Aging within these syllables - Felino A. SorianoFINAL

How Others Read You
These shapes rise to confirm
movement
to comprise
delicate species’ handfuls of
theme and noticed aggregations.
You impersonate
and how the rain
undresses this dryness, you
recall your body’s continual
reshaping, hearsay
and compass reroute
the mouth and irony from
the tongue’s elaborate mis
-interpretations.

Interior Denial
Keep climbing—
why do you? From here, the music
can launch miracles
unfastened into
more than tributary lyric—
you advance but cannot
breathe from the weight
of achievement. Why
do you? You carry what
your hands cannot: from the
dream’s early announcement: no,
night will not fraction
into smaller versions of gray. You’ve
trained your hands, —the feet
mutate—
the speed of them can rewrite
the face, even with the math
of missing. Keep—
why? These mirrors continue
to misuse you. The gain is
only noticed when an eye
plagiarizes the voice.

Problem or Singular Solution
Sorrow,
the remedy to how death stretches across the lap.
Listen,
the voice unravels past to portend the body’s smallness.
Hands,
reaffirm flesh feels sadness before the tongue processes anguish.
You learn how the father’s voice sits deep into the temple.
Your mouth is full—you’ve stopped growing.
This is where your body can not re-begin—birth appears in a single philosophy.

Cannot
The unnamed pill thawing
thorns into your hand will not
solve the math
breathing query into this morning. You’ve
heard absence builds
rest from the cold
tracing elements of
your spine’s aging number. Each
step a prophecy for how you
will be buried near your future.
You cannot awaken with
more clarity
than the pain etching steel
into the bones of your
breaking mirror.

Submerged
This cocoon you wear.
Benevolence. Your
hiding is secretive. Tedious.
The way you smile
I’ve heard it before. All teeth.
No decoration. You hear
melodies. Denial. As in
the piano pulsing. Surge.
—in person, undressed, you
dance and discard clothing as
noun and personal discomfort.
The hand that held you. Illusion.
With panic a song insults you.
Plagiary.

Logic
Why you lament

this mis
-ery is why you

misspell your name
into the mouth

pressing sin
into the fork
-ing of your unblemished

tongue.

Equivalents
Why the sea whispers
you wear the answer
in the slight rise of your
shadow. Dust
does this: erases clarity:
another form: of whisper.
Here, you recall the body
that left markings, a
living bruise, 1920’s blues.
You sing halos, —you
talk of prayer while
removing scratched faith
from your knees’
contagious swelling.

Eventual
Under your foot,
a bouquet of prior names.
Rename them:
near-skin importance,
soft verbs remove violence
in the way your hand
ceases grasp
when death unpeels
the mirror’s final
articulation.

Song to the Self
When young you
would bruise to escape
the clarity of
comfortable skin. Your
mother would
reject her tongue
to remove evidence
of questioning why. This
did not disturb you:
your face provided
erased prose to unfasten
meaning
of the escalated pain
drawing your
eyes the color of
evaporating crows.

Spiritual

You partition these voices traveling circles in your mouth. Record them.
Hold the one hallowed whisper nearest to your chest. Breathe well.
The screams, you bury into flame. Believe in the father’s spectrum
of size. When leaving he is largest. Pain to augment the size of
your disappearing safety. The city in you burns. The bodies gray
into apparitional hours. You watch to recognize past. The silence
recognizes you. The voices are perishing—the mouth tumbling
into mistaken company.

Traveling
The bag you carry
is both heavy and distant:
you travel to fill
—to feel the weight
of future
against the now of silence
and death around
the soothe of your
bones’ marrow. Motive. Wind
is context
and the color of disappear-
ance shades-in what
is missing. Missing
was to move you, was
to misread language to
lose you—
and the all of us in
these tongues
build within the mouth
what misses to lose
what the bag cannot
transfer.

The Soloist’s Translation
How

in walking, it
is more than walking, your
body expends held

together by chain
and genetic tape…

how
to attain is more

than grasping: a rhythm/hand
-profit, a gain, a more than
what the mouth holds, what

the lungs fold into made
aliment

and when you see yourself,
the mirror interprets how
the face pulses, the surface

of
your functions, the numbers
rotating the sun of your
aging throat…but to listen
is more than discovering

it
belongs to lyric, but more
than prose, than cadence,

than connecting tongue
to ear…it relies on

breathing, excursions of
sound

traveling to remember
the abstract beginning limp
of your imitative walking.

Felino A. Soriano was awarded the 2017 erbacce-prize for poetry. His writings
appear in CHURN, BlazeVOX, 3:AM Magazine, The National Poetry Review,
Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere. His books of poetry include Vocal Apparitions:
New & Selected Poems: 2012 – 2016 (2016), sparse anatomies of single
antecedents (2015), Of isolated limning (2014), Pathos|particular
invocation (2013), Of language|s| the rain speaks(2012), Intentions of Aligned
Demarcations (2011), In Praise of Absolute Interpretation (2010), Construed
Implications (2009), and Among the Interrogated (2008). His collaborative
collection Quintet Dialogues: translating introspection, which features visual
art from David Allen Reed, is forthcoming from Howling Dog Press.

Visit Of the poetry this jazz portends for more information.

Image courtesy of Pascale Gouverneur