change had come upon the world that day. The Human Race had been given another chance. Perhaps he foresaw the advent of the Hippies.

But a week or two later I received a phone call from Kevin`s girl friend. He had tried to overdose and was now in Hospital. I visited his sick bed. He seemed so vulnerable. No longer the visionary dreamer, but a sensitive soul lost in the world of modern technology. When the visiting time was over, I had a curious premonition that I would never see Kevin again. Unlike the fantastical prophecies, this premonition has proved to be true.

Once Kevin had left the scene life became calmer, but also more mundane. He took a sort of innocence with him. The magic time was almost over. The profiteers were sniffing at our coat tails, hoping that a few golden eggs would fall.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
30th. April 2014.. .        

The One Tun, Part Three.

The pub was from time to time visited by a Gypsy girl, a black haired beauty I once nearly married. I shall name her Jill, her Roma name is different and not common knowledge. She would travel to London from the midlands in her grandfather`s Vardo, a beautiful wooden wagon from a long gone era. She would park the vehicle in Charlotte Street, much to the delight of the locals.

Jill intrigued the young artists who thronged the pub. The very fact that she loved the travelling life and would not give it up made her a heroine. She represented everything that the Beatniks and their followers aspired to, but were unable to achieve. She was a genuine free spirit.

One Friday evening she arrived unexpectedly and asked me to travel with her to Abingdon, a two day trip by horse transport. I agreed, and we set off down the Bayswater Road at the height of the rush hour. The horse was little afeared of the cars and buses, in fact the other road users kept a good distance from us. They were more afraid of us than we of them.

At one road junction a car driver bawled out my friend, "Get off the road, you are too young to drive that thing!"

Jill`s reply was sharp and to the point. "I am eighteen - and besides I don`t need a license!"

The car sped off noisily, but the horse did not rear up or shie, although I expected him to do so, I had seen his flank tremble.

That night we rested in the first country lane that we came to; and then set off again early in the morning, just as the sun was rising.

I took the reins when we travelled the quiet morning B roads, but Jill took over when we encountered heavy traffic or had to traverse a town centre.

Eventually we arrived in a small field a mile or two from Abingdon. This field was her new official residence; a place where she could live a life private to herself and entertain her closest friends. Jill was born a natural loner. Life in a crowded camp site was not to her liking.

That night the heavy springtime rain clattered on the wooden roof. We slept up close in the narrow bed. We were lovers and glad of this small amount of time that we could spend together. Outside in the rain the horse stood restless in a thicket of trees. Two greyhounds slept soundly under the wagon.

The morning dawned damp and dark. Jill pulled on a pair of leather boots and went hunting rabbits in the neighbour field, shrieking instructions to the two fierce dogs. I think she caught three rabbits that morning.

Breakfast was reheated stew and smoke tinged coffee. Then at 9 o`clock we walked the half mile to the farmer`s house and sat down in his kitchen. A carefully worded contract giving Jill rights to her field was placed on the white wood table. Jilll, being just eighteen, was too young to sign the contract, and besides she could neither read nor write. I was just twenty two and officially an adult, so I signed the contract on her behalf. She put her mark next to my name. The field was now her home base, and has remained so to this day.

We returned to the Vardo, trudging through mud and rain; and while our clothes dried slowly by the window. I read a comic to her. She loved to look at the cartoons and imagine the stories. Having someone to tell the tall tales to her was a novelty and a joy.

That evening I returned to London by train. Marylebone Station is not too far from the One Tun, so I visited the pub before catching the tube home. My friends wondered where I had spent the weekend, so I told the full story while they sat still and silent.

"I don`t believe any of that" one of them said. But in fact he knew that I was telling him a true story. He was just mighty jealous that I had lately experienced a freedom that he craved, but was just too conventional to try.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 30th. 2014. .   . 

The One Tun: Part Two. New Extended Version.

That archaic cult movie, Primitive London, was partly filmed in the One Tun Goodge Street, but does not accurately represent the cultural life flourishing in that Pub during the early and mid 1960`s. On the night of the filming most of the regulars were missing. The pub was crowded with teenagers busily preening their faces for the camera; and the promise of free booze had flashed through the youth scene like wild fire.When these youngsters denied to the camera that they were Beatniks, they were telling the truth. I was present because John Lennon had promised a fee of £10.00 if I turned up. I had a contract with Northern Songs at the time. The presence of the Beatles in the pub that evening is little known. The Group sang She Loves You, with the not quite sober crowd joining in the chorus. Although the camera was rolling while the Group sang they do not appear in any of the published prints that I have seen. At that time I had known John and the other band members for almost a year. They frequently spent an hour or so in the pub before moving on to the recording studios. Some of their songs were even part written during their evenings in the pub.

After the filming had finished there was an altercation between the Beatle and my friend Michael because of the £10.00 that flew, a little too publicly, into my top pocket. Michael stood on his imagined Rights and badgered a five pound note out of the tight grasp of the musician. This was the first of only two occasions on which I witnessed John Lennon handle cash.

Another, less interesting band, is in evidence in the film; a group that I had hardly noticed. I walked by them once or twice, ears in my hands.

My friend Michael was interviewed for the film because of the key ring, complete with a quantity of old style keys, that hung from one of his ears. At the time Michael went under the nick name "Jailer". He announced that he was aged twenty, when in fact he could not have been more than seventeen; and explained to the whey faced interviewer that he was a Poet. Now Michael had already written some decent poems, but the work that he recited to the world that evening did not do his talent justice. He thought it brilliant, but the film maker treated it as a joke. I had met Michael four years previously as a result of my involvement in CND. He enthralled crowds of adults when he spoke at Speakers Corner, they had not realized that a young boy could speak so powerfully on the subject of international politics. He was a socialist to the core, deeply interested in the founding members of the Labour Movement in Britain. He had also read a biography of Lenin. He visited Islington Public Library regularly, at least once a week, but sometimes more often. We became friends on the spot. We used to explore the historic byways of London together, in particular Bloomsbury and the then derelict Bankside.We walked for hours across Hampstead Heath talking.  He was at that time still at school, but his capacity for intellectual debate was already far advanced. He dazzled me in those early years, but the extremes of rebellion that he espoused were foreign to me, and by the time of that beer drenched night we occupied two very different worlds. Sadly he took to the deadly mix of Heroin and Cocaine, and soon became an extreme addict. Once or twice I accompanied him on his nocturnal walks around Central London, and the full horror of the world of teenaged junkies became apparent to me. I hated the shear squalor of that world, and also greatly feared it.

Fortunately I was never attracted by the tarnished glamour of hard drugs. The emotional pain that was inflicted upon me by my friend`s predicament was made all the more severe by the letters that his distraught mother wrote me from time to time. One day I was able to show one of these letters to Michael, and in a moment of mental clarity he left his life on the streets and went home to his family. A rumour then started to circulate that he had died, but this was certainly not the case. A quarter of a century later I met up with him one evening on the Victoria Line. We were both travelling home from our respective places of employment. Michael still boasted a full head of long blonde hair, but his teeth were few and his left arm appeared to be paralyzed. Also his memory appeared less sharp than it had been. I do not know if he was still using drugs at that time, but he certainly had been damaged by them.

Sadly Michael`s story was not unique, but most of my friends were not ensnared by Class A drugs. The man who introduced him to Heroin is glimpsed in the film. He was known to us as Big John.Not many months later he hanged himself in his prison cell because he could not face a long stretch in goal.

But for the rest of us, life was very different. We sat up late night after night ceaselessly talking, and slowly shaped with our words views of the world that have helped to forge modern day life. The "Swinging Sixties" were created by us, the young people of the time, and not by the media moguls,who battened on our creativity to fatten their silky pockets. I have yet to see much money from the songs that I helped to write,but the usual fat cats scooped a goodly proportion of cream at the time. Most of us were well meaning, but naive idealists: the businessmen, as always, remained granite nosed and nasty.

The pub was a talking shop, and in some ways, an ad hock free lance university. Night after night, and many an afternoon too, I sat in my corner reading. The books that I devoured so greedily then shaped my life for good and ill. I studied the poems of Robert Graves in depth, and soon discovered Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas. Poetry written under the shadow of war moved me profoundly, and helped to foster my anti militarist beliefs. This was the era of the Vietnam conflict, a terrible war that America should never have become embroiled in. The ill fated domino theory was pure dreamsville.

I also read books about eastern religions. These books did not lead me to Buddhism, although I have been deeply influenced by that austere philosophy, but towards early Christianity. When I read The Cloud of Unknowing I soon realised that all that I sought in the works of the eastern masters was already present in the western tradition. Those books led me away from a lazy minded atheism towards a more complex view of the world and the ways that my mind responded to it. Atheism seemed to lack profound moral values, or so I thought at the time. My friend Michael was then a deeply committed atheist. His espousal of free love seemed to have more to do with instant gratification than deep emotional attachment. I later learned however that he had been deeply hurt by a girl, a tall red head that I once saw him with. Some believed that this hurt sped his descent into the vortex.

The so called sexual revolution was already well under way. Although I saw little wrong in sleeping with someone outside the confines of marriage, sex without love was , and is, abhorrent to me. I remain to this day a committed romantic.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 29th. 2014.    .  

 .          

The One Tun. (A Recollection in Prose). Age. (A Poem).

               Age.

Now that I am more than 70
My lifeline is almost undone,
But old age should be a time of fecundity,
Not of dearth.

Gnarled trunks held firm by steel supports
May yield their richest harvests
The closer they lean to the earth.

Young buds breaking out of the cracked boughs
Open wide like a prisoner`s eyes
To filch a glimmer of light:

But too soon, like an old man`s memory,
They fall apart in the glare of the sun.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 27th. - 28th. 2014. 

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                 The One Tun.

Last Saturday night, on the eve of my birthday, I was celebrating the last night of a wonderful all female production of Richard IIIrd put on by the Scrawny Cat Theatre Company at The Rose Playhouse. I was a guest of the caste, and we made a very lively group jostled around a window side table in The Swan. I was asked by one of the girls what life was like in London in the 1960`s, but because of the general hub - bub in the pub I was unable to say very much at all. On reflection, I think it is now the right time for me to write a little about those extraordinary nights and days in a city undergoing unprecedented change. I was just sixteen and a student at Middlesex Poly when midnight January 1st. 1960 arrived like any other mid century New Year. I had no idea that by the time I reached my twenty first year that I would be plunged into the very centre of a mad cap vortex of unstoppable social change. At the very heart of this change was a pub in Fitzrovia frequented, for a short hectic while, by poets, musicians, actors, artists, the local everyday citizens, and a contingent of latter day Beatniks. Every revolution needs a watering hole, and this Irish Pub was it. Well, at least we imagined it to be.

For a while we were not really that interested in forging a new path. Many of us regretted that we had not been alive and kicking in the decadent 1890`s, spouting aphorisms and poetry in the Cafe Royale and sticking up for Dowson and Oscar Wilde. These were our semi legendary heroes, and we managed to make aquaintance with one or two old folk who had been young that long ago time. But soon, of course, we commenced carving out our own course. I would sit in the pub, drinking little, but helping my friends write songs for their Rock Band. I also fell romantically in love with a sun bright beautiful American actress, who sadly only had a few years to relish her good life. But then many of my friends have died before their proper time, sometimes by accident, but more often as a result of the revolutionary life style changes that were set in motion by our commitment to raw edged honesty and social equality. We were still socialists then, although we were not afraid of making and losing money.

A man who in many ways epitomised those times was the Sligo born Ray Lindy. A perfect match for "The Man From The West" as portrayed by Jack Yeats, he was a free spirit like no other. I would imagine that he has many descendants, his outrageous behaviour would lead me to believe that this should be so; but it was his talk that was important; the stories that he told and the rich language that gushed from his erudite tongue. He should have been a writer, like his wife; but sadly I know of no books stacked away on library shelves. Ray was a fan of the great barristers, even praising men he loathed for their brilliant speeches. He was himself great at the bar, usually in Fitzrovia and Covent Garden; but this kind of genius is no prolonger of good health, talent and life.

But many of my friends brought about real change at that time, usually by way of the arts. Many have become great actors and directors, one a great playwrite, another a fine song writer; yet another a social reformer; but the rest have acheived little, perhaps because they could never concentrate on one idea at a time.

I well remember Pauline Boty telling me with great enthusiasm of a large painting that she was then creating for a customer she did not name. Sadly this painting, which is most likely her finest work, has for decades been missing. Pauline died only a year or two after our meeting, a victim of cancer, and only now her great worth as an artist is becoming public knowledge. The contribution made by women to the arts and to society as a whole is still not properly acknowledged in Britain.

I had in my teenage years been a singer and a dancer; flickering in grey and white across TV screens in Britain, Europe and Australia. I had been known to some as "the boy who sang with Callas" because I had indeed shared a platform with that great soprano. But by 1965 I did not really know what to do with my life, and, for some inexplicable reason, I rebelled against a life in the Theatre when the Theatre is the only world that I really understand and feel at home in. I declared that I wanted to be a poet, but really had no idea how to go about becoming such a rare creature. I battled with words night and day, and did in fact produce some poems that I still quite like, but all have been rewritten several times since then. My problem was that I did not want to speak another persons words in a Play, I wanted only to speak my own. I was in fact on a voyage of self discovery, and yet I did not then realise that I had already set sail; I  imagined that I was still standing on the quay watching the great ships come and go. I also would have loved to have continued as a dancer, but already the arthritis had taken root in my feet and hands, where it flourishes still, distorting bone and nerve ends. I made a mistake walking away from the Theatre at that time, but I did not walk very far and I now play a small part in the hustle and bustle of Bankside. I also got written into "Bedroom Farce" by Alan Aykbourn, but that is another story.

Moving forward to the twenty first century,I must say that I do not regret the passing of the years, but I think it is time for me to place a few memories on the archive shelves, and this I plan to do in future. A few prose chapters lodged between the poems.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
April 29th. 2014.  
  .      

Love In A Time of Austerity.

I have dancers feet,
Small and crippled.
How do you expect me to come running
When you call?

The creditors boarding up your window
Do not concern me,
A little self help could get you out of this crises
If you just sat down and thought.

Yes I do love you,
And I have been remarkably faithful
For almost a decade,
But for the life of me, I do not know why.

A quota of give and take should be part of the bargain
In any stable relationship;
The flow of interest in just one direction
Is an issue that can be addressed.

Your shredded pockets must now be repaired
And the keyring put back on your belt,
Then I just might turn the light on in the hallway
When you next come to knock at my door.

I am not now angry with you
For trying to make use of my loyalty
Because you believed that I would always be here:

But a little self help on your part
Could certainly solve a few problems,
And perhaps reinstate our good fortune.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 24th. 2014.

Maundy Thursday Night, A Poem in Two Parts. (Revised Version).

                   1.

         The Waiting.

Pitch black
The Hand of God resting over us
Shadowing the interior of the church
With an intensity of sorrow
That average grief cannot touch.

The candles flicker in the fierce gloom
Like sparks of winter starlight
Refracted through sheets of melting ice.
I shiver in the darkness
Feeling intensely lost, alone,
Although the silent church is crowded.

Scarcely breathing
The sombre congregation kneels in prayer
Before the stripped altar, the vacated shrine;
The absolute emptiness that veils the eternal.
I look to the bare wall where an icon
Is normally placed amongst fresh cut flowers
And am struck by a searing pang of loss.

Today and yesterday and tomorrow
Come together in this single moment
That seems to exist outside linear time.
Christ, who found good in every man,
Opened dead eyes with the power of compassion,
Now prays alone,
Trapped like a thief on the Mount of Olives
Under an implacable Pesach moon.

We kneel in the crowded dark of the chapel
Seeking to empathize with the heart broken Saviour
But finding no words that are adequate;
Our imaginations too tame to envisage such sorrow;
Our emotions confined to the world as we know it.

                        
                     2.

            The Arrest.

Traversing a distant rock strewn valley
The traitor and guards are marching to claim Him
For the whip, the Cross, the Crown of Thorns.
His ferocious cry of desolation,
Wild, like that of an injured animal,
Reverberates bleakly into our lives
Although we can barely imagine Him.
A cry that could not anticipate
The enigma that is salvation.

Under the twisted olive boughs
Deaf to all prayer
His disciples remained locked in sleep
Like untroubled children.
We, in this blacked out London church
Keep hidden our private fears and failings
Whilst trying to hope, beyond clear reason,
That we could be almost as brave as Christ,
A miracle that surely, dare not happen?.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
March 29th. - 30th. 2013.
Re-written April 17th. - 19th. 2014.