—after Fernando & Vicente Roscubas’ Plaster Hands

Ours, not of the grazing beasts, the aerial masters,

or of metaphors for flowers’ leaves

waving at their garden’s attentive keeper.

We on timetable slavery

use these extensions of minds’ correlation

to bathe with small touches

or

show

provoking

under guise

of clench and middle

finger

gall.

A magician’s attire,

the naked bones of fantasy

flying with hands of abstract

motions, fool

the few unwilling to examine

hoax’s definitional body.

Or

the sculptor’s tools

the manipulating utensils

rubbing, tamping, writing allegory prose

regarding

birth’s rebirth of new angled

understanding.

Of a night’s hiding, the hiders

with malice

lit by alphabetic stars and the unaware,

fall to the disguised harmers of life’s unknown whereabouts. They

the discarding living

form the holding O of tightening clamps,

wrapping

with deceitful pleasure a choking end, an

end of purpose

alive in the echoes inside the origin of

a mother’s once delivery.

Painters’ Exhalations 232

—after Peter Zimmermann’s Skeleton 1

Another brand of ghost,

the unheard voice of a memory

striking eyes. Recall

its skeleton, its dust

its powder, the mingling of

disdain for the skin-covering skin

adding texture to what smooth

disdains? The walkers finalize movement

with running, as does the old man whose

memory of breast feeding is a freedom

gone to the shackles of a historical event.

Time is a glance toward a body broken,

broken down delusion symptoms

unrelated to a coughing expression

or limping ankle swollen to become

a new rendition. Cliché symbolic

skeleton, hanging from emaciated doorways,

a laughable deterioration of an October night’s

forgotten festivities. Its cardboard

hardly sufficient for the alive schematics

aimed to echo the truest form, the bare

beneath an outlining layer of

skin examining day and the recovery

of lost profiles.

Painters’ Exhalations 241

—after Brad Durham’s Nine Whispers # 4

Unaware of its own isolation.

Perched on isosceles triangle,

that of limbs of the outreaching,

even angles. Oak’s hair finely thinned after combing

wind stresses dislike for natural curls.

Bird unnamed, blessed. Unnamed but

understood. Its voice heard on demand,

sliding throats of the listening canals, softly.

Crawls, too, abbreviated time on land

calls to statue of stillness, surrogate for

the abstract miscalculations of mans’

feeble dissection. Watch, bird, watch

beneath as watchers observe a candid

existence, one of constant leaving, therefore

a shouting scream will never fully reach

your anonymous abscond.

© Felino A. Soriano

Biography Note:

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California), is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has authored 10 collections of poetry, including “Apperceptions of Reinterpretations” (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), “r” (please press, 2009), “Search among the Absent Found” (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and “Among the Interrogated” (BlazeVOX [books]), 2008. He edits & publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, www.differentiapress.com, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. Philosophical studies collocated with his love of classic and avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His website explains further: www.felinoasoriano.info.