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Aging within these syllables - Felino A. SorianoFINAL

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Published by Fire Agate Press, 2017-07-31 08:42:41

Aging within these syllables - Felino A. SorianoFINAL

Aging within these syllables - Felino A. SorianoFINAL

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the editors of alien mouth, Heron Clan IV, Ink in Thirds, & X-peri for
publishing some of the poems presented in this collection.©MMXVII All Rights Reserved, Felino
A. Soriano. Published by Fowlpox Press. Layout: Paris Pâté. ISBN: 978-1-927593-63-9

For my brother, Darius
for the music within our dialogical occurrences.

“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being
is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say
that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and
omega. An end in itself.”

―Gabriel García Márquez

A Promise toward This
Here, you resemble
what the mirror always told you. These
scars are smooth, raised sorrows and
forget the singe unless pain of
your eyes reshapes entering the flame. How
your mouth rewinds misery in the echo of
memory’s misremembering
you hold your hand out
to the mirror’s version of you
recalling youth’s energy
amid this age’s injured effort. In
this flesh is removal of walls, an unabridged summation.

Healing
As if this morning was
the shadow of a new
body alteration, with
grace and prose your
mouth explains
the change was startling
—the listener: uninterested:
their own awakening: a
memorized bridge in making
pivot golden, away from night
and from the tongue’s
internal aching—
you interpret listening in
how the stone translates ground: a
place to rest and heal the feet
of all momentary movement.

Shades of Worry
Near where distance promises
difference
you sew your name
into a blue where
wind and bird create
rolls that bend and
nourish angles. This
is the summary that
morning recites, a
blend of pledge and
solitary promise. The history
of fractions that
contours and denies
with simultaneous hands,
you worry
that the
child will reoccur and not
recognize his history. You
worry that the language
of this hour will destroy
tomorrow’s syllables, and
the mouth will disappear
and whisper will walk
in place of this aging
substance.

A Proper Parallel
The way moths
ignite contours, purpling
of light—wing-flicker furrows, you
dispose of this gift
into the round perception
of destroyed conviction.
Nothing invents without
the hands once flinging
stone: the undulation
across wet flesh proves
pivot is dance and too, a
desire to showcase shape
made from dexterity’s
unnamable soul.

Despite
To sit with you is to
look down toward your
closing eyes. Each angle
a permanence of eventual
connection, of drawing space
wide enough to listen.
This room is an earth
in constant black. Your voice
I could not trace with either hand.
A private memory threw
its language from the tongue as you slept
and starvation formed into the crease
where your lips created murder. If you
ask the absence why the body left,
listen to the fiction first, stirring, this
is the warmth you held against the chest,
a reaction to breathing despite nighttime.

A Riddle of Placement

Between hand and sky the
difference frightens you. In
hand, a persona of stone
weighs its person against
skin. It waits because
from the sky a prolonged
calendar includes too many
moments, breaths. It is here
you plant wind to find water
near an absence. Darkness
wears angles best across
from a cemetery of spines—
it sits, out of focus, names. Nothing
chooses your language
because wings remove the
dead in memory, and your mouth
is only used to determine how
time discovers distance scattered
from where you’ve left it.

An Introduction to the Younger Self
You will know the beauty in age—
rejuvenate, rejoice. Here is
where the spine learns
or recalls absence, and this
hint under your pillow asks about wings,
why the spine could never fashion
into a form of healing. Rejoice, still—
somehow the rain will always comfort you,
its language of drum
honors why jazz is culture, even at
the back of throats
cultivating bees that either harm or
produce toward the decay of teeth. You rejuvenate—
you will recall that becoming new
is a presentation of learning how to
human.
Do not neglect how the body is a permission.
Every life that is stabbed into un
-recognition
is still a delicate silhouette—
and like all silvers
undulates in value, tarnish,
wearable fashion.

Antecedent

This skeleton

brittle towards a signature of
traceable dust,
a new conformity:

woman giving man her name and

later

body. Certain acts are unmentionable. This
is the mathematics

students say
will never be used.

You’ve broken
each phrase describing worth and purpose

a proper escape of func
-tion, and

what you’ve learned is
an echo’s
final pant

sits against the back
of the tongue far now from the ear

the way
the woman’s body sits

against the back of his hand

searching with force for her
former name

-carded dis
far from her father.

Synchronized Visitation
You recall an urge or warmth, an unsettling of synonyms
—an elegy in ink on the good palm of your sorrow:

The promise of continuance broke
mid
-sentence, the prose of ongoing hope
a bridge, broken into absence.

Did the ghost
inhale fragments of the speckled flesh
to reunite scent with familial
pageantry? During

the visit when each window closed
to warrant secrecy, surprise

did your mouth widen
expressing
the raptus of seizure circling the lung

wrapping an arm around the whole
of trepidation? You remember bone

how it called to its body far from assembly
amid the howl of a flame
encircling each leaving breath.

A father can do this: giving a placement of the body
life to another version of the self,
unwanted. What is said
is also a distorted juncture
to recollect storms, holding
sound, reaffirming voice

from the dead’s firecracker wounds.

Avalanches
You insisted we braid
voices. From starving,
I ignited upon hearing we. The flaring
warmth of
another would feed me
until the next conflict
rose
above the white flag
waving, healing
interrupting the night
washing out my
mouth.

__________
Here, you pretend
to rest,

and my arms
fall

into a thick sleep, fooled.
This body is a stream—
yours, the canoe crawling
to become small again,

unnamed,
the distance provoking
blades to ensure I

cannot
follow.

__________

I think about renovating my mirror’s promise. A specific
day, like most
hides my fear inside the crust of its raspy throat. When I could not breathe,
someone said
pray, and I learned why my knees would become raw I questioned

why faith removed its i to mug my tongue from finding
your body, my lungs.

__________
Blemished. To say nothing
is near enough to no
to encourage misremembering. You’ve disappeared enough

to remove my name from the strong
tone of your hands. With
each stone I collect, misery
alters the color. Again, nothing
is smooth, not stone, not teeth
and my voice has found its burden.
Broken.
Disrupted, like the moth
whose wing no longer dances
at the song of the wind’s
arrival.

__________
You to me: do not become me.

My voice to yours: these bones are enveloping your hate.
Your eyes to mine: stilled silence.
My back to yours: a thickened blade incising the spines, unartful.

__________
Always in need, I assembled myself into the closeness of a photo. This one
hangs with a slight lean to the left: when distraught, the head becomes
heavy behind my right ear. This is the part of my body that listens most
to your absence. Tired, and nothing to hurry toward. I watch how fire forms a
natural arrow upward. Perhaps the heat in my hands is telling me to climb
toward my grandmother’s resting. I want to rest, I want to hold onto what
forms hope onto the chest’s empty mooring.

__________

You said. Not toward me.

I

overheard. I listened

to the spirit underwater. More than bathing

cleansed me.

__________
The way spring remembers children, the ache in these feet

forms further hate

why I cannot move. at the memory of

__________

Once, our hands
became a furnace.

Our faces
the home needing heat
needing touch.

Our bodies, though,
too cold to travel toward the warmth
stayed in the separate rooms of

our breathing.

__________
This bottom realigns my eyes: searching, and each ache is a counting toward a
totality of my needing.

This City is Screaming
Something is heavier now, than when
the weight of my youth was young language,
broken teeth, thumbing marbles.
Early in the year and already
more death is wounding mothers
than when a father smashed the home,
painting it with absence. Candles
with holy metaphors line and light
these streets searching for the bones
spilling marrow staining
these addresses. You cannot walk
alone. Night is an ego that will not
improve its mood. Anger slices
the air into fragmented halos. It
is here I’ve grown and built my
daughter from hand and symphony.
She cannot walk alone.

Amid this Culture

There is too much here to
open,
but you begin. Your hands
soon tear stretch from the velocity of search. Your face
becomes stone
when

once

soft like
its own eyes.

In this massive room you see a mother
sitting still. She speaks in gurgle,
her vomit

dressing new shoes and the curling air with
death. Here, you cannot

speak with mouth. Your hands
throw fever

that cannot cool, and the room soon
dissolves

by the hands wrenching the
last tear and sphere of sweat into an

evaporated name.

There
isn’t much here to decide

but the window moves around
the room’s steely misfortune.

A blemish on the wall finds its shadow:

a moment muted into anxious breathing.

What Knowing Builds
When muted like the welted
flower pinned to
improve an evening’s
aesthetic, you find
a voice to understand
your mirror’s pushing
you forward.
When the jacket is
removed a dragonfly
escapes the cylinder
of clear vision.
Remember, the eye
only turns toward
heat stemming from
attraction.
Imagine the rib
protruding to escape
enclosure. This is
how the mouth
speaks of healing
violence.

With Root you Stay
Staying means the weight
of this moment will
not allow contemplation. With
the dead, a painting is
not appropriate: language
with levels of voice and rage
predict honesty. The brush
you can maneuver, create circle
when square would pronounce
the body, better. Here you
invent because the mouth has
lost its fullness. You open
to engage but the silence
resembles white, a dangling
lesson no one will remember.

What Causes This
Grated breathing these
voices interacting. Each
moment of sifting seconds
changes you. Grayed
affirmation haunts and
portrays the body’s
counterfeit, a magazine’s
trivia stumping the watcher
into living backward.

Losing
The hands, once
dexterous
once

drawing the eye,
the center

of the mouth,
the tongue’s pivots
and paradigms
—now, they hold
angles of the air
sifting praise
from the voice
vanished into a history
and the shadow only
listens, etching sound
into the touch.

Turning the Combination
Remember how the body
releases anger. This house
is the spine
of your growing. When
young, its strength
would always pivot, would
wait until each room
was silent until
the floor shook from
the weight of the voices’
misinformed collisions. You
remember the most crucial
moment. The agreement
between body and voice
the cease of interactive
detestation. Each mirror
broke and reinvented
what remained—
the hiding, the hearing
of how to heal
using scars to gauge
an hour by the rising
pink, the subsequent
smooth collection of
skin’s alteration.

Solo
You hear this piano
and how the hands shape
echoes too far to determine
tone and the language used
to attempt improvisation. The
way you listen is a blemished
reaction, the
weakened pulse bridging
now and the death calling
toward your crawling. Every
crow—beneficiary of height
and swirling orange. Each
rotating song a privilege of
syncing sorrow to the plurals
of how you reinterpret music.

Elation
You heat this pressure
to determine retreat.
Space behind your
voice is a mouth
rejoicing in the tongue’s
inciting promise.

Hanker Amid the Home of your Aging
You count the crowded rooms
to outline where
your throat memorized
hunger. It is within
the mouth, these words and
memory lose motion.
These patient bodies
sliding the tongue’s
slippery watching and achromatic hearing.
You ask how weakness
begins its death touching the stone
held against the glass veins.
It is here you wonder which room
will best diagram your suffering—
which will invite rain to eliminate
your undisturbed starvation.

Transition
The eyes you close
contain radiuses—
broken windows. Outside
a perfection of green stands
still near where water evaporates
into shallow shapes of foam
and architectural fiction. As you
open into awareness, sleep
softens you—readying
for its next arrival,
collision of intersecting
hallucinations. Why these
forms find you—a belief
in reshaping death from
the last version of self’s
undented, unmuted
conversion.

Delving
These hands dissolve errors,

rain into rivers, and
you form voices to forget

something vacant
—sitting here you develop

misremembering. A mother
devout is only as needed

as the warmth
winter extends into the body

becoming cold. Remember, you
are someone’s first reaction. This

ash around you recalls
your Grandmother’s weeping. The

grave is a mirror, remember
you will speak into silence

until beginning no longer
finds solace in the breath

of your derivative attention.

Sounding out Your Movements
You recall soft hands

or the misery of arid
touch. Dichotomy

launches, despises
you

and every mouth that speaks
your bones: turns its back

to interrogate debris, the
wilt of your ashen silhouette,

—recall:
who you were when young: spring,

or, the pastel of that nation:
softened, active off the eye

as
when scent jolts you, and
you turn your back to

escape intrusion and
its name travelling the

throated
cylinder wandering toward your death. This

is waste: the people in you are destroying
its weather… and sleeping is the
comical remedy turned toward

when
laughter’s exhaustion predates the

birth of your antiquated memory. The
myth of embrace, the train

ascending,
the moth interrogating amorphous
angles of air: these are written
into your forehead: you cannot
forget the tragedy of ink, how its

scripture
misleads when spoken from
achromatic tongues, forked

to deceive and provoke

in the synonym of new, a contagious
heritage

leaves and makes you wait… and now
burial awaits you… each hour an
articulation of increasing windows

opening…
guessing when your mouth
will endeavor into the wet

circle surrounding where
your feet announce starvation

and
had there been allowed
nuances, such options
would appear alive more so

than the fragmented song
hanging

broken lyrics
around the tired
neck leading your momentum

backward…

This is Not My Music
You find your

presence in the name
devoted to your body. Again

who calls you son
formulated song to
forgive the absence
while you sing uncorrected
lyrics. It

is here where
your voice incited
crime within your

surfaced autonomy: con-
trol brandishes barriers
upon created space

needed to isolate the
music resembling faith
and the tonal den-

ial given to you in name,
remorse, and in song used
to invent perceptual together-
ness.

A Symptom of Leaving
“Live. Live”, you
said

as the stone
parachuted
to the water’s
bottom organ
and with misery

you
recall that echo
stabbing in vain
into the breath
and music
of their voice’s
final pronunciation.

Home, but when or Why not now
This Carolina, North, always

east
to your body’s centered comfort. Born

far
—alive, between, each voice
connecting strands of age, braids of

humid hands always
hold

you. And to speak of fishing you
would never do alone,
yet
only there, a synonym for always
invents somatic ways

to engage with what swerves
in blue-gray glitter

10 feet below the wrinkled
mirror

holding your younger face. This
is space, an adaptation of freedom:

more
sound of horn than the
scent of mornings’ meal, you
aggregate in small rises

to
ensure you do not stray down

blind
to any angle of home—
these humid hands

promise,
they portray a self and the
circle you seek that includes
the portrait you hung, structured

against
your centered home, here
where the photograph is of voice,
warmth, visual caroling

portending
the way just prior to death

you will hear the song that
moves you east to examine what

held
you still when young an unable
to die.

Dialectic
When listening you

meditate. You hear solace,
analyze. Every syllable, a

slowed
precision, pulsing in
verbs and antiquated variances.

You
do not injure to advance
theory of carelessness: placing
the body outside the self. You
are not injured, and this hearing

is
necessary to multiplying living.

Version 1
No Name

Hear it. This. Remain when
the blend of you. You spill

the throat
throws you, an

of circumference representing age and the

philosophy of trauma.

The head hears you.
This momentum

cannot praise. You.
Beneath these blankets

two shadows braid
breathing patterns

fire to blame then
a sequence of spit

splays anatomies and the creator confines as to scold as to teach as to

evict through faith’s why you. Never.
unlocked devotion toward

Version 2
No Name

When refilling
the body the
ache in the

wind only
bends to burn
breeze into

mouth of this
hour’s muted
affirmations.

Portrait in Duality
Endless

this ghost of you,
—with feet of pause

how could
you fade? It is here you
move, but do not enter. Enter
as to help heard voices calling from
discomfort. You cannot enter—
cannot be seen. Again: this
ghost of you: silver, you were born
this way: aged before walking: talking
into laughter: abridged before

endless
ghosts hung within these
photos.

Song of the Verbal Praise
When the wind becomes
what hears you, how your
voice hums in baritone light—
neither dusk nor tonal
Affirmative death will
listen with more affection.

Sound
and your voice’s mind needs treatment,
two or more dreams design
where this is going—

it
is with remedy the spine’s
curve will heal toward
what’s warmest, what’s

weakest
and what will desire the
whole of you, most.

In Your Hearing
This road and its clarity
bends to meet your needs, as
with the mother’s wandering
grip
the embrace, always for
more, always from guidance
in the trilogy of her cradle…
it
is now as with always, as
with never, you realize
in this rumination you

discover and forget
as

with memory, you move and
it escapes you… its feet
and steps too wide to

fit
into the smallness of
your aging and limping
shadow. There is permission

here,
but again, you forget, and

you feel as if you disre-
membered something

and
that something rearranges
the halo just in front of

your wondering voice. To
reach it you must speak,

but
the silence as with whisper

only conjures a small
response from the mind
that wilts within the

age
of this hour’s predeter-
mined delirium.

Precursors
In pocket
your cold hands,
hands as evidence,

evidence as open
mouthed

whisper…
song as pure feeling,

feeling as heart then pacing,
pacing then feeling,
feeling the song an extracted
whisper—
contagious then to
wonder, wander to where

the body misleads you,
you as the mirror’s

final voice, voice in the
cold hands, hands
now evidence, now

talkative
toward how the mirror

misreads the tongue
of your behavior.

Relational Hazard
Breath from the dead,
an ornamentation. To
know is to hear or
speak without
listening.

Music Version One: Trumpet
Capture what cracks and
it will heal you.
Under silences, a swarm.
: listen, the impulse, the
worded warmth wrapping
music into and around
your mouth’s needn’t worry.
Sway, the body does. Does
now then again when mentioned
in silent passing.

How to Speak
With fractions you
calculate your body’s meaning.
The prose
on your tongue is scarred, desolate.
You counterfeit hours to appear
slightly altered out of fear of knowing place.
This is how your childhood
retells your story: you were born
from the mouth of a radical name, an
eye closed to find the body
half attractive a shortened route for leaving.
Your tongue taught to use un to
prelude the way your ribs would always ache
and your face, though manmade,
the shaping hands misread the directions.
It is from your mouth’s unknowing
you continue to circle an alternate self and
paste its residue onto another’s tongue
while they are sleeping towards death
and future description of your errors.

Listening

The way you stack this music
voice atop voice
you lean to
inhale how rhythms breathe
and cause the body’s bounce to
accumulate effort. Nothing
sleeps here: light births itself
—light is a misery that folds
hours into absence. You run,
the music follows, voice and
further voice misleading the
body: if you close your eyes
to imagine a moment of
prayer, rest, this day
will become light creasing
your purpose, setting the
skin aflame.

I am many things
you, many more. An error
when young
prevented the tongue from
speaking my name
without the wing of a functional
flight. My stutter stood me still,
flaming face, drawing in my voice
from the pasty air floating above
my tongue. You listened, you did
not laugh. You stuck out your
hand to catch the jitter exposing
my mouth’s sticky speaking: my ruin
began to rebuild, first
in how my shadow exposed
its breathing; then
toward a secrecy of fear
my wander began to sweat
and my death wandered
away from the momentum
of my living.

Interior
You said the mind

was cold, a winter of age
and broken demeanor

among interaction with
voice and the body

bent opposite of your
summer whisper—

and like bones aware
of their meticulous break

you only heal
when time walks into

the halls where you
push and pull, hear

and behave, as with
a wind arcing its fabric

around the room of a
distant recalling.

Transvaluing the self-image

Timid the
leaf in you. Hero,
the wind from you. An hour,
the crow among you.

With praise you
hold in hand what

promises color and rotating
images, and like the praise

each eye gives to the understanding
of heat’s body you

untangle these memories

an anniversary of practiced
ritual

—you visit what scares scars what

reminds through cicatrice and sedentary healing

—you space evenly your reaction to warmth,
how its body is both here and negative in appearance

—such absconds
is the spine and its youth, its strength
as does the father’s holding you

the strength crawling from the curved arm
through the fever of swollen finger
-tips and you

preserve the song
long enough to swell

from the tongue’s variation
of pitch and unperfected lyric.

Home: from the Window Entering
Prose, this, glass of stained green
gold
obfuscation of hybrids. These syllables
wear you, skin
of hallucinating

bees.

M
u

t
a

t
e: need yourself. Collate:

what unites cure yourself. Untie
rearrange

to confuse

normality’s structural
hands, their holding you

mimics a fist of geese navigating to escape this cold and condescending

absence of food. Unwind,

rest,

relocate, press your breath
into the sun
of this room’s
achromatic climate.

Changes and the Indifference
The way these branches
build sculpted height,
descend, into their
corporeal bend,
the weight enough
to suspend and fade
—you inherit what the
dead wrote in ink and purchase. The
colors parasitic from age and light’s
heavy fatigue and
you recall each body, each
slanting from the
touch of your interest—
it is here, inside, dark and
half-full, the mirror squints
to halve your presence. As
with rumor all the weight has
gained, and you inherit hands,
their touch and grip,
you move until the slowness
hears each bone state shame
and fallen names, from
branch, home, from
shades of the city’s
difference.


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