Petra Whiteley-

Little Night Music

I.

Blackness is

my light, inside my mouth

worms of music crawl, heavy

as my darkest bone; the bone's bitten side

bears a mirror in which no other appears. In

there a body grows and folds into itself. I think

it is mine. My eyes are refusing to hear. My ears

no longer see this music that smooths me out as pebbles,

soothes my darkest reactions into the muteness of  seas

as their green thinning waters wait

                                          (s)nakedly.

                               I become a feeling

of stigmatised silver.

II.

When God took me I was milk,

when he sung me I was its perfect whiteness.

Somehow my crucial pieces became a clock inside

His head.

A fly scraping His skull.

III.

In the rain I touch

the edgeless-ness. A rhythm of lies

passes deathly

between my body and me. I believe

this - !

my body, a heretic of my pain. My fingers,

crippled and crushed, collaborators off target.

And that slippery war

                                  a heritage. Constant

and permanent.

IV.

My body,

               annihilated and silenced,

slipping dead through its own pulse. And my eyes,

always turned towards the same point(lessness)

The Sound Shrouding Teresa

Far too often I find my hands working;

there are too many discarded statues around here,

air and dust. I throw Teresa against the wall,

that weird doll inside my chest falls,

her no body against the off-white muteness of plaster echoes

just as it was when I've finished

with being a girl, and threw my dolls against the wall.

If I had a knife I'd have called them all after Marie Antoinette.

There was nothing behind their smile and those mouths,

they lied about Golem song-words and the skin of God.

Only out of the black moments of sex and that terrible longing for death,

I have brought something back to breath. A slow sound in ebony warmth

of old violin cracking inside my freezing fingers. And for the statues

I arrange lilies on the razor's edge.

  Melody Of Darkness

My body is not the one walking down the street
               it's the cold mass on the table in the mortuary
                   it's the black bird pecking on its own wings mid-flight
                         it's the Christmas fish in her last bath
                            the other side corner of a cemetery
                              

                          (only dogs remember it)
                                                                             a
                                           burning painting on an empty white wall


I would rather if it were music drifting from the doors
            through the windows,             through grey and heavy air   
                     (not song-sheets, rain-pissed in the gutter)
                             a yellow flower wind-torn in a mountain's spring
                                   (not a speck in its dying tomb-water)
                                       or even its cold biting river      frightfully alive
                                           as the darkest wood violins
                                              (my grandmother's forest; its fragrance of
                                                     shimmering scary-beautiful - no world -  lostness)

      or just a thought -
                 a thought dissolving in a cup of coffee in its white delicacy
                   (in blueberry china touching an antique table in
                           forgotten house with history stashed in its dust -
                                           handkerchief in a pocket, in dog-eared photo, corner-smile - ancestral)

                               but lingering on
                                       (visible) melody of darkness
                                                        lined  in memory of fingers (touchable)  sonata  of a lived-in skin.

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' out recently. 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.