I’d keep them on a shelf in my memory’s virtual occupancy library:
to access electronically in every disconnected place, at any given time.
As long as we can bother our heavenly father,
we’ll have circumstances to keep us making the right choices.
Until faith’s will on earth grows too old to give birth,
righteousness will be tolerated by the tide of unswallowed voices.
Because despite the temptations solitary time brings from strangers,
you rob them of the treasures they hide within trust’s secret gardens.
Because I borrow from your beauty every time I escape the dangers.
If your heart muscled mine with questions of infidelity’s wrongs,
I’d protect your doubts with my bones and pray before answering:
until shadows stretched across your ceiling to greet you like dawn.
We sensor the sexual while praising God for perpetuating the species.
Physical activity loses its focus from the alienation of guilt’s confusion.
Mental activity is attracted to the supper that gathers desired energies.
So give us this Sunday, without the fellowship of a sermon’s cure,
to remember the sacred falling for greed’s daily bread.
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,
and let trust warm us like a blanket clothes the skin of a bed.
Until dietary desire raises my internal temperature like good dreams
pacify guilt by hunger and sleep retires anger from its daily exercise,
mornings will beard floors that bounce revelations like trampolines.
For love cannot justify all of life’s personal glories,
though joined at the hips we as humans are.
Only because cruel smiles sever from clever lips pride’s untold furies,
do children break the rules of adults by going too far.
THE POET'S BIO
John Patrick Acevedo participates in the creative writing critique group that meets the second Sunday of every month at Howard Community College in Columbia, MD called the Wineglass Court Poets. Sponsored by the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo), the group plans on launching their own website in order to give others the opportunity to learn about its poets and to link them to their poetry.
Ironically, it is through the auspices of his own Synergy Press that his poetry has evolved. In 2003, Acevedo had one of his poems, Volcanic Gravity, published by Gitana Press in the journal Tuesdays, an anthology which featured the poetry of 31 MD poets, while being a member of another poetry group at the Barnes & Noble in Bowie, MD. In 2008, his poem, Siren Song was published by the Howard Community College Times. It explores the American Indian’s legacy in his typical “idealistic-realistic” fashion. Complemented by two Hawaiian paintings by Barbara Steinacker at the Artists’ Gallery in Columbia, MD, Acevedo’s poem Skeleton Swing will be exhibited in March 2009. It stands as a testament to the metaphysical marriage of consummation’s feminine fantasy to masculinity’s unrequited reality.
A conflict resolution between the sexes is what Acevedo believes his poetry has served him best with in his life. It is because of this calling, that he sees life’s experiences through a biblical lens with the common belief that art must follow its own golden rule in order for love to pay the dues of spiritual inequity. Meeting a sympathetic senior at Boston University launched Acevedo’s writing during his sophomore year at the College of Communication, where he would graduate with a B.S. degree in Public Relations in 1990.
“Life is what happens to you when you don’t forget anything except the most important thing,” Acevedo says. “What happens to others when you forget everything except the most important thing is what has driven my poetic experience.” As of yet, none save two of his some two hundred poems have been published. As a 14-year veteran of the electronics giant Best Buy, he writes regularly from his home in Columbia, MD, where he lives with his father. Acevedo still visits Boston with him every summer. If you would like to see more of his poetry, e-mail Patrick at J_Patrick_Acevedo@hotmail.com.
FIVE QUESTIONS FOR THE POET
1. Can you tell us about who you are and what was your main inspiration for 'Solitary Sunday'?
Foremost, I am a second-guesser. I love reaching the limits of relationships. I graduated from Boston University's College of Communication with a thirst for true love. Solitary Sunday is about the drive for gnosis that makes an artist strive to transcend longing. The setting I relate to in the poem is Silver Spring, Maryland during the winter of 1991, a couple of years after the person I am writing about was born.
2. 'Solitary Sunday' mirrors contemporary themes with conservative ones, like technology and religion, like communality and individuality. Do you think solitude is the secret to soul-searching or is it immersion in social events that enables lives to find the right paths for themselves?
Change, or any other cause and effect for that matter, is a reinforced cycle of passion in which the individual identifies with something he experiences and then hopes others will as well by his translation of it. Technology and religion serve the purpose of preserving these experiences.
3 You tend to be philosophical in your poetry. What is your definition of what poetry is and what do you think about the state of poetry in the United States?
Life is solitary without art's imitation of it. Poetry is one of the most effective means by which life's lessons are taught. A poet's calling is to initiate his audience with his message. As for poetry in the U.S., I can only say that some poets shy away from global Zeitgeists in favor of politically-correct ones.
4. 'Until dietary desire raises my internal temperature like good dreams/ pacify guilt by hunger and sleep retires anger from its daily exercise,/mornings will beard floors that bounce revelations like trampolines.'
These lines are my favorite from the poem. What are your greatest passions as a poet and what, do you think, is of extreme importance in our society, which has been neglected by our poets in their poetry?
Ancient Christians believed that insight, or gnosis, was the path to salvation. The Gospel of Thomas uses dualities as the medium for understanding human nature. As a romantic realist, I've strived to personify good and evil within the body and mind as a Gnostic would today. In other words, yin is physical and yang mental. I believe that anger motivates us to be greedy and hunger inspires us to trust others.
5. If John Patrick Acevedo were to be remembered by a single sentence, what would it say?
Success is earned by learning from our mistakes; failure never looks back.
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