SYNERGY PRESS

 ∞

The Poetry of JOHN PATRICK ACEVEDO

¨There are three archetypes for sociological autonomy: Pathos, Ethos, and Logos.  The lust/love, pride/hate is the Pathos autonomy; the hate/love, lust/pride is the Ethos autonomy; and the hate/lust, love/pride is the Logos autonomy.  Pride creates hate and destroys lust.  Lust creates hate and destroys pride.  Hate creates lust and destroys love.  Love creates lust and destroys hate.¨ -John Patrick Acevedo, June 19, 2017, Synergy Press.

Broken Limbs

(for Michael Monk)

Avocado.  Chocolate.  Cheese.  My doctor prescribes me something to drown this energy.

“Excuse me?”  the housekeeper smiles as I complain about the powerless lamp lightbulb.

She waits as my red lobster face and thinning, broken-limbs salt drip something wicked.

The secret of success feels less like failure as I paper sweat cream over curling toenails.

It doesn’t show but the cops park outside the just-closed bank drive-thru for local reasons,

not for these tourist porn soles horn torn socks another day as John Lee Hooker explains:

“You left me once.  You’ll leave me again.”  I was hanging on for the hold-out sun of dream

when a door slams for pizza like a poem or limbs mousetrapped on cancelled plastic seats.

I was holding-out for the hanging-on rain when I heard that Berry Gordy was concerned

about sales when he asked Marvin Gaye to overdub Tammi Terrell on her first #1 duet.

Yet in 1967, America was dysfunctional love and life a messed up, down and out family.

I drive up a road in Hanover, Virginia, test the 1729 Slash latch on a first fellowship door.

"Give and take is my gnosis of January 1991.  It is almost impossible to understand.  Yet, the secret it holds lies in the active/passive natures of the two sides.  In other words, when one is deprived in body and mind (hunger), there becomes the need for take's subjective salvation or gnosis.  Similarly, when one is deprived in heart and soul (anger), there develops a wanting for give's objective survival or longing.  However, the moment either hunger or anger are satisfied, there becomes a letting go of compromise and a holding onto competition.  It is this very change in human nature that defines the Old and New Testament Zeitgeist of ignorance/arrogance (acceptance) overpowering will/reason (change).  Furthermore, the belief in the "power of God" is based upon the renunciation of justice and the inevitability of egalitarian morale.  I believe, nonetheless, that understanding give and take as gospel can conquer, as Jesus of Nazareth as Christ proclaims, death itself.  For to recognize strength in eating's salvation of the spirit is to embrace strength in sleep's survival of the flesh." -John Patrick Acevedo, August 4, 2017, 5:20 p.m., Synergy Press. 

It is with unreserved sublime gratitude that I announce that my first Poetry eBook entitled Moral Authority: The Poems (2012 - 2016) A Gnostic Outsider Sociology was released this April 2017 to various eBook online stores, including Barnes & Noble (Nook), Amazon.com (Kindle), and Apple (iBooks).

Featuring 52 original Ethos poems, a definitive conceptual illustration, 10 color photographs, and an in-depth author's foreword, Moral Authority: The Poems lays down a fascinating foundation to my Holy Bible Sociology, founded after 30 years of critical thinking and one comeback song from 1982 that won singer songwriter Marvin Gaye his first two Grammies in a prolific career with Motown and finally Columbia Records.

It was titled Sexual Healing, and, as an expert in its metaphysics, I applied the rehabilitative dogmatic karma of give and take (Book of Job, Old Testament) to the passive/active sides of human nature, the very first poet to make it a gnostic theme for the spiritual reconciliation of good work ethic with the artistic evolution of uncompromising faith.

Marketed and distributed by Mill City Press, it will serve to further promote my seven outsider poetry books by Synergy Press.

Thank you for your support!

John Patrick Acevedo, Poet.

May 05, 2017, 5:59 p.m.

Columbia, MD.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ztc3bhkmtlx65e/17_12218_TXT_SoftProof_r1.docx?dl=0

DOWNLOAD THE NEW POETRY BOOK ENTITLED 'GODZILLA AND HUMAN RADIATION: GLOBAL POEMS (2012 - 2017)' by JOHN PATRICK ACEVEDO, Synergy Press. [ CLICK LINK ABOVE TO READ BOOK NOW! ]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aycstL1x2tK5gslRTBOajC-8VSs4RLkPFsxnUYCnnv4/edit?usp=drivesdk

"My book entitled Godzilla and Human Radiation: Global Poems (2012 -2017) is about the activity created by the lack of dependence, be it from the worker or from market, that results in so-called freedom.  The importance of this freedom, however, is that it manifests itself within its partner.  In other words, when the worker ceases to be productive, market will catalyze market values through human radiation, and when there is an effort to win for the market’s bottom line by the worker, market in turn becomes a kind of Godzilla.  In both cases, abuse is used for marginal progress rather than use being abused for non-productive resistance." -John Patrick Acevedo, Poet, August 31, 2017, 3:03 p.m..

Godzilla Globals Human Radiation

I had changed.  Work and pity parties had moved

my soul to be saved by the life I never knew.

It was just a fluke, a misfired chance I mistook

that sent me into the future with a past to be glued.

Tonight the end justifies the means

when memory reverses mirror inverses as a child’s tears

that scale cheeks to appear late enough to be redeemed,

as I fill a hole made whole like love, its crooked, tectonic plate ice.

She B-Line’s wait with double-date, tailgate griefꟷ

debunks the lost with unsaved costs.

Mourning is never late when dreams won’t overtake,

like arms muscling for a pillow to wake collect-called sleep.

I accept her needs roar to endure yet mine only horseshoe more.

I’m losing my waist to worries.

I’m laughing my ass off to hurry.

The weather feels more chill than a morning coffee killed,

until Godzilla goes global with human radiation tonight.

I’m raking up bitterness with overdone tasksꟷ

sipping soup because I did this loop way too fast.

I’m coughing my meds as my bumped-up microwave goes dead.

I’m only missed when I finally make others not want to ask.

I’m extending family change.  I’m paying for interest not to Fed.

Smile your Hell all you want yet I must buy myself a shorter belt,

because the money don’t pool love when funny rules-out help,

for your Godzilla to go global with human radiation tonight.

Trials never beguile.  The trouble lies in love’s double-standard miles.

Keeping to yourself, you may come to finish what you get, bet regrets

will leave you like worms thrown to screaming nests as Godzilla tests

the theory that conception is but God’s test, radiation struggle’s death.

I accept her needs roar to endure yet mine only horseshoe more.

From a cold heart and pastel style comes secret news in what I say.

She is many yet I see few.  I hate the easy that smiles the hard play.

Yet Bowie’s road drives up class as I use The Force line under line,

won over by fine girls with finger snaps, burn their bittersweet denial.

A Poet Gets Dupont Circle to Back-Up Harley Quinn

(for Mandy Dyer and Lowell Hoover)

She tells me I turtle Manga’s back-up tasks by mentioning her similarity to Harley Quinn;

tells me to stop writing this poetry to make love to all her Halsey and Taylor Swift friends.

Yet now that I’m with Marley’s ‘Alone’ in an Adam’s Morgan bed and a slave of Swift sins,

I have to say that a minister and professor composed this to Batman a church imposition.

It’s also a poem for Pussy Galore to scratch inside the dog-eat-dog muff of rough roughs,

a poem to remove Odd Job’s hat from bars at Fort Knox as James Bond sells a surname.

Perhaps we need a poem to Harley Quinn customers onto fresh concrete as geese arrive.

People either compete when compromised or compromise others to compete.

The boss took a quick drink outside Le Pain Quotidien as I began last night to lead paper, lead her raincheck home with him before finally accepting a life of bread and water lacking.

Nothing breaks my buck like Folders in a cup as Dupont Circle backs-up my Harley Quinn.

Lust and change takes pride in easy buys.  Love and acceptance finds hatred in hard sells.

I was in a Seven-Eleven pizza box when I first heard her read “Dills Never Appetizer a BLT”

in an Adam’s Morgan Busboys and Poets last year.  “You’ll never see me again,” I said

just before she answered with: “Whoa… wer-man!”  She was ill still she took back for poetry.

That summer two became one as the Subway man said: “Meatballs usually come one way.”

In her Dupont Circle café today, I lead more paper to remind my Harley Quinn whose I am.

She makes a secret wish as ‘Alone’ plays overhead, texts something to an older boyfriend.

To be accepted women change into girls.  To accept themselves they must kid their world.

Nobody does Harley Quinn like government.  Nothing backs-up a Harley Quinn like a poet.

Matters of change may harden thoughts yet acceptance never goes out of style,

so I handed Quinn the poem I began the year Thorazine took my legs for wrestling myself.

The nurse was not the true love that I had lost yet was first to open me to heaven and hell.

In Dupont Circle, copies of it were so highly stacked, the government became ill over pills

that quit good livers, triaged money for peace until even pains took away the lap of luxury.

“It’s not every day that you get to do what you need to do.

Yet today I kill my BLT without the dill for an appetizer.

I hate to say it but a dill before a BLT is only killed with dessert.

It’s what you crave that makes me need to want you.

The people stay because they hate to say it’s not what you want them to do.

I hate to say it but I’m only dessert for your main course’s appetizer.

There’s only cat and dog rain to undo for me what you have failed to do.

Yet it’s not for me to say what keeps you staying for what I meant to say.

It’s haunting yet shy girls play guys by breathing sizes into bleeding needs.

I hate to say it but I don’t need to dill a pill any more than salt needs to kill a BLT.

I take bacon limits seriously like tomatoes yoke lettuce with turtle crossing legs.”

When Dupont Circle read this, Quinn’s café began serving BLTs with dills dropped.

Back-up’s no longer buttered Halsey-Swift toast nor make-up sex utter black holes.

A dill talks trash about designer cash at a Starbucks.  BLT’s fill sackcloth with poetry.

When the Microwaves Cookie Your Mother’s Present

(for the ‘Sentimental Journey’ competition)

If, in your later life, you should come to find a fictional crab cake

become a microwave’s oatmeal raisin cookie’s smoking 1587 crater,

put on your favorite shoes, thank your mother for her present,

and visit the crosswalk near Studio B that hits ‘65

as a blind man counts his steps to Marvin Gaye’s ’Can I Get A Witness’.

Very rough-faced, I hustle to a Manteo diner door after strolling my windy beach.

An angelic girl points at me and smiles up to tell her father: “Look… Satan.”

Her mother scolds for indiscretion as her husband wistfully says: “But she’s right.”

When you’re losing, the world will show you just how to be patient:

How to try, seek, love, struggle, believe.

When you’re winning, you’ll find hope in all of these things yet be told nothing.

My late-father was wrong to feel that any of his tangled needs were too strong.

We only take the competition’s extra mile if they refuse to give us compromise.

Will my late-father’s favorite crater accept me

as I take on my twenty days in Manteo, North Carolina,

can I give-in to the program of Granola bars, flaxseed yogurt, brisk mile walks,

and alternate weekends for self-indulgences?

Beware of the microwaves that cookie your mother’s present.

Unpack your bags for twenty days of competition.

Stand up to your dates with tangled needs.

Gonna give to a Paternal Journey.  Gonna take away the compromise.

Find a heart that never seems to worry.  Find a mind that climbs to Hi.

Gonna last the step of carpe diem hurry.  Be the first to forget to swallow pride.

I’m unlisted by every single girl.  I’m kissed by heartache’s memories.

I have tested every little limit to the hardest part.

Every kind of heartache I have seen.  I have listened to all the crowds

tell me that my heart’s in the wrong place

and my mind will never really know.

Each Hi, each Hi I see my soul fall.

Every time I go to Manteo, I complete the cycle,

tie the knots to every Port of Call.

I am sitting for hours like an adult.  I am adult sitting on the porch.

I am keeping notes on my Paternal Journey: my twenty days without compromise.

Doris Day and all that she had journeyed, never gave a movie line

a deeper truth than ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be’, told the world that the gay were kind.

Everything that I have ever wanted is quiet out here now.

All because I took a Paternal Journey.

All because my mother Googled cookie diet lies.

Eleven.  I’ll be staying up till eleven.

My heart will tell you how in seven,

I’ll be wide awake with my phone and all alone,

sit my morning hours on the porch.

I’ve become a man with worldly complications

and a child the mother leaves.

I’ve revived the Paternal Journey that compromises survived reality.

Check-in at a diner in Manteo, North Carolina.

Set aside twenty days without compromise.

Enjoy the Studio B cookie sung by a blind man on crosswalk ’65.

I hear the waves outside my oceanfront condo.

They call to others yet not to me.

I feel its presence drift back and forth like it should,

and I am log dead, like the man Hughes describes in “The Weary Blues.”

I sit outside like the ghost of a dog for an hour on my condo porch.

Until I slowly climb its wooden stairs to its beach.

Feel the salt breeze shower through sugarless hair.

Hear a ’65 song from Studio B.

I’m a fool to say I’m not a fool

and know living ain’t living if you tell yourself there are no rules to “all is well.”

Read the Book of Job for your twenty days of tangled needs.

I can’t tell myself any more lies about the ‘Sentimental Journey’ of compromise.

If you want to know where not to meet the competition.

If you want to journey without tangled needs.

Get out of bed wide awake with your phone and all alone.

The Holy Bible says that you can’t change the nature of a bad acceptance

or accept the nature of a good change.

The well to do favor the prejudice of bratty independence.

The neglected fail to make good on the privileges of a promise tried.  

I say that we either accept ourselves by accepting those who try to change us

or change the parts to ourselves others can’t accept.

I believe that life only gives you that which you wish not to take.

It leaves you with only that which you have given up on so that you will divide regret.

It takes your twenty days, makes you into a vulture of confusion’s tangled needs.

It murders competition by stealing your memories from the ‘Sentimental Journey’.

Forever only means something if another shows you his left carpe diems.

Come sit Indian-style in my late-father’s favorite Roanoke Island crater at Fort Raleigh.

Find out about America before it became America.

Learn how to microwave pizza with “other woman” hands of chopped-onion hurt.

Find yourself in the wake-up call of the absent neighbor as you Noah Arc your mail.

I sit in the diner only to repeat the waitress line: “Have you ever been here before?”

Doris Day was serious when she cried her line ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be.’

Satan suffers gladly over the neglected gay socks God would have you clean.

Give Him all you’ve got.  Don’t talk to the neighbor long when you’re running a little late.

The reason there is no evidence of the Paternal Journey is the microwaves only cookie

your mother’s present.  Your new love’s best friend has every right to decline your hug,

has every right to say with a cautious smile “you’re very lucky” for sharing a love poem.

Take your own Paternal Journey.  Find yourself inside the crater of 1587’s lost America,

untangle needs in twenty days, start the work your father gave you that you might finish.

I was looking from the tip of the porch key when I took the shot, lost something deep inside.

I can’t tell you exactly what it was.  Yet when my vulture eyes searched where I remained,

they saw something that could only have come from him.  To those I’ve lost to my later life,

because he did not want to tangle us with needs, I took a hard trip to 1587 and came back.

We only go the extra mile when someone shows us preference, even with only drink smile.

Twelve Forty-Four Won't Do

"Right.  Right."  The Americans are passing all the meek, poor, and weary on the left.

Circe and Ulysses look very tired as I sit aboard a cruise ship.

I did not just get in.  I'm on the Express Lane to Omega Glory.

A scared girl walks into a sofa at 12:44 p.m..

The young janitor who appears before you four times in an hour works the least.

What will you do?

He that has no friends loses all respect for those who do.

The careless judge the pious and bring the entire world to Alpha Sin.

The Virgin Mary is grieving.  Mourning for her Priestly Marriage.

Jesus of Nazareth is dead.  The people praise not.  What will the High Hats pray for now?

What happens when we do will not do if when we live like Him, the world wants us to live with them.

Everybody has to have at least one virtue.

No one has to have even one vice except for the scared or curious.

I was told that "Dr. Seuss is on the loose."

Close all your coverless books.  You just don't understand the man.

The Ladies Room on the upper deck is the place to buy all the 4XL free T-shirts.

They don't want to know.  I don't need to care.

My smell master slaves The Ice Princess.

"It's not worth it," my crazy father warns me.

Bad Technology and Poor Weather

I'll be looking up meanings in my college dictionary

until I find out the mysteries the tallish borrow so that we can talk.

I´ll be jogging footsteps by a machine my father once sought;

puffing fog Rocky Balboa and I lost when my thoughts were soft.

They say art is the path of greatest ease.

Eventually, even fools realize that this world is all we got.

I say bad technology and poor weather work together

like a pimp with lust and love without a main squeeze.

I am the forest of fallen trees, a river of rolling logs.

I am the unbelieving Christian, holding a stick at a church picnic:

circling like a cat in a corner as children chase unrequited dogs.

They say art is the path of greatest ease.

¨Lover please don´t forget my lot.¨

I say it´s only poor weather that makes technology´s cure its own disease.

She was looking out of the limousine window;

impatiently waiting for her bridal door to chop.

Still, it was she who called up Daddy for the flowers

when my cousin´s casket was briefly opened for his Pops.

They say art is all about absent presence.

I say it´s in the present absence that moments seize

when danger´s poor weather becomes beauty´s bad technology.

If love were an accident, I´d be the first victim lost.

If love meant fighting, I´d be the soldier who moved the line only to be shot.

Life is no fish story. It´s always better told after the fish has been caught.

Mornings are for secret wishes; evenings for news the world has forgot.

Only want to say ¨I love you.¨ Don´t care what my favorite critic thought.

Every spring begins with a rain that brings the lessons painful artists drop.

Whoever said art is the price that gains from the greatest debt was never a boss.

I say art is compromise, not to receive from the poor the wealth that suffering gets.

¨Only imagined what they wanted.¨ That´s what a masterpiece used to cost.

WORK HELPS SELF-LOVE REST

"Most self-promoters use neglect or lack of support like a spoiled teenager uses privilege to earn the right to complain about authority, be it paternal or maternal, political or ideological, economic or psychological.  People are who they want to be. Period. If you feel unloved, you have a choice: hate yourself and anyone who loves or love yourself and anyone who hates. I chose the latter because I know that my love for you has made me want to live and work for a future I had thought was unjust.  When you are buttered up as soon as you show your face, you can be sure that the bread others wish to sell you came from your own oven and that the fruits of your labor have already been sown. We should claim success to help others succeed. Mercy comes from self-love's failures, from the hurt that benefits others.   To judge is to deny the success of mercy. Success is failure. Pleasure and sorrow repress pain in order for joyful healing to find its own expression. Work is self-love's repression of the rest that helps another to find his own expression. Personal expression is the work of life and only benefits self-love's rest."

-John Patrick Acevedo, Poet., July 04, 2018, 10:03 a.m., Columbia, Maryland.

Deer of the Crossing Last Ones

There is a lottery taking place in the world.

Most people forget that they have something to win.

Yet there are a few who make it across—

that road between closure´s deer crossing

and the mistakes made when we betray the last one.

Because, for every last one,

there is yet another saved by the ´parable of the missing claw´,

the lost story that tells of how Jesus, like Judas by him,

had received a vision of the kingdom of heaven.

¨In heaven,¨ Jesus said, ¨there is a king crab for every missing-claw crab,

foraging the sand for lost souls as the tide gives and takes away salvation.¨

¨Where will you go when God is no longer with you?¨ Mary asked.

¨Do you believe that I have forsaken you? Have I not shared with you

every vision but your very last one?¨ Jesus said.

¨Lord, I am unworthy of your heaven!¨ Mary wept.

Then Jesus lifted Mary, who was kneeling before him,

thanked her for her vision, knowing secretly that it had come from God.

I am turning the circle now.

I know not how many I have left from loss.

I wait like them, mate time until your headlights stray

from my face— realizing how your fear prolongs my grace.

Closure is not easy for me.

I know not where life fits in... only the exposure it begins.

I count my mail slow— flip my coins from tails to heads.

If there is yet another after you still to come,

I know I must learn to respect her decision,

randomly display the winning number from my TV—

behold her ticket´s success like it was always mine to bet.

I also accept that many deer may never cross,

many ´perfect´s´ never purr their way beneath my skin.

Yet I choose to not be among any of them—

trick myself into never allowing them to pop the question;

give myself all the second chances that take the hardest tests.

And so I round the circle once again—

watch you misplace my misbegotten innocence...

pray I´ll eventually mirror the light in your face,

believe in the crossing deer of last ones,

the fight that never quits and swallows spit like premature providence.

Weighing-In Authority´s Conversion Spin

This poem is for every saving bachelor´s resisted progress,

sitting in his car with fresh fries and soda´s lemon-lime escape.

He watches as she takes his change from his waxing means,

smiles as the patient manager presses lies like a tattoo dry-cleaned.

To understand the drive-thru is to apologize for static pride´s haste.

Catharsis is only unstable when the ecstatic experience weighs-in.

Hyperons stabilize catharsis when energy wanes transient ambition.

See anomaly in the eye-witness of a yawn´s uncensored entropy.

We pay off suns for atoms to beget orbits with electron spins.

The heat of its energy chills the past with empty tables.

The seats of now remind us of family suppers never had.

No one knows you when your salary´s refrigeration is constantly cool.

This land is your land as well as mine. Yet love grows old when still.

The flesh is a storm of doubt that tests heaven´s realm,

keeps reminding us of fears that hope for safety´s approach,

like intimacy finds opportunities in a cell phone´s chimed disclaimer.

Keeping thoughts dark close windows to pasts of rainstorm revelation.

We are loved because we keep apart. The road that opens is the heart

that hums sober when starch feeds rich and poor alike. Trust is a greed

far from the window fronts of swan lakes and smoke smog, conversion tips.

Watch the peeps as they walk along opposite sides of heaven´s sidewalks.

God is of Old and New Testament grace; charity passive fear; sacrifice active sin.

The mind keeps sharp what kindness blurs for retired men of suspected purgatory.

The book never closes for pedestrians. Wait for your hot fries. Let your life begin.

Ice A.D. Apex Delivery

Clunk, clunk, clunk. His footsteps descend my home´s vacuumed stairs.

I´m listening for an excuse not to listen. She sighs into her jasmine tea.

I´m the prodigal son, a security blanket tool— dry ice´s A.D. apex delivery.

I´m with her because she´s free. She´s dependent on exit´s subjective reality.

Could love be the trouble of getting from A to Z? I think even she would agree.

How we worry is of little concern. Movie night is but foreplay without the TV.

Inverse confusion. Envy thieves doubt of its charitable, sacrificial privacy.

Shave Judas. He betrays and murders like a mother compromises greed.

Trust doesn´t want you, you see. Take leave of her before meeting needs.

My father will yet call— even after hurtles curse meals with dispersed anomaly.

When friends lie, they do so only to make love to your father´s quiet immaturity.

Sit and talk with him. B.C. is as lonely as always. Overextend yourself, please.

Everything happens for a reason. Especially when we find the strange in the familiar.

She´s talking in bed as I toast to him. There´s a salvation to everyone´s reserved grief.

Purpose wakes feelings so we may shake the hand bitten by dream´s earned sobriety.

Waterloo Awakenings

I am driving down the country road on 35 mph winds

that seem to match the speed limit as my father´s 65

seems to be my only crosscurrent, mile after mile.

I am calling myself to leave a message for someone

who is always home, because I know that being there

is worse than being called by salesmen pulling up outside.

It is to Waterloo that I drive, away from the grassy yards

needing to be cut. People pole Napoleon´s totem battlefield,

historians and military fanatics who pace back and forth,

trying to understand something my father once knew,

something about awakening, about being played for a fool,

about gifts that appear and disappear, like bird offerings

on your doorstep as your mower smokes when you hit a root,

as if spewed grass was but the spit for her to exit labyrinths

to no way backs, something like that spilling between hills

that filled soldier claps, as Napoleon surrendered his flag–

a world conquerer outwitted by the illusion of advancing troops.

Now I open the front door as my car hisses against the birds,

as if the morning curb had taught them something I´ve heard,

something about Waterloo and the mother of hurricane pants.

¨The morality of sexuality comes from the narrowing and widening of active/passive living, loving, and working.  When the body/heart become active, there is a narrowing of paranoia and a widening of perversion.  This creates a gnosis of love and belonging, which is of New Testament desire, a sense of freedom from giving´s submission or activity.¨

-John Patrick Acevedo, May 19, 2015, Synergy Press >8.

John Patrick Acevedo pauses to weigh-in on the Belgian fields where the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte finally surrendered his forces at the infamous Battle of Waterloo.

"They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  I say, life and art flatter themselves and that it is human nature to scoff at the powers that compete for what the world knows nothing about: namely, that progress and resistance, like learning and altruism, benefit from and suffer for the experiences of another, and not vice-versa." -John Patrick Acevedo, Poet, July 28, 2017.

Finding Zen in the Carolina Clay

I’m walking through the Clemson bunkers of Newton house dorms,

walking with blessed eyes, eyes once saddened by requested prayer.

I suffer for the sake of another’s hovered efforts at underground rails;

ride inhumanity like cold rides norms over Carolina clay like acid rain.

Evangelicals file the hard marrow of narrow minds, lead from behind.

A church member invites me to his car one night of night rain.

He’s a grape still attached to vines of virgins in flowered dress.

He left after I sat on top of a bunk bed as my minister read

of two brothers who died in car accidents with girls just wed

to his disciples of bleeding wine and family’s wounded cross.

He has me listen to ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’,

hopes I will find Zen in the Carolina clay without Bruce Hornsby

as I walk back to my dorm, my Gospel of John’s seedless wrong.

My song ‘Mandolin Rain’ plays over his as my brain’s temptation

learns what drinking lames, something almost lost in translation.

I walk the road as my stomach barks, purrs, and rolls

over a tray of three-bean oil and vinegar and chicken salad.

I join no one at a long half-empty table.  My hands clench

as I force prayer beneath a pink dusk outside the cafeteria,

I eat my crow over a former roommate’s “better off” betrayal.

I sleep alone as Michael Jones pianos ’Seascapes’ like memory,

his solo moistens like my new professor with her photographic one

reads my freshman words until they crack beyond sophomoric,

until my Bible study leader’s voice opens a door 28 years will pass--

the way beards estrange us of our past, make ears for our undead.

A Reason for Nothing

We know the passive can close stomachs like desserts.

We care nothing for the lacking that compromises hurt.

Maybe there is a reason for the nothings we all ignoreꟷ

the needs we scrub against to scratch backs like concrete.

Her eyes are spent as she cups her hands to buy mine

with a moral authority that cries like babies without neglect.

My father prays for sumiso as the Native American exhibit

suggests that he line my seed with the lead of Puritan sweat.

The vices of parasitic demands, the amoeba comas hosting

the finals at Colleges every fool fears like a Jamestown plot,

finds the path of least resistance in epidemic, intestinal banks.

Dark is the corn of starched collarsꟷ Thanksgiving’s hired blood.

Never Sleeps

Something in the way she calls me when I’m holding out for Omega glories,

the holy uploads that rise and fall like prepared lines for near-miss mealsꟷ

the microwave serving for pocketknife graces said over hotel-covered glass.

Never leaves keys and forever sleeps, like love and war ends without beginning.

We are the exhausted air of fear’s fluid lives.  Hope is a passing elimination.

Give yourself a piece of cake and the world may decide to eat you up instead.

She tells me by my gradual internal combustion that I am failing to avoid feelings.

Over my overpriced steak, she gets drunk, pays no dues for half-assed excuses.

She digs a tomb for her other blood-faced menꟷ afraid to be late, yet womb-loose.

God leaves us alone long enough to discover YouTube’s unprotected, TV-posting.

Its message is our untaken journey, the one that wakes, like my dream of a friend

who came to my father’s house.  “I have an early doctor’s appointment,” he insists.

As his sleeping territory becomes snores, I relish our private cheer turned to shock.

There are many near-accidents.  They enter shared, careless rooms, make you feel

like your mind is getting full with an ocean soup as you tell someone close, far away,

that you need to walk outside, show the rushing traffic that life, like art, never sleeps.

Yet in the beeping horns of opened window, dusk traffic, they tell you to *uck yourself.

You will gently reply the same to them someday.  Only just pity them.  Envy will rewindꟷ

will let us see when they were of any help; will decide who lights their memory cigarette.

LA Don’t Mess with my Old Man

I’ve seen my barber’s child claw his paper plate with his fingertips,

claw for Honey Nut Cheerios as his Old Man clips off the LA channel.

“Now that’s something else,” he says.  He flicks O’s past straight hair.

The compact refrigerators sold well the two days after the hurricane.

The Korean did a Klingon salute, fist over chest, as my mother became me.

His wife tried to bring him over fuel loss clouds that kamikaze radioed plans,

cried in the way my eyes grew frightened as they smiled for something free.

I eat Farmer’s Cheese from the Middle Eastern grocery shelf.  It tastes rich.

Takes me back again to the visions of Zen recovered from my Carolina year,

the year my professor left a gift around underlined Christian white out type.

“Yes… sometimes that’s all we can do” was her solution to meaninglessness.

Freedom is as arrogant as the vintage extension cord tangles relayed realities.

It’s like the homeless trying to survive without one attached to premature beds.

The compact units never keep a place on the shelf.  I still smile at sudden loss.

Send your son to meet in LA, Mister President.  Don’t mess with my Old Man.

The Cheerio chalk still O’s the foreign plate.  Rope whips its yoke vinyl cement.

Chance Plane-Burns Provident Winter

(For my grandmother Inés Acevedo)

There beyond the carried loads of sacrificed resistance are the winters of frictionless static.

A man returns to mother thinking of what the rooster starts, listening to scratching-dog glass.

Her tears gather family as he speaks, hat in lap-- smiles of life not too brief, of suitcased loss.

Some say the blues plane-burn tire fears like suitcase winter.

And I have seen them lie, pretend to offer the hopes the spring will never get.

But there is something in the father’s love that I have learned while in its cold,

like the happiness of a hungry child depends upon the dependence of the father

and the happiness of the mother upon the sanctity of an angry son.

Drones are dropping newspapers from cargo hooks onto the driveways of undeparted cars.

Emanations of faith are but law and act to the first and the last, like girls fisting candy cash.

Can you see past the sidewalk dusk, past the phone booth where she returns to me?

I cannot answer her future’s present call.  The dime she inserts has rusted way too thin.

Her hyper index finger cancels unatoned grief.  A straight and narrow year has passed.

Her renewed doubt is burning faith’s tires in New Balance sneakers beside a roommate

as we cross her heated path, reminds me that chancing providence never gives pause.

Oh, yeah!  I have seen the light,

calling like the father’s dreams leave pride behind.

He lives in a place far from here:

neither in heaven nor in the underground.

It is like the perks of market

that I come to return to who I was

and to let him know

that I am finishing the grieving he leaves this town.

He listens yet hears me not.  For I am all

but here now, gone to where the Coquis are gone.

Where he speaks, this place knows not.

Yet he sleeps both above and below this street,

like market perks the grieving town.

Keep your heart within this world,

and you will find it gone.

Keep your thoughts within,

and your God will lead you on.

I approach the red brick apartment,

far from the Lares farm, the shirts of sackcloth.

The snow begins to fall as a child babbles on.

It lands on my Avalon windshield like upon its lawn.

I clean my eyes with my own wipers,

as my step-father seems to smile from his Virginia farm.

I am wearing my father’s khaki overcoat.  My glasses are fogged.

It is the same as he left it, the same as she left him,

before my heart and soul began to outgrow sin,

like the weeds and grass so closely cut along its urban meadow.

My father seems to smile at my discomfort:

the way wannabe’s feel inadequate when they know they must bow.

Market perks the grieving town

without ever churching the unmarried child’s new crown.

I listen to the fatherless women as they holler down

to the motherless crossing my path like geese.

For my mother has tried to forget how she couldn’t back

this hallowed ground into overworking her Jimmy Mack,

couldn’t carry his grunts like slot machines spin fictional storefronts─

the way valets purse a girl’s lips, tramp dead end eye sockets.

There is a white nurse, a white angel deep inside me.

She family feuds my car’s new lot like greed double parks a spot.

The old brick apartment is endearing no soul but I.

Its plastic chair balcony now bears clothes from a family like mine.

I walk back to my car quick, say something that makes me smile.

Keep your heart and soul for the God you love.

Market perks the grieving town,

shakes the hands of ringed fingers

for crying wives to dinner chicken pot pie─

makes you shave less daily from the truth you fight by day;

wakes your son after nightmares return you to where you lie.

Behold the Silver Lining

Slowly, I saw the mountain snow melting.

Dared until my glowing sword declined.

When the Allies lifted the hem of her dress,

she knew the thread to my silver lining.

Each to each, we raised the ceiling:

withheld the bed that flowered fed good-byes.

She was above what I thought was my love,

till my arrows broke her rainbow disguise.

Behold, dawn is victory’s retreating

when greed becomes a trust redefined.

Keep in room as her iris fully blooms

and dusk shadows like longing fills the sky.

If she follows me, she will learn the way I walk.

If she loves me, I will talk beside her without a care.

Yet my heart gets sick of her living well when strong─

would rather fix comparisons, comb over flicked hair.

Bogart's Bar Menu Brews 22

Come on over my friend of yesterday and brave this here stool.

So sorry for my unforeseeable: “My, what do we have here?”

I’m about to leave for my crib, so leave this Semisonic single with me.

I was kind of “into them”, back when love’s weather was hot wing greed.

If you’re not over me yet, perhaps we can still dairy an engineered child,

piss them off, and go where wards Casablanca dreams like dogs shake legs.

Drunk doctors almost never choose Bogart’s 22 from the bar menu drinks.

They keep looking for the blink that reminds them of gallantry’s missing jinx.

Don’t hurt yourself, yet I’m not yet lame and could care less for X-Men plans.

Hurry before the evening news refills your last Kryptonite tab for your Shazam.

There’s one Frappe for every gal’s Seven-Eleven, wet-walked resurrection will.

Ingrid clears the perfect schedule, hears ‘As Time Goes By’ , cheers Federal Hill.

Spiders in the Fly Room

Someday, you may hear the fly as he lands on your TV sky.

Somehow the spider watches this and crawls without being seen.

I have lived long enough to learn that there are spiders in the fly room.

The spider in the house refuses to eat and sleep.  He is trying to save the fly.

It is human nature to destroy one another and to create out of dying’s fear.

The man in the house is alone yet his son is trying to work out hopelessness.

The grass clusters and drops in unison.  Yet each blade sings its song.

Acts are like flies─ they give blindly to be or to not be trapped.

And the spider, may he rest in peace, is nothing without the fly’s law.

The fly can never become the spider, yet sometimes the spider can become the fly.

Flies will consume themselves if the spider refuses to show them the way.

I feel my leather car seat stretch like a spider’s web as I sit and wait for him.

He no longer struggles within this earth, within the silent blades of grass.

I have seen the spider’s web that Leia lies to sell and buy for Han Solo to die.

A spider eats and sleeps beyond his means until he knows the fly can’t live without.

I too have become dependent upon the spider by freeing myself of his flying room.

Kill the web to save the fly and you kill yourself within the spider’s solitude.

Save the spider without the fly’s act and you kill the web within the fly’s law.

You can hear the fly only when he gets lost within the TV’s windowless high.

You can see the spider hide when the fly rushes to exit his webbed room.

It is the man in the house you never hear or see yet he always hears and sees you.

Skin spins kite winds all around you.  Cocoon light is for the fly.  The spider never dies.

Before Red Ray-Ban Skies

Before the L.A. hills of Hollywood;

before the air-conditioned rental gasoline,

I held onto my reversed recycled Ray-Bans,

took shots of popcorn bread Red Bulls at every stop,

as wheels along Ventura Blvd rang beneath skies like texts.

Before Californian carpets palm treed my wedding bed,

I heard from the Pacific Ocean that I was among the deadꟷ

still walking dreams gone blind, dreams filled with gold cavities;

still talking strong with bent wills, talking reversed recycled shells

emptied by strangers such as I, emptied by the L.A. morning eyes.

Stand beyond the sea, breathe in all the wasted lives gone by.

Smile as you visit the man showing you that life is seriously sweet.

Watch the buzz in the way you drive as the radio acts instinctively.

For faith is in the flesh and blood, in the way you poor mailed wine.

Antennas across microwave hills tell an even taller tale, of lead nights.

Gina´s Jesus

Did somebody just call for an amen?

Because here I am again wearing brand new shoes

as I prepare for something higher

than my thick head can comprehend.

I love women like Jesus hates the red light of possession.

I hate men like Gina loves the green light of the forsaken.

Just don´t hate me because my shoes are new.

Just don´t love me because my mood is blue.

Here I walk again, Gina´s Jesus.

Today the children sense my Pentecostal spirit,

as I cross Park Street in sunglasses and headphones.

They say instincts come from the gut,

just as complex thoughts come from fundamental feelings.

They say that on the day of Pentecost, language will undress you

like a salvation salad rolls cherry tomatoes around baby leafs.

I see Gina leave my mother as she and I enter Park Street Church.

She alone speaks to us of desire´s burning happiness for sin´s songs.

She alone takes us beyond the promises that squeeze hands and pray

as the pastor shares his personal stories only her melodies can deliver.

Then, if lucky, Gina will sell me the day´s CD amid the solemn portraits

of all the previous pastors in the fellowship hall as I take care to fill

my Styrofoam cup with the musical blessings of black coffee perversions.

¨Thanks for all your support,¨ she says as I praise her shining vocal skin.

¨It´s going to rain,¨ my mother chants as I close her door to my car.

She looks through the window to see the surprise on my face

as the sun suddenly appears through a twinkle in her eyes.

She´s learned that I can find miracles in the smallest of things.

Finding sacred joy is a journey she and I take every Sunday morning.

We take pride in listening to the worship of the choir´s symphonies.

Because I love God more than me, more than family, more than three.

I love God like destiny loves eternity, like sleep loves the calling of the sea.

At the eclipse of her heart, I usually see fate shift among the trees.

Now the rain begins. The song plays. Love kicks my car like a startle reflex.

It is then that I sometimes join her for a beer at the bar down the street,

where she confesses her sins, pulls her black hair back as our eyes salivate.

Passion doubles-up with chosen commitment as desire lowers resistance´s flame.

Come rain, come shine: distant applause always connects me with Sunday service.

My mother and I like to watch the dusk sky web its rose genealogies over dinner,

until paranoia no longer fathers Park Street goers with her freely-translated hymns.

Salmon Memory

Whenever there´s a danger, our smiling efforts win the goals

of battles created like a river—

where hearts solve questions like fish are game for the hooked answers of claim.

There, generations omit graceless imitations like the flow

that carries pride trespassed and transferred like war´s unwelcomed inevitability.

Whatever has a blueprint, lack of experience brings everlasting chemistry

to bare soles calloused by leaps of faith,

stretch family´s present net like a long-lost lifeline, gives ritual´s salvations a twist.

Heaven limits dreams like sheets cover abundance, beheads royalty´s pillared bed

while lovers groom for unwanted rooms that return the welfare that goes so poorly met.

Whenever material is lacking, we find gravity in the salmon memory of love making sense—

the two-way tide that blunders what trouble claims to catch before the blind´s ´little too late´s´,

when greed baits compatibility´s limitations until fear releases hopes like unwanted needs.

Yet, every heart and soul works to be eased. Every body and mind plays to please.

Just to be blessed and just to appease. Ever casting lots yet not foolish enough to seize.

Truth lies naked in the garden that is the big picture. The trick is in how well

you can clothe it with the details. Don´t give up just to get there.

The waves of exegesis are never fleeting. They are always there.

Still, from the mighty iceberg to the deep blue-dotted sea,

tears drop innocence like a first baptism´s debt— genesis Sin into crying all over again.

Shelling Loyalty´s Wishbone Break

Weekends curl his thinning gray hair,

shows him a world where particles travel

all at unpredictable speeds.

He´s become loyalty´s active taxi to red eye, wishbone breaks.

My two-day gallon of milk sits on my lap in a paper bag.

He´s debating in the rear-view mirror my mother´s pheromone guilt.

Why, on this Friday, she decides to stand half-naked by his car door.

Almost home, he smiles to himself, as I wonder why he slows down.

A heavy rain begins to hit his Porsche shell as he swipes

the paper bag from my lap and hands me back my sweating milk,

asks me to yell should we suddenly encounter incoming traffic.

A green and brown turtle has attempted to cross the street.

He runs back, his gray hair and rolled shirt sleeves drenched.

He slowly pushes the driver´s door along as I hear Russell bark

somewhere beyond the dark, just before the engine accelerates.

Russell has escaped from my mother´s kitchen back door tonight.

Too-high on popcorn, she is listening to Peter Gabriel live.

Her wired husband reads a book on the ideologies of humanism.

He has forgotten to give Russell his cold water.

Because of them, my father stayed in love with hate:

long after the preference of school, the child support, the Master´s degree.

Still, on this Friday evening,

Russell was returned in an empty trash can.

When I returned two days later with sour milk,

my step-father proudly shook hands with my father,

before wiping his face, yellow and blue flannel, jeans.

Apparently, my mother had thrown up from the mess.

As I began to understand, my father quickly agreed,

paid him for the gasoline that drove Russell all the way to the dump.

¨The empty school bus never looked back,¨ he laughed.

¨Russell was hit so hard even the morning papers printed an extra.¨

My mother appeared at last, her face scrubbed so clean from crying,

all I could feel was Russell jumping, circling the yard without a whine.

Walking Raging Dog´s Flying Itch

You give me joy and pain. They just come in two´s.

You leave my calendar stained in black and blues.

I remember the sideway cracks along the townhouse road.

My bike was my life. The weekends my father let me ride.

I´ve seen lost souls before. Ones that never die.

If I could have your love inside, my spirits would ride high.

I remember coasting down. Faster than a speeding bullet.

Until speed bargained with death. My pedal caught a bank:

that flying itch to race sent me backwards, my head impact

left me in that moment, like when ice took my sled instead,

clanged the barrel as step-father came running down the hill.

And then I looked at you. And I thought it was true.

You take me to closed door.

Flowers mirror tears. Silver golds band.

You scratch backs by needing more.

Brave chore sinks like rope rock demand.

But, baby... you´ve always been a friend.

But, baby... friendship has an end.

Walk your dog out of your cage. Cut your needled stitch.

What stops and goes like traffic ain´t the rage of Belgian beer.

Lady, find me. Lady tragedy.

Lady, blind me. Lost and found identity.

Wonderland waffles. The milking of babies with chocolate.

With scar on his scalp, my dog licks at ants along concrete.

Lady, sad me. Wooed by wishing.

Lady, had me. Nurturing´s cruelty.

Put on your double-knotted sneakers. Sugarcoat cereal TV.

Record a home movie with your phone, as toddlers smile jump

the step now reserved for SUV´s. A step once cranked to limits,

like father was waitressed by tip talk, his tragic joke´s Timbuktu.

Even Odds Redial More Than Once

Once, I saw the grass grow, saw the dying light turn dawn.

Once, I saw my friend move on, become a father to the old.

They´re departing sights I´ve had to learn from as I walked,

looking for trails to peak to cliffs, rivers to sweep over rocks.

Once, I reminded my father of how he used to redial my gain,

hoping my cost could cancel the even odds more than once.

Once, education became a weekend that made me roommate,

as the sun poured down, heat so heavy I had to sing in the car,

fenced Neil Diamond tennis, dug a tunnel with my bare hands,

as I stood sad in the grass, my penance for the family we lost—

the way of the Amazing Grace she came to see, the way he chased

his motorcycle after she beached Takoma Park, cheap oil and gas.

Crowds Tadpole Clouds Over Ohaine

The Belgian fields slope up and down, the grassy fields solar wind dust

into the boundless night and cascade light far from this hallowed ground.

I am looking for the father who towel dries my domestic hair and back.

I am searching for the Napoleon of Jerusalem. He has become foreign.

He is taller now. Standing behind a deli counter, he still serves time.

He has sold me the less affordable pork chop, the kind seasoned

for the mothers who come to buy their sons a more aristocratic beef—

the spoiled shoulders burnt so crisp they leave no bone chips unturned.

But on this day, Napoleon trusts not his enemies of crowded greed,

just as he knew not how to save himself from the cages in between

the young woman whom he loved and the poison wages of his defeat.

I am seeking them within myself now— their steamed crab Superbowls.

I am eating his pork chop to build my own castle, a much richer empire—

dreams of leaner ponds over Ohaine, of pretty, tadpole girls so clean

their midnight crowds dish the jobs of cloud overtime and bullfrog benefits.

Dirt is not for the moral. It is for morale´s suffering and healing amphibian.

Philosophy at the MVA

Business hours are a lot like life: late in opening and a little too early to close.

Evil propagates into indirect ´me´s´, good into relative ´you´s´.

Tired girls are dropping philosophies at the MVA today.

I only have damned souls to save tonight.

Because tonight I´ll pass the liquor store on my way

to marry straight the one with twenty-nine lays.

I love the bruise mascara she hides on her face like strife.

She loves the weeds of life I garden for her like a wife.

What can I say that hasn´t already been said?

What should she do that hasn´t already been done?

I´m pounding feet through my shadow´s invisible pavement on my way,

as hope sounds off trumpets through my beating heart´s 1982 first-aired art.

I could have copyrighted that book on the chili bar shelf—

the one about the sociological sketches across the rocks of Utah.

She should have bitten off the kamikaze idolatry I chew—

the one about the zealous artist who swore to finish a tour while in Baltimore.

I need her consent to get ´us´ right— unlike the matters that turn laughs to tears

and fail to smile back at the good-byes that make promises suddenly disappear.

May consumption extinction bring her back to my side— long to make me hold

her angry sadness that sings in me as her happiness feeds my hunger again.

So complain in vain— stomp your homesick foot while outside of Oz.

The people will only stick their ¨Sorry. But We´re Closed Now¨ sign on their door.

They keep listening to some nationalism that pains the aged into becoming young.

They keep preaching complaints that sell books that make them do what they´re told.

So finish your cake America. Prejudice has just declared my fifteen minutes a holiday.

Even the MVA has closed its doors at 4:29 p.m. for the fast cars of avarice to celebrate.

Pick the lock to the teacher´s desk with your half-finished test if you can.

The dog´s bark means your fears will well up and a deserving Martha will finally run dry.

Tipping Grail

Cocoa thirst, jogging sex,

sunglass shade.

Japanese star, photograph memory,

Pacific peak.

African smile, sensitive mercy,

clever youth.

I can´t put my finger on the map

but I´m in San Francisco

and I don´t know the hills.

I guess I´ll call you

somewhere on the way home.

Black eyes in expresso bars.

Black fingernails on corners.

Black caps on gray heads.

San Francisco.

Look at the Italian waiters hustle.

Listen to young couples explain.

I may not reach my final destination

but I´ve known you here

in your black tights and high skirt,

walking your white poodle in Chinatown.

And if I now remind you

of the child you´ve outgrown,

look at the tipping glass overflow

when lovers steal hands where tears go.

If I can´t put my finger on the map

as it wrinkles into trash,

listen as boned girls cover their lips

as their phoned date growls:

¨He´s one of us... so why be different?¨

I may not meet you here again

but I´m getting to know the hills.

You see, it seems the crowd

needs me more than I want them.

For I take my coffee bubbling with froth,

not volcanic black!

I reciprocate their expendable polemics

with the hysterics of rage.

No. I may not see you again

but the waiters still slop oil upon my pants,

the couples still explain,

and the tipping glass still overflows

through the cartoon words: Tipping Grail.

I procreate with the new money

that dares to masquerade.

And if I flare my eyes and turn to face yours,

find omnipotence in knowing

that I walk a labyrinth of dissonance.

I might not belong to life

but I´m as alone as this art.

Perhaps all I stalk is a long hug

to remind me of love nearly gone.

Perhaps all I have is courage watered down.

But somewhere else you arrive

to a man who believes in good fortune

just because I said good-bye

to the forever you couldn´t live with

though you used to love the fog

like a streetcar loves the tension of a cable

tugging underneath

or a stranger such as I

the bridge

golden by the glow of sky stretching

the horizon.

Dogs Smack Gums in Cockroach Laurel

I'm taking off my white-laced sneakers with instinctual haste so rude.

My belt buckle clangs out mistaken premonitions as it hits my watch´s face.

I´m ready to shower off work sweat like cow grass changes underwear,

stare into the distance as ´the Batman´ governor pulls out his fat pen.

Yet, unlike him, you have a mission to undergo as he drives you home.

For the man you wish to know is me, how his bare feet are but unpainted toes.

You dog him as he chews eyes against your skin like a cockroach smacks gum.

Still, I think of you as I shower off my cold sweat, take him to my halls of fame,

send the State the picture you will receive as text— the one that speaks of thorny lies

as you towel dry my hair with his fierce face and deny his request to sow his cigarette.

The chime of jealousy sends you off to read your phone mail like traffic off´s a holiday,

pour milk into my night coffee like barn breezes make history out of corporate slaughter.

You wet the tip of your throat and I recite him this— he trips over your deadpan loyalty,

until I catch a glimpse of ´the Batman´ as sparrow news forwards skyscraper driveways.

Fishing to Keep from Drinking

(for Elizabeth Rodricks)

Tonight I´m talking ´bout a cure for scratching air,

the drive to drink that requires clean sheets.

Here I enter a grocer´s check-out,

weighing my license against the blush of the cashier´s touched face.

He says a total, hands me my receipt.

The sky is a cloudless blue.

Hundreds of parked trucks wait for business in the airport lot.

I´m not alone,

yet tonight I drink to my dying landlord and her Irish city.

She used to listen to my rhythm above her vaudeville memories

as she tried not to fall back asleep,

a price paid for night shift schmucks like her late husband and myself.

I watch my step as I enter steel,

place my valued carry-on beneath the seat in front of me.

My flight will not arrive on time. She will not partake of my sentimentalities.

I doze off for an hour,

say the Lord´s Prayer to the silent tenor of Mario´s Sigmund Romberg.

She used to count on my rent like the changing girls counted their tattoos,

had sex until they succeeded in financially hooking up men´s stares.

Only her grandson still remembers the antique acts

that packed laughter inside the comic books she collected

for a suitcase he knew his father would save for him fully intact.

Flora´s hope for catharsis was already gone,

as was the ever-longer growing day,

when I received news of her passing.

It was the smell of alcohol that covered my breath with sadness though

that made me call to book a flight within the cradle of ¨the T´s¨ heaven.

She used to love scolding me while we returned to her assisted living,

after I´d make her notice the artistic movements along Harvard Square,

yet not before I would find the hook to yet another Romberg song.

Flora and I must have sung every one of them a hundred times,

before she would finally kiss me, crying, outside her life of memories.

Her husband´s death was, for her, the final curtain.

Seems like I retired from driving trucks

when he ceased to inspire her with road songs.

She didn´t drive well when not under his protection.

When medications polarized her into charley horse drives,

I would pick her up to dine at downtown Boston´s finest.

Now I live off my family´s income as I drink off social security.

If only I had saved the comics she kept to stop my drinking,

we might now be celebrating the recovery of insatiable fishing.

Circling Logan´s runway like nurses park doctors at desks

while they make the rounds that keep them reviewing charts,

I pour vodka down the toilet to announce her long-made decision,

poison an ocean with her dearly-departed´s filtered past,

choose to be on her shore— survivor of this all too familiar class.

¨Before she died, she gave me this,¨

her grandson mutters into the corners of my eyes,

referring to a 20 cent comic book.

I point my shaking index finger pensively

at the green and orange heroes among its pages.

He finally explains how ´The Hulk´ lost his mind, ´The Thing´ his heart.

Laughing inside his wild eyes, she sleeps now as she did then,

unwelcome amid the flowered walls of bold names

that honor her widowed life with arrangements and sterile cards.

The freer one becomes because he wants to be loved,

the more dependently-evil he perceives those around him to be.

Love is a compatible dependence upon one´s significant other—

the extension of ´us´ that makes lust a part of the world God sets free.

As partners, we find it difficult to attract those less familiar with our flames.

Still, we wish to be there for others, help them to see themselves attracted.

Flora and I had believed that acceptance could be intellectually-based,

that one could grow closer to this world by learning to evolve from art itself.

I grab a seat in a far corner of the viewing room,

still tired from the journey from my married son´s home.

I watch her son ruffle the freshly-cut hair of his as he shakes hands.

Her death had much to do with his mutant life, I thought,

that she would allow her son to place such manic beliefs in him,

like our long drives gave her poetic license to color my drunk thoughts.

Looking between the hairspray of tree trunk heads

belonging to so many of her family... to so few of her friends,

I remember how free my operettas had made Beantown seem—

the forest she once briefly told me her husband had longed to leave.

I lived for her for over twenty years... she with my truck driver dreams,

when I hear a priest begin his eulogy, something about water and wine.

Breaking Hard in Allentown

She received my happiness.

I discovered her unaccepted gifts.

We brushed bodies, tenderly kissed.

At the very last moment, she said: “I’m so sorry.”

Found uncles bring gallons of milk to lost girls just starting out in life,

when you break too hard in Allentown.

She requested oil and vinegar instead.

I broke her several pieces of my own bread.

We remembered the bands, the tie-dye T-shirts bled.

As I insisted on paying the tip, she said: “Give it some time.”

Premeds strut malls before they open, hurry for drive-up Mocha rehabilitations,

when you break too hard in Allentown.

She got a text from her beloved son.

I went to the bathroom, just occupied by one.

We made excuses, loosened the belts and laces we won.

The manager came over, politely said: “Is there anything else I can do?”

Auto part barns become remodeled kitchens for tourist coal wars fought at home,

when you break too hard in Allentown.

She bought me a wallet, ‘a souvenir’ she sighed.

I wandered creaking floors, looked at my watch’s early time.

We spoke of antique wealth, porcelain breakfasts, love’s first blind.

Then, meeting two cages pets from another life, we said: “At least the weather is fair.”

Grief lifts calligraphy tears as valley fog reveals solitary cemetery, pyramid tree odds,

when you break too hard in Allentown.

So she leaves me standing there,

between her henna headlights and my unwaivering stare,

blames me for paternal spirits that lane family and pause affairs.

Her tires spin in the mud, wins nothing as she laughs with unstable eyes.

Her fears lift years later, like a broken feather licked over useless grounds,

when you break too hard in Allentown.

Defogging the Monsters of Shamrock

A tear’s salty acidity cuts through my frozen skin as base camp waves my return.

I am at the beginning of dying, yet a passive reality pinches beneath life’s cruelty.

I have seen the undiscovered mountains that almost drown lungs, crossed seas

swam by better men than me; beheld hearts saved by a bell I have come to hear.

Yet I must attend revivals of sweet reconciliation and she the avalanches of grief.

Defog the Parisian windshield of Marvin Gaye jaded, perfection-paid awe.

She smiles at you for a priceꟷ monsters are what men become to virgin eyes.

Versions of old politics filter air with the Eagles every ‘One of These Nights’.

If I could have woken low, punched myself as you regulated lover’s missed call,

I would have hiccupped your Senior Challenge, pivoted our steaming unknown.

Sudden light is woman’s praise as gradual darkness is prayer to a father’s sun.

What I wanted she could never take the placeꟷ the life of realized dreamsꟷ

the uninfected sight that gloves swipe as they wet air like an opened canteen.

I had wanted her to succeed, yet I am tired of praising her for mediocrities.

The masked man cheering her from inside the generational curtain is not me.

The tiny hand clenching pinky fingers is not the will of my claimed anonymity.

Wolves prefer unaged meat like men manhandled cheese.

Defeat dates selfless victory.  Victory dates self-destruction.

Her Pearl Harbor plurality of worlds plays out singularity,

like Golden Age comic books back-second our critically happy dance.

Mentally sojourn the Dylan ‘diamond rust’ of Colorado Springs,

as your radio gentles Shamrock mountains with Baez radio, Excalibur hell.

The passive life she wanted me to write, she accepts as poetic justice.

She attempted the trail as her breath clouded her ever-clogging steps.

She ignored my requests to never take a break, to always make-believe.

I could smell the icy water cake around her scarf as she whined defeat.

She slept at base camp when I reached summit, began my slow descent.

Unexciting the Iguana Female Trinity

He searches for her leaving a foreign plaza as the movie crowd slowly exits.

She has yet to read the play’s poem, has yet to break her married ticket stub.

Her friend has opened her eyes to a life she is about to see as a compromise.

Yet under control is her touch and quick summary of The Night of the Iguana.

He grunts to himself as she comes up, smelling of third-party incense smoke.

A child greets them in a running Volkswagen Beetle.  Their words sound old

as they argue the purposes of keeping one waiting, of keeping new jealousy.

Christ fills her mind with William’s exciting play while reciting Female Trinity.

A curious woman looks at them from the lowest step, covers her perfect hair.

Iguana scales close his eyes as the man in the car notices what is happening.

From his island he departs, arrives to Berwyn Heights, to his apartment brick.

She thinks of Mary and Martha as she draws out for him the priest’s dilemma,

draws out how flesh fought in vain, took ‘the long swim to China’ to fight drink.

He lights up for a moment as her Vaseline purse-breaks her ticket stub bread.

He feels his bucket heart buckshot desire as he watches cold eyes fill with fire.

The child replaces fears with burning hope as he observes this in his backseat,

like the poor observe how staple needs slowly burn a budget, burn rich plastic

without the rest of finger couch TV or two Three King's Day fried eggs on rice.

¨When the mind/soul become active, there is a widening of paranoia and a narrowing of perversion.  This creates longing and lust´s alienation, which is of Old Testament guilt, a sense of dependence by elimination´s passive taking.¨

-John Patrick Acevedo May 19, 2015, Synergy Press >8.

Burning Sheets for Earthquake Slates

There’s a light-year, baby boom rising up from the cold ground and this sleet,

as my beating heart listens to the weather warnings against my date’s ipod.

I’m looking at her from my fogged windshield as her sloping eyes defrost haste.

We people ski blades that steeple our moving church─ Christ’s sleeping cross.

I ignore commercial pitches between the traffic advice as my tires earthquake ice.

I get past her music’s echoes, like stale coffee and fake-cheese pizza forgets taste.

I was there once. But now it’s college graduation, my American license to disagree.

A year has passed. Balmy sheets chill irritated, mosquito skin. My cousin knocks.

He reminds me of a promise. It’s two in the afternoon. My brain is a traveling Psalm.

My father is coming to meet me on a beach. He brings a towel, bathing suit, my meds.

“WKAQ: Radio Reloj!” My grandfather knows now where he sleeps─ his room is dark.

My cousin smiles at my plastered, barking eyes, burning from windy mosquitos and flies.

My toothpaste slips from my brush. Like Spring Break, it’s skiing. I’m losing my kidneys.

The sun fills the damp air as my lungs are rigged by appetite like dream’s unboxed fight.

I recycle my wallet against black hole gravity─ my bills trial and error memory like waste.

Unfolding Handkerchiefs of the Grave

There’s a peace I know that keeps the heart of gold.

There’s a soul that falls down upon a grassy land of snow.

And there’s a holy man who smiles with his fist clenched

on a book of prayer. There’s a black cat that strays away

as you cross the forbidden street unaware of your own haste.

There’s a damned man, and he ain’t no lamb, thinking of her lies,

the girl who thought she had him in her sweating hands.

She was in a bar with a unsuited man, telling her lies of who she was,

before her mother took away her wounded heart as he stood at the door.

His family moved to California when her children no longer adored her.

Her sons made Midwest money for the Daddy’s girls who drunk so funny.

Their kids can tell you true: in Florida their grandparents play Bingo for Good News.

I moved to Hawaii to discover something worse than the business they had dispersed.

My doctor listened when he saw the woman so rich and blue, walking her dog on his lawn.

If you ask, she’ll tell you it ain’t far, to the hotel in her heart: the island that never yawns.

I stretch my handkerchief across my clothesline, somewhere in Massachusetts out of time.

And I woke yesterday, looking her those clothes I forgot to unhang, fold, and put away.

Maybe you’ll buy yourself one in your confusing youth, keep it in a drawer for what’s in store

on the day of Sabbath as Texans and Indians stir a soup the Jewish deliver to your doorstep.

I list these things all for you just to wipe your eye over a person who once hugged you bereft.

Now it seems to feigned clean in my suit as you exit smiling about what I do because I must

for the ones who prayed for gold broken teeth were stolen from for a handkerchief God unfolds.

No One Can Serve Anyone

Tell the slave to go home at 5:00.

No one can serve anyone.

Tell the mother she can have her jive.

Where we go and what we say doesn’t hurt.

Tell the sister to stay off the streets.

No one can serve anyone.

Tell the brother his money can’t pocket heat.

Who you kiss up to don’t measure the reserve.

Tell the man to pay you for your overtime.

No one can serve anyone.

Tell the customer what they need and not too kind.

What you get ain’t always what you deserve.

Tell the stranger to pack up their plans and go.

No one can serve anyone.

Tell the guest to lay off your hand and nose.

Why we live is to freely give and to find a way to earn.

Tell the Maker His plans are better than the yearn.

No one can serve anyone.

Tell the undertaker his grass is your cremation urn.

If you let Satan love you, all the women will turn.

So keep your coffin, keep your Hertz.

The world is no oyster if your waves don’t fall for her.

Meet it with a smile. Pay it nothing but your respect.

Tell me something I’ve had ever since we met.

No one can serve anyone.

Call your boo, your lawyer, your better-than-average oblivious pet.

Only after he hits you, text me a little yum in the interim.

Ladies book because hotels are cleaned by interns.

The people know the power that sweats upon a single bed

and two polished shoes upturned.

Keep your water. The oil isn’t virgin enough to burn.

The butter verse is the morning poem I’ve forgotten to churn.

All she has is the nerve. No one can serve anyone.

"The healing and suffering of sexuality comes from the elimination and submission of the hunger and anger of an active heart and mind.  A Christian's spiritual struggle is one of a soul's entropy.  Salvation comes from the transience of a passive mind."

-John Patrick Acevedo, May 16, 2015, Lares, Puerto Rico.

Roses on Valentine´s Day

Maybe isn´t good enough for me.

She calls me up Sundays after I fall asleep.

I tell her she´s wrong and only loves herself.

I hate to think of how unloved this makes my TV.

I was anything but maybe whenever you were around the world of men.

I´ve hated it ever since your friend called on-time and you began to laugh.

Perhaps it´s the black cat on shoulders that makes magic so unbelievable.

Rarely is one able to accept his own faults as well as be changed by them.

My friends are few yet all too real, like kicked dog declarations.

We judge either to instill needs into those who have-not

or judge ourselves when they seed more than mercy´s none´s.

It´s wanting another to be good enough that kills everything.

Dare to become all that you dreamed you could never be.

Better to have lost in life than to have unrequited gains.

There´s a joy that´s never lost, pleasures without pain.

Sorrow heals, not by accepting, but by changing, you see.

You may have known, yet I´ve always wanted to tell you–

I stayed only because you were better than me.

Maybe is only good enough if it can make a family conceive.

I soak your wetness through leather soles as my barber shoes.

I was, simply put, you. I kept it all to myself, frightened by reality.

So farewell until we meet again. Alone tonight, I drain Maui pebbles

from socks down a clogged small hotel sink as my Mai-Tai speaks

of something hard my son was working on, roses on Valentine´s Day.

My son sleeps in a make-believe world.

Some working nights, in my room, I cry for three;

hoping for tears that never came.

The past can leave never´s praying at the pew.

I put him to work, made him a schemer of second looks.

Gave him my story, cut the knot made for liars and thieves.

Still he buys flowers, avoids dying in my sleep. Misses rain.

I kiss his grief as he burns confusion listens while standing.

He heard me coughing once after Peter´s rooster gave him his exit.

Saw my walking-sex smile, like Papi´s, trenched in FM, red van news.

I came to bereft them both of incompetence´s scarlet letter dinosaur.

My Napoleonic war will go on, like Lucy ratings charge apartment air.

The Benefit of Being Old

You ask for favors, thinking

that healing will come.

There is a man

who wears a labeled shirt, pressed

by a hotel machine.

He believes in charity’s justice

that cannot make healing a sacrifice.

I am walking to my hotel room in a bit

of a hurry. The manager has requested it.

I look into my opaque room for something

he wants me to find.

It is something lost by his own

life, something found in the darkness—

his childhood’s heart; his bad grades: struggling

to listen to his Walkman,

still:

a gift from his father on his birthday.

He is looking,

as I am now, for the words that can never

answer the question of damage, of cost,

of A’s.

For the market only asks him:

“Double or the other A?”

It is in the dark of my vacant room

that he awaits— the past that drinks unpay.

He is his father: looking for A’s,

the benefit of private education’s being named.

My shirt catches on my door’s metal hinge,

something unnecessary,

like war’s damage, the space

of some drunk dream’s after-that’s.

The man with the white labeled shirt is the man

I almost became, even without

the straight A’s,

the present mistake: that white space of some loss

that can never be repaid despite the seizing of compromise,

no matter which idol keeps you sane.

I go to his father’s place and hear him laughing.

Because his mother has taken all of the batteries

to iron one of his clean shirts for some other

man. One for his one work day: a job I will never know.

Easing Belief´s Convenience Factor

(for my mother Carol)

I´ve seen her belief open like an Easter tomb opens on a child´s Good Friday face,

seen her hands press her denim working skirt, lick her lips with a heedless heirloom pin.

She doesn´t remember my blind faith then, when the pale sky chilled the idle hours,

penned me in a build-in porch in Forest Glen, like my crossed-out verses began to end.

Yet I was a brownie and she a child then, free to wear sunshades at dawn, struggle for relief

when work collected my fall like farmer´s cheese rakes downs like Mariah´s lazy-lawn wind.

I had not known wisdom then, yet wise were my drowning words before I burned in the fire

that reigns foolishness like Seinfeld´s comedy father repeated that drunk night: ´give and take´.

We must believe in the hardest factor first, before we can settle on a convenient truth instead,

before mother can walk into waking´s forest, the Gospel I have yet to forget, of wanting´s death.

I can still feel her crying over me, feel father smile as stereo turned mono into Classical breadth.

It doesn´t matter that they had not wanted me there.  Cream is poured to keep weak blood fair.

It is the day before Easter and I am practicing Hinduism as if all my desires could accept

that I am guiltless and she will leave but a few things, pray I will only need what needs reminding.

Taking Unknown Second Chances

(for my step-father Dr. Joseph V. Rodricks)

Tomorrow I go.

Ostend may be child;

Maryland may be cold.

Today I stay.

Lady you seem mean.

Mister, why so green?

Yesterday is passé,

like soupy fish and mussels.

Can you not cry should I hustle?

I´m sleepy, so weepy this night.

It´s my 47th birthday in Bruges.

I´m glad to have survived alive.

Where are you walking alone? By.

She tells her banker teller: ¨C´est domage.¨

She is also telling me to insert my new chip.

It´s not cold in the bar though.

Even though the bartender owner says:

¨He thinks he lives here.¨

Ostend, for now, is my home.

No. Not because of him or Him.

Because where I live has suddenly become owned.

¨Dancer or human?¨ This is the lyric on the radio.

I think we could both be both.

The hotel is not in my head.

My thoughts are simply steps back into bed.

My thoughts and you are brief.

Yet, to me, they keep your tears clean.

The darker the act, the deeper the chat.

I heard ´The Meaning of Life´ on a Bruges bound train today.

It may never arrive, yet goes something like this:

¨Take the unknown ouroboros gnosis and place it on top.

Yet before you do, make its base a second chance

by longing hard enough to strengthen it

by the piece that once weakened the egalitarian homeostatic sky.¨

Second chance, here I go.

You combed dreams out over the night.

To Moere I must alas befriend.

He has stayed in me up until now.

I pray he and I will speak again.

The waves, the dogs, the casino.

He was a Prince only to his boss.

Music and poem are now his in Moere.

I walk home with him. It is evening.

He sings of Terrell. Her memory stronger now.

He needs a cigarette bad, yet seems to be good.

Cousaert whisks by on his bikeꟷ a Hamill, Dean show.

We accept the injustice after hunger is gained from lust.

We accept the suffering after anger is lost to being loved.

Where going gets on, il ne pas ni agoge ni adroit.

Areté. Marché. C´est tout comme si, comme ça avec la tête.

Along dirt streets of Flanders, we connect and separate.

I´ve taken from the silver plate all that was leftꟷ

Marvin´s last supper had Frankie as the Judas.

Maybe London murdered Cousaert after all.

Yet there is nothing after the wild eyes forget.

He and I are here in a small cottage in Moere at last.

And even my father has to laugh.

Volcanic Gravity

When my father and I first hovered down Bourbon Street,

watched as others picked up still-burning butts, I loved not.

She brushes away bachelorhood like Jazz, wears my mask

as balconies receive our camouflage crowd, lift wet T-shirts.

She fills my palm with the same yet different New Orleans,

as we find humor in the fat hustler exiting his stripper joint.

¨It´s showtime!¨ he says, beading his beard with beer foam.

I never knew sweat could smell as slick as volcanic gravity.

We keep coming back for her to free my neurotic coup d´oeil.

Because sometimes flesh needs a psychotic Mardi Gras thrill,

the voyeurism that escapes sin like ¨the mysterious stranger¨

the Mark Twain asphalt of giant ground sloth reincarnation.

For isn´t this the fingering that makes wanting tongues bait,

scratch down hairy backs like crayfish shells give rice its taste?

What spices pleasure and joy with sorrow and pain salvations,

packs us into noisy beds like sardines― feed clam resistances.

Along with publishing five autobiographies, ´outsider stories´, that juxtapose the process singer-songwriters from the seventies and eighties took with his own ascetic approach to gnostic manifestations both within and without, Synergy Press books are the first to capitalize on the rehabilitation terminology of ´give and take´ John Patrick Acevedo founded as gospel.

His metaphysics introduced in the 1990´s to the general public through poetry readings define Good and Evil in terms of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, as illustrated in his landmark diagrams appearing here.

The 'Gospel of Give and Take' is one Acevedo began with his poems Gina's Jesus and Soul Attraction in 1987 and 1993.  In it, he lays down the gnosis of passive hunger's alkaline and active anger's acidity: the struggle between emotional fear and spiritual hope and physical fear and mental hope.  To merge both is to possess the power of God living within, the 'salt of the earth'.

Acevedo reveals how in the Tree of Knowledge the body gives actively while the soul takes passively and either gives passively to the heart or actively to the mind, which in turn takes actively from the mind or gives passively to the heart.  In Acevedo´s Tree of Life, it is an active soul and heart which gives and takes to and from the body in order that the mind may passively take.

A graduate of Boston University, Acevedo has been featured at Barnes & Noble as well as at many poetry venues.  His thought-provoking stories and beautiful poems lay down a fundamental marriage between the memory of prayer and the mystery of praise.  "I believe that, with enough transience in the wake of entropy, will and reason can awaken arrogance and ignorance," Acevedo says.

Acevedo's poetry can be seen on youtube.com, facebook.com, and google.com. Four of his poems were exhibited at The Artists' Gallery in Columbia, MD from 2009 to 2013. He writes from his hometown of Columbia, MD and was a top-performer for the retail giant Best Buy for 20 years.

¨The Holy Bible Sociology of active/passive morality is that when one becomes consistently active, he will experience pain (body) and sorrow (mind) or Old Testament suffering.  When one becomes passive enough, he will encounter pleasure (heart) and joy (soul) or New Testament salvation.  Hence, to remain active is to suffer the lot of the worker and to become passive is to enjoy the fruits of one´s labor or market success.  Yet, the control-sharing of market is one of worker sorrow and pleasure (mind and heart) whereas the freedom-dependence of the market is one of worker-market joy and pleasure (soul and heart).¨ -John Patrick Acevedo, September 30, 2015, Synergy Press >8.

Glossing Over the Goddess Eyes of Grief

There is no existence in humanity’s fallen Eden,

only the musk pulp that vortexes lust up from volcanoes

deep within the Devil’s inhuman, remotely-childish heart.

There within man lies unfinished progress.

I have touched the frayed edges between Heaven and Hell,

pierced completely through its seamstress depths.

I have seen how a Goddess’ eyes gloss over the surface of a man,

seen how she takes his hand deep inside hers as he double-takes

her fallen grace, stares into her well of grief, her dried well of affairs.

One midnight, one window quickly lifts along a sore man’s crossroad street.

A blinding kitchen light heals his swollen numb feet as they step over tiles,

heal his cold bare feet as his job opens his refrigerator to hunger and thirst.

Both call him there to sit and wait at its gate, fill his Omega gut with culture.

He waits for the sun to return, waits to wake lost lovers back to their seats.

He makes his table with toast, milk, and the fruits of Goddess grief gloss.

Leave behind the crumbs of your nonexistenceꟷ your needs will only satisfy

the jealousy that refills intolerance’s inhuman tank.

Drive off the early morning lacks with their taunt invisible reinsꟷ

the ones that join howling dogs to hissing cats,

as their avocado skin goosebumps with the pulp of their polluted skies,

peels back like your unrequited loves are unborn within your unlived past,

as clouds ripen with light, spoiling from red to brown;

as others vulture to learn the future’s all-too-familiar taskꟷ

the one that eventually rains down upon us with the sounds of bird song.

Moments of bliss and tactless hurtsꟷ the old man’s mind is a double-edged sword.

America’s ancestors call us back, to take our Roanoke Island broken toy hearts,

dig past the moss of the Devil’s dirt-cratered mound, find a reason worth living for.

Before dawn we will find out the truth, what really happened between me and you.

Neither Here Nor There

I could have cried for you,

since pushing through the rains of pouring train´s unrequited stop:

my traveling asteroids anchored; my oxidized thoughts sheathing by lust:

instead of sentimentalizing pain.  The doors split as I tour the street I sit departed on.

I could have saved eyes for you,

since Monet´s paintings have been salvaged by Nag Hammadi politicians.

Instead I saw the snow blight his poppies, overextend parasols, numb cheeks with rage.

The Outer Banks lighthouse sage has me spoken for by limbless trees of solemn weight.

I see her smile struggle during the over-friendly visit,

imagining the suffering that keeps family fears in what the future dreams.

Yet work is all I can keep, all that drives her from and to nowhere.

Found that debts are bought within and walked dress shoes along a sea of moss.

I go to lies, distractions, mysteries of Black Friday reins and machine paid fares.

There is no time to force the child´s restraining tears or cake the iron board horse.

My wish for her is to save my spirit when she finds my soul neither here nor there.

Yet she leads me to desert lakes-- winds that angel wing footprints like lipstick hail.

I could have climbed down from her peak,

since she loosened herself from me; since I watched omphalos lower her string.

Yet drive rises and falls as fat clouds the nets of acid-milked tea--

the sour step that shoulders transparent needs and descends hunchback altitudes.

Really Naps the Maitre D

(for my grandfather Juan Acevedo)

At sea, we mask beneath the mirrored cascading,

the mask we don whenever we kiss and pass parading.

I see her tears like salt in the earth sweats a bed;

see her years outclassed by mine

a hair and a breath.

She climbs out of her mattress way,

way ahead.  I am retired,

an uncrumbled wall of work fame.

At sea, really naps the Maitre D when pics keep asking

exactly just what grade of milk drowns

the silver pitcher, as he pours grease like a home plate

is run by El Nino's curving, checkered legged referee sliding catch.

I am listening to 'Red Red Wine' by Neil Diamond

like it was 'The Summer of '89'.

Somehow, he sings my sadness way too high,

leaves me laughing

like a serious, misunderstood clown.

Could I forget the slamming

morning door my Senior year by the Russian roommate?

Can I go back to the issues I've outgrown

like my unrepressed adolescence?

Stay with me an hour or two as 'September Morn' plays

in my stateroom's backseat.

I wrote you this note to say 'Thanks' for the year

God barely forgave.

The ship sways as I point

my text steering wheel into your finger paint, ocean moon.

Whatever you say, Dear.

I'm beyond effort, beyond the balcony's ballad spreading friendly fire.

'Heartlight' has E.T. phoning home after a much -too- long delay.

He found a friend.  Maybe I can, too.

My cell phone gets weaker like your biological clock

loses charge of my battery unconnected.

What I mean to say, the Maitre D already said

by the justice shining in his front car seat teeth: God's eye

immunity parachuting, dropping lines

like lies shake us to our fist's church immunity.

Holding onto to love's return is like letting go of a life lived too near.

It means nothing but the regret

of forgetting all but that which makes us plain.

Don't explain the tragedy of unabsorbed misperceptions.

I feel your mercury lust in the lines I drop, like whispering dust

collects impersonal space.

Static Cling Across the Basement Rug

My head rests on the seat as my father drives with eyes fixed ahead.

He speaks of a Spanish place where young couples with babies eat.

Weaker than ever before, I think of others as he rethinks his strategy.

Blinded by graduation´s dead-end streets, I´ve moved out and within.

I´ve left a basement for his New Year´s treat. Its rug sparks against me.

It scares like uneaten bread. Last night, I sat up until dawn statued heat.

My sober thoughts leave him, as I ascend rented stairs and wave to him.

I hear glass and radiator breathe, mesh my bed sheets like flowers meet.

Pulling out of my driveway, he leaves me to my porch’s frameless mattress.

Looking to Lares, I shoe lace solidarity as my boombox plays Edie Brickell.

The freezing rain chills like adrenaline sweetens sweat with shingled sex.

I watch nurses graffiti time as walls virgin doctors with unfinished debts.

Emoji Love Call-Out Time

Ending my work shift never felt so New Year’s Eve.

The month has ended.  I have won another month.

Yet I know not that these things happen for a reason.

The skateboard dude laughs just outside our storefront.

Perhaps fathers want sons to win forever in their lifetime,

cannot see that their moments are worthy and owed nothing.

Perhaps mothers are either Black Holes or firework sparks.

They curve human space like asteroids serve gravitational fields.

Her sick sweat is about to irritate my naked wrist.  She laughs.

It’s been too slow and long a pace.  My body begins to burn.

The weekend is young and I have nothing but Dad to please.

X-Ray his life and he may raise a glass to paternal invisibility.

Tired, she coughs at last.  My growing interest takes her energy.

My father calls as she walks to her car.  She flashes her abdomen.

We’re catching Emoji Love’s cold; scraping icons from our windshields.

Receipt paper holds numbers as I crawl Rt. 95, frog jump my driveway.

She is crying as she eats her old salad.  Her city love-life untold.

She has just enough cash for gas, groceries, and cheap booze.

My father thanks me the next morning when I call-out to shovel;

Dan Rather’s Uncle Sam’s potential for turning over dissonance.

Absence Fills the Eyes of Restlessness

Devotion kills the lies of selfishness.

A man will spend his entire life waiting for now or never.

Yet only a woman’s plans can confuse his restlessness.

Find a way back to Vulcan, the ‘Search for Spock’ afterlife.

The phone machine answers as he turns over in his bed.

Her pouting lip dreads his good luck with jealous bread grit.

To praise a lover is to offer mercy in return for promised love.

He sits and waits─ keeps my mistaken’s; leaves his forgiven’s.

These months, he warms my kettle into whistling.  I drink with him.

The morning rain ripples into streets as neighbors learn who he was.

Build yourself into a church.  Connect the dots.  Disobey all that moves.

It has been a year and a half since our eyes met at The Greene Turtle

with invitations to his returning memory.  “I’m giving a hint,” he had said.

Beacon Street

Guilt is the cause of excitement.

Desire is the effect of sorrow.

Sorrow is the cause of guilt.

Sanity is just enough depression

to close your mind to the aged.

Because sanity is the pearl in a shell─

each generation must try to pass it down to the next.

Until my brain becomes focused enough

to separate the destinations that come into view,

I will not stop here until my body has cast its shadow tilts.

As blue as love can be, you are still my angel.

You lift my limbs until I can almost float

between the sidewalk´s whirlwind of peripheral affinities.

Joy respects attraction.

Greed betrays trust.

Trust respects joy.

Compassion is just enough mania

to open your heart to the young.

Because compassion is the girl in a dress─

obsessed by the compulsion to grow into sex.

And just because the churches of guilt

have stained my soul with the burdens of the conscience,

I will no longer be ashamed to look you over like money.

For since accepting your claim of amnesia,

I´ve come to remember where expressions lie.

Since time has slowed my body and sped my mind,

I´ve gone to the only places you´ve left behind.

Where did you say you used to while away?

In the basement student lounge I heard you stay─

when you remember the man you saved for graduation day.

For again at dusk I know I must return

to the corners I´ve let unconquered fears squeeze me into─

because hope still trips me into confusion like a snake.

Perhaps continence is more like guilt than like love─

the more repressed the desire, the deeper the cut.

For emotions only prolong the desires sorrow forgets to wake.

And until I taste just enough sweetness in my tea,

I will continue looking for what´s already there.

Until your heart plays the tune that my soul can believe,

I will still feel the bitter rain of hurt in my parted hair.

And if by chance you see my name in print,

below a photograph of the ghost you resolved to save─

find me among ¨the T¨ passengers that came and went.

For many times I´ve been turning onto Beacon Street,

with your mother´s address in my memory´s safe─

hoping to send you a bouquet for Easter that year,

as I prayed my forsaken promises would become your faith.

Remember when they began to jog up and down your street,

as we meandered around puddles of rain like careful conversation─

before your mistrust would blow me off to second chance Lents?

Now you´re picking up your pace as I prepare a future here─

because I know that to care is to be close as greed to children.

Now my obsessive loss has made me as valuable as ´she´ to helpers─

because providence seeks to possess the misbegotten.

For I had thought that continence was love and sorrow lust─

the lonely nights I dropped you off when I was courting

the virtues my repressed desires had made into deeper cuts.

I had thought that my name in print after your maiden name

could hide sophomoric immortality, like my tears quickly swept

could earn the hurt your heart had spent─ preparing me for graduation day.

For every act of kindness done for the sake of salvation,

there are places that serve as beacons through which wisdom

may impart abstract locations with the details of personality.

They are the self-created heavens of imagination

that transform the inhibitions of relations into familiar paths─

to bound the heart only by the kindred spirits witnessed there.

For only on your street, do the sparrows think double-trunk tree academics,

until my father´s father´s arm hollows around my mother´s mother´s back─

for us to dare to dream the sentimental thoughts that do warm-wire tricks

like a messenger solstices angry guilt and hungry desire within orbital tracks.

Those who despise misery, come to crave unrequited foolishness:

like women sigh happiness along solitude´s slopes with such tender cares─

to slur the words of wise men who tear through the drunken darkness,

until weapons dull from the cutting of initiated promises and layered prayers.

The clock beside the Student Union seems to stop as she struts

along its wall and opens an industrial strength door to a flight of stairs.

Pant-scraping hands shoulder strap a book bag as her face total recalls.

Her eyes touch base with my Everest escapeꟷ my gee-whiz cataclysm

with an overexposed date, with a Dr. Zhivago, Lara Poem underground.

She gets stay.  The game is for my own risk.  She undresses patience.

So if I should make a toast for all to attend,

one Easter meal with the borrowed grace of a new seat,

remember the pride that used to raise a glass and smile─

the evenings dreams lit the miles as I looked for Beacon Street.

Dad´s Christmas Glass

There was once a man sold his heart and soul

before telling a girl how his sharing was all his own.

He was saved by giving up responsibility´s control,

waited until she told him the cost of cold over the phone.

If you ask me, I´ll be honest and true.

Let me explain how using eventually gets abused.

If I tell your family what I think of your missing core,

they´ll only want the free dust that settles beneath my door.

Because I´m off and on again with Dad´s Christmas glass.

I was looking out for Santa.  I was guilty for seeming glad.

I was singing Cats in the Cradle to dead traffic lights fast.

Then came the time for Puerto Rican, Three King rhymes,

as my mother reeled in and out of his life like apple wine.

It was 1981.  James Taylor gave up on heroine fun—

left Hollywood in a Carolinian taxi with born-again cash.

Yet I can´t stop crying, now that the borders are dying

and my mother´s undiscovered family keeps mine doing time.

So tell me if she listens while the townhouse is whistling

and the unborn baby I was so jealous of fades fast.

Maybe I´ll tell her tomorrow how she cleaned up the sorrow

and built a home around this signed heart like a collage cast.

Now will he ask his mother how to turn out yet another,

as she sings some hymn about a kite past its fighting prime?

So tell her that I´m sorry for thinking that she was married.

Ask my children to gather for the Big Fat Cat one more time.

There´s no road left untraveled, no glass filled, no genius ex-jock.

There´s no innocent kiss and tell, no simple hell in eternity´s tap.

I´m here staring at the hat to give birth from its hidden door-trap.

Still Dad´s Christmas glass lasts longer than a newlywed mocked.

Some die and never tell their sacrificial story.

Some fly only to land on a personal runway to glory.

Some ask their mothers how to lead with girlie questions.

Some ask their brothers how to follow manly suggestions.

Can you find the future in the palm of your hand—

the lines that run down genes and evaporate up again?

Do you egg on eyes that seethe the yolk of yeast lies

as they crack your mistakes, attack you from deep inside?

Because I´m off and on again with Dad´s Christmas glass.

There was a boy who had an airplane wire.  His anger fueled the fire.

He spun it round arrogance like an adult child running too mild.

Until there was no longer the girl, who for him was a windy pearl.

Only dials between the ceiling and couch of her mathematical smile.

Now it´s 2013.  I drink fast tea over charm-three´s pacing bed, heavily-bent

while the Tin Pan Alley Hawaiian troubles over late-night TV´s unforgiving—

used and abusing what overcharged use´s abused Wuthering Heights ring.

If you know and care off and on, you learn to earn enough accomplishment.

"When market gives, they have not.  When it takes, the worker has not.  When the worker gives, market has.  When he takes, market has as well.  To fall for loss, one learns to give to market and to take from the worker.  To believe in gain, one earns from the worker and takes from market."

-John Patrick Acevedo, January 24, 2016, Synergy Press >8.

The Missing Hour

(for my father John Acevedo)

You will not return this prayer when you come to lay beside her,

speak to B-line´s holy brave, summarize to all what you´ve saved.

We learn to compensate when the world favors dreams to sleep.

I was the hidden seeker of your venting ex´s unforgiving needs.

You pleaded denial when I saw laughter in your suffering eyes.

She was the fire you never lacked, your resolution´s missing hour.

It comes to some in the repressed release of forbidden thoughts.

Some speak to distant relatives in the flavors of sleep long lost.

I was humbled smarter by the shared desserts of sandman desires.

I got arrogant the harder you pushed, dumber the more she pulled.

She would eventually kneel to your meager self, her devoured trust.

It´s hard to please hurt when ill profits from counterbalanced greed.

Lack of use creates intelligence. This increases intolerance.

Absent abuse encourages ignorance. Presence creates use.

Use creates arrogance; arrogance ignorance. Abuse envies pride.

You can´t steal salvation by murdering ego any more than ego can

steal charity by murdering compromise. Seize guilt´s sacrificial son.

A woman is only impartial to sloth laborers, impotence´s childless cow.

Will draws hope from within. Grace calls upon drought to forsake fear.

It is but the missing hour that we desire, a chance to work it out alone—

feel her adrenal lie crisis her inconvenience, marry the easily amused.

Wasted Runs Over Broken Records

Let your hair down tonight, but keep it neat for his Thanksgiving.

Because I remember living without, remember being second best.

Turn me on without him slowly. Only before it´s too late,

tell him how strong he is, tell him how he makes you weak.

And just maybe you´ll see that I´ve forgotten who I am.

Maybe you can believe your heart can be healed by my kiss.

For your love goes south for his mind to stay stable,

as my art splices this story like a reporter´s curious vice,

to embellish, not its context, but rather its irrelevance,

so that he may watch you wife the cherry pie you slice,

after holding my plate like an audio cassette snapped

of its tinsel wails by an empty parking lot quarterback girl.

Because I remember picking up my cafeteria tray at Clemson,

just because there were no sleds for my freshman snow.

I remember sketching a beard I would later grow,

until my separation year generated a protected ledge grave

above the mighty Colorado River,

before changing film rolls, look at Grand Canyon insignificance.

I care nothing of the spilled milk that cried but knew me not;

care little for the spring that wilts hope like a living fear.

Sell your wasted run for the unrecorded, unsaved selfie.

For those who will loss, learn how your gain never changes.

I care but for the lazy fog that beats hearts of impressed gold.

Care for the sentimental skip that shovels snow quick at dusk.

Stripping Coal´s Gold

The weather has been kind this winter’s day

on the pilgrimage to the place of my second chance rebirth.

Because the clouds held up their weight, I too tried to be brave

as I boarded the train for a destination at the other end of life.

With me is a picture that has taken me so far for so long

in spite of the hunch of my back and the gray in my beard.

For some reason my cabin is too cold and I find myself

leaving shadows for soup and coffee in the train´s cafeteria.

Out of the corner of my eye I watch as my waitress leans over me

to take my menu and, because she and I are strangers,

offer to satisfy her curiosity by telling her the tale.

Taking off her apron, she sits to take her break with me

as I ask her if she believed in ¨true love after false facts¨.

In and out of doubt´s rooms, women come on and then move out.

We need to suffer when alchemy marries disenchantment´s zoom.

I never banked on his crocodile smile, never thought it could make him

a better man as I watched his pride turn to her as they walked away.

Still, I had noticed that he would comb his hair more than once

on every go, drive spit down my throat whenever I dog-eared his bible.

I should have listened to my friend when all he did was shake his head,

as I dropped my right fist over the poem, told him I would never be through.

¨Janus is his god,¨ he had said, as my optimism blinded me into believing

that this manager then must have a warm side beneath his corporate cool.

Still, sitting in my car as my headlights documented their night´s numbers,

I couldn´t help but feel the ticking drive that makes a company lose its protocol.

Turning away from the moving night´s window, I met my companion´s lonely stare

and, for a fleeting moment, saw through her polite nod.

My hand grabs for my coffee only to feel hers stop it, then to go on.

¨It´s cold now,¨ she says.

I lift the cup as if to toast her empathy.

¨I know,¨ I reply sympathetically.

¨Next stop... Boston!¨ the intercom announced.

Giving my server a ten dollar tip, I thank her for her time.

¨I loved her too much,¨ I confess with a smile.

She seems to understand as I ask for the check.

¨You´ve paid enough,¨ she says.

I was going back now to my father´s New England college youth.

Going to where an apartment balcony waited with open arms,

as he tried to catch another round of plastic golf balls from a toy rifle.

Going to the grass where father had placed her kite string in my hand.

Yet as my netted maid decided to strip to pieces the check of my coal´s gold,

we left the tears then and there, like a love kept after getting too hard sold.

Wiping the Face of Venus

I forget not to think until she sleeps.

I care to know how much she can bear.

I learn by remembering when she weeps.

Nothing is present without procrastinating.

Procreation obligates with justification´s scars.

Arrogance hurts ambition for alienation to attract healing.

I think of missing pleasures she has hidden deep.

I hear her crying when her thoughts are lain bare.

I forget not to think until she sleeps.

Abuse excludes and use includes hating.

Dreams cage lost souls within golden bars.

Nothing is present without procrastinating.

Sweat weakens her like tears in speech.

Sorrow´s game is always played by two.

I learn by remembering when she weeps.

Loving sweats hunger with the moans of mating.

Lust angers men into doing regretful acts.

Arrogance hurts ambition for alienation to attract healing.

Her cave wells up whenever she senses my desire.

Her curves cut blues like a diamond woos.

I forget not to think until she sleeps.

Giving seeks guilt until danger is found.

Righteousness pays dues with population´s tax.

Nothing is present without procrastinating.

Then I string her with foam like the moon waves a beach.

We make out until I´ve taken all she has to share.

Afterwards, I learn by remembering when she weeps.

Hope wipes the face of hurt when we stop aching.

Fear remembers desire´s ever-fleeting stars.

Together, arrogance hurts ambition for alienation to attract healing.

Dirty laundry keeps lying clean. To wife is to grace a street.

Sin comes from knowing. Marriage is caring´s prayer.

I forget not to think until she sleeps.

I learn by remembering when she weeps.

Good deeds save punishment. Forgiving blesses betraying.

Charity compromises when Venus becomes Mars.

What is ambitious is arrogant. Procrastination attracts by alienating.

Nurturing the Sobriety Within

St. Patrick´s Day uncovers guilt´s self-convictions.

The law of inaction depletes elixir´s diuretic cans.

Accelerated needs keep one closing the door.

Love is an only child feeding on what he doesn´t own.

I line my dormitory shelf with wide-open intimacies.

I am as proud as I am sensitive. No one walks alone.

Absence calls for a fixed presence to bare what once was here.

When your world seems as locally-visited as a gas station,

empty your tank and fill your spare tire for upward mobility.

People may trouble differently, yet each tells a similar tragedy:

a child is conceived, a job doesn´t pay, generations separate the wealth.

As it turns out, the future reaches out for the past, makes us human.

Feelings are the arteries, thoughts the veins that run to the deities.

A woman knows this, how her window opens, her door closes,

when the house they belong to divides and her means are in question.

So pay tithes for the sober man. Prepare for the life after employment.

Stop earning only to be checked by the analysts that only tout companies

founded by pioneers who hire workers only their children can understand.

For not only are mothers that permanent stain on the brand new frying pan,

they are also the purple buds that bloom so sparingly along roadside trees.

I´m intoxicated with sober men´s wives whenever they point them out to me.

We are both somehow a part of their recovery, that reemerging innocence.

It values sacrifice, not for the individual, but rather for newborn existence—

not to enlighten the authorities, the institutions, the political establishment.

We may not wear a ring, yet our child´s synapses woo us like nature´s matrimony.

We might not be under the influence, yet we both limbo under dependency´s bar.

Though our tears only sell pride, we squeeze tighter, talk softer than melted butter,

let them stream around rosy cheeks until life confronts with the fallen´s festivities.

Still life´s celebration is only to accept the hell that is all around us

whenever we rejoice in finding that prenatal piece of heaven within,

hear the missing child´s voice, shed blood with the person we call our spouse.

Because it´s really for them that we pray, to gather for the purgatory that is without.

As in the ancient Chinese philosophy,

absent yin pulls me into your reality

by submerging memories into distractions.

Present yang pushes you into my dreams

by surfacing memories from distractions.

Hunger and anger circle vices like sharks in a tank.

Absence calls for a fixed presence to veer lies from what is clear.

You hold not what you think I possess nor what I really think,

though you confess only that we might quickly drink.

We are environmental beggars and hereditary thieves.

Who we mix with dictates what we follow and to whom we concede.

We are stumbling to close the deal— rain bullets our complimentary hats.

I am mumbling to my ball-pitching saints, standing drunkenly at bat.

You hold onto my battle that you may fall feet-first into my liberated feel,

though I show you only the imitated habits that you miraculously make real.

We are consumed by each other like their lies kill our jealousy for the obvious meal.

Paranoia cries for leg and butt-men to forever solve thrill´s perverted mystery.

Passive futures lead only to active pasts, public fears to solitary hopes recovered from loss.

Greed fists privileged envy into staged climbs while miners trap pity below trust´s gravity.

You suggest to my imagination that you kind of love me,

though I hold out to hold on out of fear of losing your sympathy.

Tangents twist complications into the games of friends and enemies.

Art is at best journalism and life at worst a genetic receipt´s faded experience.

I free your heart to scurry action and law from the ignorant indulgence of Christianity—

come up with accepted months of change for the redemptive points of society´s ´no return´

whenever your burning eyes take the chill out of my absolutes you smile into relativity.

We realize dreams when history is made out of bought memories and souls born to be free.

Yet love teaches us to sing life into its turning of art into momentary tears.

I no longer watch the Times Square ball fall, try to bring back melancholy cheer.

Do you hold out because I hold onto Magdalene grace and the wrath of God?

Some people love for a taste of life while others live for love´s struggle for monogamy.

So can you enlighten me as to the reasons true love must slowly rot—

lovers go for schemes while Mom and Pop design the family for loss?

Beggars live off what you make, thieves off the dreams that children outgrow like cribs.

We learn the price of success by forgiving another for their failed attempts at happiness.

May we steal not nor sacrifice for the foolish sake of divorce´s entropic company.

We fix marriages, not by incompatibility´s fidelities, but rather by finding joy in pain—

trust longs for love when sorrow´s pleasures live less and lust becomes more transient.

I sweat you because you dry bones and rust eyes for the kind cruelty of familiar strangers.

I don´t enjoy watching internet disasters.

Impatience causes my body to become overly-active

when your mind gets too passive.

I desire you then— wish to pull you into my life.