My Ideal Funeral.(Revised).

             
When I die
Let there be
No curtained Hearse
To carry me
Along the Hampstead High Street
Elegantly.
But on a market barrow let me go,
Big Band drummers tapping
Quick - Quick - Slow
On muffled skins and cymbals
Ecstatically.

And when the Party`s over,
Late at night,
Dig a deep deep hole
Well out of sight
In boggy Kenwood
Surreptitiously.
There leave my corpse,
Secreted after dark
Beneath beer cans and ferns,
Blackberries - condoms - fungi. -

Then plant a willow tree.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
Sketched Spring 1962. - Lost, then part remembered 1st. - 2nd. October 2014.
Completed as originally imagined 13th. June 2020.

(A). Fragments of a Dark World. (B). The Woman in the Moon. (C). Lines Written in the Cloister of Westminster Abbey.

                       A.

     Fragments of a Dark World.

Red tooth and claw. Red tooth and claw.
That is all life is. That is all. That is all.

                      1.

Arctic Owls have been observed attacking prey
In the sharp clearness of the northern day
Leaving red traces on the melting snow,
Bleak warning signs, or the discarded debris
Of smashed up lives in a hostile landscape.
Only the clear eyed Naturalist knows the worth
Of all that is lost in an instant.

                     2.

Darkly flies the hunting Owl.
A shadow stretched across the moon.
A blur of wings. A skull cracked open.
A trace of murder staining snow.
Darkly flies the hunting Owl.

                      3.

Locked in my hideout I fight the weight of these nightmares
Forcing my injured body down onto the concrete floor.
I grasp my camera as though it were a rifle.

The circling Hawk does not mind the strain of the long wait,
The dawn wind rocking his body,
His talons aching for prey.
                       
                      4.

Trapped in the ruins a journalist scans the rooftops.
The morning quietness is splintered by rifle fire.
Somewhere a child is crying.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
Fragments sketched between 1971.- 1984. 
Partly rewritten September 25th. - 26th. 2014.
Section 4 written September 25th. 2014. 

---------------------------------

                      B.

The Woman in the Moon.        (After the watching the satirical play by John Lyly).

You came into my room
Not a ghost, not a dream,
But real as the face in the mirror
That spoke to me.

I turned my back to the window.-
The image of your face
Shattered into diamond dust
When I closed my eyes.

The moon that I spied through the glass
Was pocked and ill favoured,
Not like Pandora`s dream
Of a matriarchs sanctuary.

I miss you, but fair maid, we were not for each other;
You degraded Utopia with your forthright inconstancy.
My flocks are scattered,
The fruit trees unladen.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 20th. - 24th. - 25th. 2014.

---------------------------------------

                     C.

Lines Written in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey.


Something permanent, elusive, but clear,
In cold stone leaps the fire divine.
The spires fathom the quiet air,
The sunlight steeps the glass in wine.

Break not the bread, I`ll take it whole
To ease the conquest of my soul.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 20th. 1972. - December 7th. 1980.

Three Short Poems For Aunt May.

                         1.

                  Endgame.


There are no poems in the eyes of the dead
Only the shadow of a sun gone out
Ash white and drifting


=========================
     
                         2.

          Fractured Thoughts.


Girl
Afraid to look at my wounded hand -
A broken bough
Not yet cut down

Can`t you accept the world as it is?
Red leaves descending upon a worn path -
The stumps of felled trees
Overgrown by saplings


==========================

                        3.

            Harvest Moon.

Tonight the moon drifts among clouds
A ghost ship
A lonesome bird without wings


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 18th. 2014.

Three poems to be read together, written in memory of
May Langdon nee` Odell, who died during the night of
the 16th. - 17th. September 2014.

A Portrait of Myself at Twenty.

I seeking the cut of man
Have worn out floorboards at Promenade Concerts,
Marched from Aldermaston to London,
Listened to speeches at Speakers Corner,
And have ended up none the wiser.

I have sat in a pub for half the night
Quietly reading Ginsberg and Shakespeare,
Chasing girls when I had a mind to,
Occasionally getting slightly drunk,
But this did not do me much good either.

I was in hot retreat from the world that I loved,
In retreat from the spotlight and live theatre,
The itch of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd,
But that is my life, I can live no other.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. September 2014.

The first two lines were written in 1963, the rest was composed 11th. September 2014. 
For much of my life I have tried to live as part of the crowd, live as an observer, but really I am a natural performer. 

The Private Photo-Shoot. (Revised).

I lift your photograph off the shelf
with a nervous hand.
I should have smoothed back
that wild tangle of auburn
before I adjusted the close up lens
and flicked the shutter open.

I was creating an icon of you
with diffused lighting
and muted greys and blues;
But an icon can never be more
than a simple mirror image
of what the camera sees.
Such beauty must remain
an ephemeral abstraction
artfully arranged
on a glossy scrap of paper.

I study deep the fragile mysteries
of startled, half closed eyes,
black in their hooded alcoves,
small elemental fragments
from the dark side of your moon.
This is the only trophy of that long ago weekend
that remains now in my keeping,
An image, mostly fiction,
that can be shredded in an instant.

Consistency is something I`m not good at,
which makes me, sometimes, hard to get along with,
but we had always vowed to keep in touch,
and even maybe share a house together,
But, as you see, none of this has happened.

I kiss the faded outline of your lips,
Then place the photo back upon the shelf
Where it usually resides, almost unnoticed,
Between a stack of old unanswered letters
And a pile of half read books.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 1st. 2012. - July 18th. - 19th. 2014.
September 8th. - 13th. - 15th. 2014.

A re-write of Midnight Goddess.

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling Queue. (Revised).

                       

Random Thoughts While Standing in the Groundling`s Queue.


Fragments of the past come to the surface
Just like matchwood splinters
Breaking out through skin.

Recollections tend to be like this:-
Suddenly the stones beneath my feet
Echo to different footsteps
Than those of passing strangers,
I mean, those strangers who happen to be passing
In this lived in moment,
Faces locked on phones.
They are indistinct apparitions, shadow puppets
Merely,
Ghost pale and indecipherable,
Whilst persistent images from my distant past
Hit my eyes with the vehement power of neon.

Your face Jo Jo - in particular - is always on my mind,
More aggravating than my arguments with the Bank.
The fact that we rarely slept together - Jo Jo,
Remains a sore point after all these years.

Suddenly I am back in the Thatcherite nineteen eighties,
You in tow, exploring the derelict South Bank
Searching for that legendary pie and mash shop
Your mother never stopped waffling on about.
(She had lived hereabouts right through the Hitler War
But did not realize how much the world had changed).
To this day I have no idea if that shop was real.

You were chattering away nineteen to the dozen,
That being your custom - Jo Jo -
Never listening but talking for hours and hours on end.
Eventually you moved - on a whim - to San Francisco;
And there has not been a single phone call for twenty years.

GET YOUR TICKETS READY.     STAND IN LINE.
I am shocked back into the turbulent twenty first century
Where certainty is a farce that no one believes in,
And daily life less real than a West End Show.
The queue has shuffled forward onto the steps,
It is a cold wet night to view A Comedy of Errors,
And I have left at home my hat and purple woolly.
You once told me you would not be seen dead in a queue,
But it was de rigueur to be spendthrift and spoiled in the nineteen eighties,
As though the future would be fun filled -  warm and cosy,
A safe place to look back from.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
5th. September 2014. - October 14th. - 15th. 2019.

Sketched while queuing to see The Comedy of Errors. 2014.

Alma of Sarajevo. (Revised Version).

The most beautiful smile in the world -
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing the snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his grave.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day when she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.-
Hugging her pregnant belly
She begins the long slow climb back to her home
High on the swart hill.
An irrational fear of losing her unborn baby
Numbs her fraught mind. She exists without true hope,
Nihilistic, empty.

Reminiscent of gunfire
The splintering of a hewn oak
Stings the air.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just as her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

It is hard to keep a footing on this path,
The surface falls away, disintegrates beneath her;
It is porous,  grey like ash.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. - 12th. - 24th. January - 8th. March 2013.
Rewritten 28th. - 29th. - 30th. August  - 2nd. - 4th. - 13th. September 2014.  

For all brave women caught up in wars.