I sit here on the side
Of my own long road
Listening to the memories
Of crickets and toads
As I remember back
To years of childhood
Spent feeling lucky
To be in the wildwood.

No car horns honking
No neighbors screaming.
No jarring realities to
Waken me from dreaming.
The breezes and the stars
The city kid changing gears
Creating a landscape that has
Resided in me through the years.

Ice cream socials and songs
Sung in the church nearby
Bringing tears to my eyes
But I did not know why.
Why did these simple folks
So very glad to be alive
Smile through the foment
Then go right on to thrive?

They had no television,
Some had radios to hear
They relied on Farmer’s Almanac
To help them through the year.
They made their way themselves,
Knew when to plant and to reap.
When to harvest and store food;
Early to rise and early to sleep

They had a car and a tractor
But seldom had to leave home.
They bought this farm
When they lost the urge to roam.
We didn’t go to movies then,
But weddings and funerals
Brought friends together;
Cousins aunts and uncles.

At summers end I went back
To the city I knew so well
And got used to being there
After a rather touchy spell.
The water tasted differently
And Grandma was a great cook.
So, a whole lifetime later
Those days deserve another look.

I wish I could go bike riding with a girl,
I wish I knew how to ride a bike...
or how to perfectly apply lipstick in a way
that looked natural.
There's something about long hair and rural roads,
leaves ruffled along the dusted trail,
perfect petals proud in the wind.
I want it all.
That perfect song during a midnight wander,
the taste of fresh oxygen on my tongue.
The feeling of two eyes locked on mine
hands so soft, fingers unbelievably smooth.
I guess there's more that will come this way,
an imaginable feeling felt only today.

Jeff said
I wish I was dirt
I'd wait on the spills and the the cigarette butts
Doubt very much it would hurt
From the bounce of the glass
Or the filter, for better or worse

He said it's easy to soak up stories
If you're laying on the ground

And he said
No clocks or unrequited work
It'd just be me, I'm the dirt
I let you walk all over me anyway
So let me enjoy it

the coaxing leering laughter and the coke crusted smiles hold me together through my daily trials until the mountains fade and plains stretch far and my childhood chains resurface along with old scars.

Two days into being back in Van Lear upon onset emergency,
I feel trapped in my childhood home and engulfed by jingo lobbyists who have posters of Ronald Reagan,
And I read about Pascal's Wager in an essay by William Buckley to realize how anyone, in annoyance, could fall into conservatism.

I come home and all the farmers are talking Communist uprising,
But back in the university the Mormon professors are talking up our structure and that we should roll with the punches.

Noting that everyone disagrees on something,
Everyone back home is too sessile to talk or debate the issues.

I must leave at once and argue with tact about the grander schemes of life and money,
I'm just getting started.

///

This is not a place where you can accumulate *** and alcohol,
And thus not a safe space for creative expression and thought...

In the dormitory halls I would put on my Aztec print sunglasses and parade the hallways declaring myself the most immortal of men from third to fourth floor.

And then you inevitably get trapped in a two story country house,

Cry for the fact that the sky is too calm.

Nothing happens here.
Nothing happens here...
It makes me uncomfortable.

Let me sit in the corner of room 403 and meditate with more excitement than a shouting match here,
Or how everything is so quiet and we're waiting for a phone call of awful news.

They all must think I eat nothing,
I subsist on nighttime ghost stories, or something,
I'm a creature of the night,

Then who are you,
Man of American with your European jaw,
Or King of all men who dare to call themselves free,
Why is it that in a decade of invention and creativity
That it's the appeal of brawn that wins out continually?

We are regressing.

Eastern Kentucky is the center of the wound,
The eye of barbarism and I am not welcome.

I will move west to spite my family and then become successful to spite society.

This cathedral was ruined by dust,
Your altar has gone out
And you smell so strongly of the pine trees you rest your head under.

I wish I could bottle you,
Either to have that aroma at my disposal,
Or a shot of you to drown out my hardships.

Each day moves in sequence with great emphasis on the orchards,
Bearing myriad fruits,
Such heavy blossoms in sequence with your arrival.

I'll wish I wouldn't have locked myself away,
Away from the sunlight—
The good sunbeams that grant entrance into life,
Spending all my time lamenting for the world around me.

Seems like no time to feel love now,
Only time to cry for the love I let go to waste.