I L U like my ***** clothes
Love being forgotten
On my bedroom floor

I L U like chores love the
music that helps them
forget they're chores

I L U like ***** dishes
Love hot showers and
the other side of the sink

I L U like I love spilling
Salt, and warding off the evil,
By tossing some behind my back

I L U like I love
Breaking rules about
my own supposed
non-Superstition

I L U like black cats love
Bad luck, cause to them,
It's just Friday, you know?

I L U like the hot dog bun
Loves staring at the beef patty,
Wishing "if only, if only"

I L U like bread loves
Being forgotten till we're really hungry
And then we're all ungrateful, like
"Hey bread, you remember us?"
And bread is high above us, like
"Always."
Not even a hint of scorn

I L U like the first time I saw
Jurassic Park, The dinosaurs
Were real enough
sans chicken feathers, and
Who needs modern science anyways
when love has no fossil records?

I L U like the weather loves
Surprise parties.
I L U like painful
surprise party memories love
being forgotten on my bedroom floor

I love you like Mayflies love living,
oh so briefly, once a day, every single day,
Chapter one to chapter none

I love you like mayflies love themselves,
brevity and all, stirred by nothing but
the glow of Dawn's light,
Dead by dusk, the Mayfly never
knows its final form.
It dies
in complete
incompletion,
but that's okay.

It drank the salt ocean,
it breathed the living air,
And that's how I want to L U

I write poetry when thoughts infect me
catching colloquy in a web to feast
my thorax alates pearlescent scales
I capture nectar from dewy books
***** waxy words that form in the back
of my throat in honeycomb shapes
they taste sweetest directly from my lips
until you notice six legs protruding
or ten eyes staring up at you in fear
the apex of my elytra is rainbow chrome
but all you see is a hardened shell
admittedly, all I've ever had is ability
to filiform syllables and sounds
dangle lexicon delicately from silk pages
in hopes of creating all the beauty
that I have never felt I possess in this form

Hard to believe it was 18 Years ago, 1998.
Waiting that long to make love is an unfortunate fate.

A July rain awakens the sleeping nymphs’,
Like old Rip Van Winkle, a yawn & stretch those limbs

Clawing their way out of an earthen cocoon,
Metamorphous begins by the light of the moon.

An electric buzz fills the West Virginia holler,
Charlie Cicada says “Connectin’ with them females is the problem”

And not long after… a loving relationship is bequeathed,
For the less fortunate, the brown trout waits beneath the Sycamore for a tasty treat.

Well there you have it; such is the life of the Brood Cicada,
And for new born nymphs’, it’s time to go sleep until the next Mania.

K.E. Carman 2016