A seed
as trim
when frills
are mine
in Roanoke
shall shine
Blue Ridge
Mountain Skies
again with
appellation contrôlée
in my
appetite and
a year
away in
Virginia and
tannin taste
sure today.

You could have reached here Wednesday by last choice
Perhaps your mood shifted. All the calm nights
you had now lay awake. You explore the city
built by the perfect people, white cathedral
stands upright on a slant, a compass buried in plain sight,
the gibberish of art students from painting lullabies as sirens.
Only children are asleep. The university
grows younger each year. The best teacher
is always late, not realizing her impact.

The person I’m most comfortable with
stays in bed. Security found indoors
the couch allures, security in the capsule,
The deafening whispers, the genuine friends
who live nearby and can’t talk straight. The blessed temple
building worshiped by advertising majors.

The lucid potential, morning sprints round the track,
a library sustained by crushed Adderall —
glowering orbs rotating back counter clockwise,
out of chimneys the black spirits climb,
detectives bicycling, the honor students rummaging
for class notes in the deep end of the dumpster.

So this is college? That frontier plateauing
before you can dive off a cloud? So this utopia
was a dollhouse, the daily on the doormat
camps in the hallway: waits while the child watches
a sit-com?
Don’t apartments stand still? Are abstract paintings
and basketball supposed to nurture a city,
not only Richmond, but also other lonely cities
of misunderstood brunettes, dank **** and dubstep
the weekend will seldom put out
until the city you moved to shuts its eye?

Just tell yourself, “live.” The best teacher, eighteen
when she moved to the university, still grins
even as she coughs out fiberglass. Any day now,
she sings, I’ll take a drive and leave this place.
I pull her close and say. You haven’t slept in your own bed.
The boy who you’ve always loved still thinks about you.
The books you read before breakfast,
whoever the author may be, inspires
and your least favorite student who raises her hand
is judged but her posture never falters.

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

at the fete du bons vieux temps - Cahokia, Illinois

White clouds of rosin dust
Flew off Geoff's fiddle strings
As his earth dance
Soared above the pulsing
Of friends on bass and guitar.

Tuniced men bowed
To their bonneted ladies
Bedecked in colonial frocks.
In turn each pair sashayed
Down and up the line,
Whirled and laced their way
Through outstretched hands
Of family, friends and neighbors
Shaping an arch at line's end
For all the rest to pass beneath.

All across our country's timescape
Countless bridal pairs
Have sealed their sacraments
Spinning in the whirlwind
Of the Virginia Reel -
With each interclasping of arms
A blessing upon their unions.

Geoff lifted his bow from the strings,
And bowed with his band to receive
The applause rippling the air
Like the patter of ancestral rain
Nourishing the sweet soil
Of our common earthly essence.

February, 2007

The country music plays at a low tinny volume
I never much cared for it
But thinking back now I enjoyed it then
From the back seat of a love's family car
Stopping at small town after town
Country meals and light on conversation
Our favorite was finding
everyday treasures of times long past.
How appropriate then as I scour my mind doing the same
thing

Running through ancient Appalachia
Frolicking without a care
She had never felt more joy-
Never felt less aware.

As they followed the waterfall trail,
There was no time to spare-
Time was irrelevant,
As they were breathing in clean air.

Treetops swirling into one another,
Breeze slow and soft,
Sweeping salty tears off of her cheek-
They were lost.

Lost in their own minds,
Nothing left to exhaust.
Inspiration was the mountain peak-
Floral scents aloft.

Driving in a spiral
Down the rugged cracked road-
They pulled off to the side,
Anxieties and heart rates slowed.

There they found two cement half-
Pipes peering over the mountain side
They climbed down, sat in their grasps-
Contently contemplating their lives.

She turned to her love
To ask what he was doing.
He said “writing down ideas”

There, she saw her fate.

Writing is dangerous a sport
With far too many muscles left to pull
Not only in my body

Writing is far few abstract-I cannot think in words and I cannot label-the day I put it into words it's labeled
And that is dangerous a vote

Thinking is much cleaner yes, for now
They said that thoughts are safe
yet I don't think obscenities in public
And I don't feel obscenities in public

Two sane thoughts a day(required by law) they say will keep the writers away from Fitzgerald's and Virginia's-Poe is still fair ground

They said that diaries were safe, but we writers do not write in public
But sports are played to audiences and votes need to be a-gotten and we writers express our condolences for the death of writing and the birth of Athleticism and Campaigns

I hate airplanes.
I hate them
More than
Anything
I've ever hated.

Except the flight
From Dulles
To Ft. Lauderdale.
I like that.

Especially at night
When it feels like
Stars
Can be caught with
A thin fishing line
Twenty feet away

And eventually you
Go off the mainland
And can't tell where
The water starts
Or
The stars stop.

Then you see a
Sudden line of lights below
And beyond that
An infinity of bright bursts
Of lights
And lamps.

All darkness,
Then suddenly
Light.

I really hate planes.

But not the flight
From Dulles
To Ft. Lauderdale
At night.
I love that.

Your colors are so heavy, how dare I, I cannot sleep. Years inundated under, through skin coils, marigold fields. Yellow crocuses, orange California poppies. Moors of cattle ranchers, yokes of oxen. Plasticine uber-confidence, silky white-skinned testubular thrice people harmonies. Blisses of contagion, contagious bliss. Wrists and incisors, tying down in a bedroom, waking up to live harps and choruses. You dance like you're so alive, but I'm so alive I can't dance. Or breathe. Or knead my fists of earthen wears, or sell my soul completely. I drove off a cliff last night, but the four foot fall ended neatly. The plateau authors my chance to sew my bright, beyond- my fortunes. But the hour before I fall asleep, seems to be the greatest torture.