The Mimicry

You are the bone-ripping questioner

standing stone still in a bleak, empty room.

The winter light slowly, softly thins, fractures you.

Crumpled paper shrieks under the weight of cold.

You stay there unmoved, unfree, so silent,

yet it was your bitten lips that called me in.

I am skinful of your solitude, my skull is full

of you, I peel the green from the black of my eyes,

point out the trajectory of your so rarefied visions,

trying to breathe deep to answer the shrill hard whistle.

Nightfall is closing in, I remain torn in the salty slips

of crawling time, cracked melancholy on the moon tide.

You could break pieces of me and hurtle them like suns

through the darkness that lives on the slick line between us.

You are the bone-stitching interrogator, frozen sullen in wet

black silk of the crowded crossroads of disturbed long nights.

Whatever answers I give and clothe you with and keep you warm,

you will never be moved, fovever focused on the raptor's rituals -

the flesh food carnivals, the mask and symbols wearing figure-heads,

play-acting mimicry of dead blood-line of unpulsing strangeness

as I,

drift, wind-tossed and singing the waves in, just to belong.

Witch burning

I.

He saw me as the black eye of waters,

the keyhole of oceans, moon-drowned

in furious tides, the waves of his wrath

kept coming, the purified skin of stone

shone in the

nights left horseless.

In the dismal house the table was

set,but food was rotten in the abortedsilence and living,

breathing smouldered.

Everyone was the dirt

under the carpet,

clothed in smiles like empty bullets.

II.

She sat me by the piano till I cut the notes

through the walls of her hate, dried like

autumn fruit, one moment delayed

from decomposition.

The train kept closing in, screeching

and stinking of her end, so she hanged me,

right there, crucified on the tracks.

Red was the Sun, my blood was cold.

III.

I was left there, bellow the waters,

swollen skin of lento, symphony sung

for the dirty target, it was procession

of his judgement. The day had come.

His eyes burnt me like wood and

her handswere nails.

Air was the white silk of the coffin

of God he locked me in, the virgin

sacrifice of his seven deadly stakes

of envy and pride, this I, it was a child of sin.

IV.

The foetal inferno touched, the parasite

of her womb, unwilling, there was a hook.

The ligaments of life, tied tight.

Crouched crone counting the fingers of

colossal fires smoothing the reflection

of hourly lies of strange, dead loves.

They both sound like pure-shined angels.

Their entwined voices have a toxic sting,

flies sun-soaking on heaps of hoarded gold,

hidden under the twilight vermilion skies.

V.

Freedom is the corpse between

the sharpness

of rain and the maudlin measure

of melancholy and faith.

Methods of taxidermy

There he is, translucent in otherness,

measuring movements by rivulets of memories,

firmly folded in the fistful of his sorrows

(everybody else forgets) buried in the frost.

Wooden crossed-crown pressed

onto the juggler of abandoned and paled.

He moves,

upside down l

ungful of soil, maggots

dancing

through dried veins.

(He wasn't the one)

The smell of unrisen passion is stolen

by the thieves of tribes and masquerade

of dolls and their taxidermists

with their glue-filled rituals.

Clouds pass by

whatever we've done.

Filth and scream, the everyday bread-fill. The kicks.

Everywhere, spread from street to street. Bliss.

(There it is, shining hawk-eyed, take it).

Forget (the trespasses) through our skin.

Petra Whiteley immigrated to UK in 1993 from the Czech Republic. Her poetry has appeared in Osprey, The Glasgow Review, ETC, Seven Circle Press, The Gloom Cupboard, Eviscerator Heaven and Unlikely Stories 2.0. She is also a prose editor for Eviscerator Heaven. Several of these e-zines also published her articles on political and current issues (left-wing position), history and methods of literary and poetic movements as well as essays on and reviews of current poets, lyricists - with more forthcoming. Some of her poetry will also appear in Apt and Eleutheria. Ettrick Forest Press published her first poetry collection The Nomad's Trail in September 2008. She is currently working on a children's book with visual artist Steve Viner.

Read more work from Petra Whiteley.