Petra Whiteley-

Of Smallness and Nothing

The river has given me
                        a small skull,
its emptiness is ticking.
 
Time is a music-box
                       inside my ear
softly,
              and with sharp tugs
                           it un-knits my
                                            nothing.


Anatomy of a Being

Bodiless
head, hanging organs -
unloved flowers
with colours un-nameable
and mute. Fingers holding
emptiness of songs, wringing those
small necks clear of dirt in
a slow breath.
 
Barbed
cicatrices in subconsciousness,
rhythmic blood libido
a piebald horse straddled
with blind eyes and a crown
of nails. Without entrails.
 
Broken
thoughts and images,
smothered, that plush
mouth agape with maggots
marching through open silence.
 
Bold
push in the larynx - again(st),
the bell of ruined hours.
The metallic swell of their
clatter and nonsense. Eaten in a blast
of its side-to-side rocking and shrieking
out incomprehensible  Gods. Devouring
flesh of the pulse. Crawling under a tongue
expecting the miracles of language.
 
Stunted and un-giving.


An Excursion/Cosmos Inwardly
 
Take in your eye, an I, seeing itself in the hollow
spaces of a body, perceived. The mouth
of its noise a barren branch of sickness
spreading thin lines against electric midnight,
in-turned against the red-blue fists of a life, felt.
Sickness
of silence and thirst for the Sun, the torture of music
pulsing in vast blackness of a tree set against the skyline,
the contour of impact, imaginary, closeness
of pain and indifference - only here suffocating
pillow of useless digits of thoughts. Resurrections shining
with stolen time of billion cold stars like a red neon. And only
in this place, it lays with everything breathed in and sculpted,
sensed beautiful, sensed in sweetness, sensed in generosity
of plush touch.
A village of one, mime theatre of hopes, a shattered in-scape
of world swallowed and digested, mirror of images and language stains,
here, see it talking as if it knew itself, as if God was juggling
its hells, as if God was the whispering Scheherazade.


Petra Whiteley was born in Czech Republic, but England has been her home since 1993. Whiteley’s poetry collection 'The Nomad’s Trail' (Ettric Forest Press) was published in 2008, a chapbook 'The Moulding of Seers' (Shadow Archer Press) in 2009 and ‘Exhibition Of Defined Moments’ (erbacce-press) in 2011 with 'The Liquid Metropolis' due out with the same press in the spring of 2012. Her children’s book Watchmaker’s Quartet And The Shattered Pendulum describing a surrealistic adventure has been released on Kindle in 2011. Her prose, poetry and articles have been published widely in webzines and in print. She reviews CDs and interviews bands/musicians on regular basis for the Reflections Of Darkness.