may sometime four

All I own I cleaned and placed in boxes, and may leave in boxes, crowding the walls around the central space. There lies my great wooden desk, small but solid, I take with me wherever I go. All the way back to 1998. There lies my intention to write my books. The tv got the last of invitations. I may not open the door. When I die someone oughta cut my desk down and bury me in it. Together may we be, repurposed.

may sometime three

I believe it is good to be part of what is to come. Always a change. When you become it, staying exactly with it, they see you embody a movement and you can be credited, thus, you are the movement. This is not without dangers. You may rise and fall. You may lose yourself somewhat. They may disinherit you when the fashions change. I tend to shy from movements which are both conscious and public. I may identify with some, partways...yet I like to create space and step aside into it. I prefer my own rhythms. My own movement. Yet even personality is perilous. Life will go on so become.

may sometime two

I told you what she said to me and then I felt hurt again, yesterday all over me. I faltered and began to cry. You were my witness. All night I was on knees and hands, scrubbing the place I called home for 5 years. When I finished it was dawn.  I hardly got any sleep. Life pulls me along. Today I am the broken tree lying in pieces in the parking lot. I will surrender the keys.

may sometime one

Wind beats around the heads of palm trees above me. Kids flirt with chlorine in this concrete pool. What a violet sky. What a chemical mess.

mack truck

i was making my way down a particularly dicey part of highway number 5. in a hatchback, black. in a single lane slowpoke being invaded on either side. half the heads i saw were looking back at me from the road. not a good sign in a sea of choppy brake lights. my lane was more compressed than the sacramento real estate rental market and the hottest around. you coulda sold space and got rich in a sec, without thinking. the overpasses left heavy eyeliner inside the shadow of downtown, highlighted by the glass of a thousand former accidents. the exit for Q street was coming up like the question i was asking myself: should i get off this bad trip before i make history? and for all the wrong reasons. sometimes a single choice can save your life. it would take me way off my timing, was the con. i kept my course. i could reach out and touch the rushed commuters, encased in their steel murder machines. i jedi mind tricked myself into a crosswalk mentality, like those white lines meant anything to protect us. i turned up my radio and let down the windows. i threw fear into the wind as i shifted into third. kept my eyes on the tail of a wandering june bug with dual exhaust. all seemed well. then the mack truck came screeching down my left flank and almost pinioned a subaru dead stopped by the weavers, all running interference. i saw the giant wheels roll by and they were smoking. taller than my car! melting rubber for a living! suddenly my world could fit inside a hot wheel. i could read the writing. on the sidewall.

k and k

baseball cap on
backwards
tomboy
bad news
the original
skinny
acidwash
jeans
tore up old
self. like usual

a taller you
a bad hair day
no bra. ya
wool cap
spinning around a
middle
finger
scratcher bingo by
a switchblade
gettin’ high

wow
twenty ten
just look at us
then
the madness
the sadness
followed us
haunted us
still i long to
remember


the way you
touched me
gave me
chills
weight of an eighty
impala beneath us

reading our poems
aloud and again
the fortune of
finding a
friend
oh why
oh why
did it all
have to
end

katya mills © 2018

pulse @ 39

The medical tech excused herself to speak with her supervisor. She hid her worry rather well. I was in a gown after an EKG. I had a paperback in hand, from the donated library in the waiting room. This happened almost every time. I was once living at high speeds. Sleepless nights. Racing around to no end. Years ago I exited my madness. Since then life has been something to cherish in slow motion. Few sudden surprises. When I saw her, she looked relieved. I asked her the number. Today my pulse chimes in @ 39.

kids (life as lab)

When I was a kid I witnessed attributes and played with them. I wanted to know what would happen when I behaved a certain way. This was life as laboratory. I tried lying and got caught. I tried being super nice to people I didn't know. I tried bullying, after I myself was bullied. I tried kissing my friends (with their consent). I tried doing chores without being asked. I tried fighting with fists. I tried reading a book from beginning to end without stopping.

If an adult caught me experimenting this way, I would often be earmarked from that moment forward based on my behavior. This was called judgment and came very easy to them. I learned not to trust adults very well.

hide behind umbrella

you can try and hide behind umbrella. you can hide behind your interpretation of the law. you can hide inside your home behind your money and your discourse. you can call for law enforcement. do not be surprised when they pull you out from cozy privilege and imprison you. restricting your arms at the wrists. rolling your fingertips in ink. will you smile for the camera? will you represent your vitriol? will you miss your mocha cappuccino reserve and high castle office? the fawning gucci assistants shredding papers, who you undress with your eyes, leaning back in your chair while stroking your gold-weighted pen?

painted fences

i was moody i was ready i was running through a field. i was young i was adventurous i was heading for a fall.

you were walking you were friendly eating raspberries off the bush. you were older and reticent and you wanted to protect me.

we were unlikely bound for friendship in a deep and southern town. we drank orange juice walked the shoreline. painted fences stood us down.

we live like birds

you get a key and a room
of your own in a small city

what a feeling
you can make a whole world
all to yourself

you can read books
you can play guitar
you can write books
and songs with
friends

you have an address
you live there
wow

rescue some kittens
and raise them

life can be really very nice
for some years and then
one day things change

they tell you
you gotta go

we live like birds

may 17

when you have someone who means the world to you and you are related by blood and you have no history of ever doing one another harm, you have about the best thing going in this life. be grateful. reach out to them if you can. talk to them.

kiss the smoking girl

you think faster than you write and can your memory keep (you) up, when the days fall off like calendar paper painted numerics in a spotted corner where a pay phone once connected the disconnected? relegate your dreams to a political sideshow. the overthrow of nickels by dimes and half dollars in a strip club awaits. she leaves you drunk and singing. your oldsmobile won't start up in the cold. you don't care. shove your hands in your overcoat and walk off. watch your breath. smells like midwest. something different the day has for you. bread factory. maybe a motel room. cartoons. a new friend as tore up as you are. laughing against a socieconomic slider. anything but a tow truck and another bill to sign. buy a pint of whisky. postpone the inevitable. kiss the smoking girl.

everyone needs an anchor

I am troubled for my book. I want an anchor to hold and keep her from dashing upon the rocks. There's been time and room to navigate these challenges, to circle and play, to figure eight, collide the waves. The surface stretches out like a canvas. I have numbers to make sense of it. I have broken her into lines.

Now it is late and the wind picking up. All must be sealed and lashed for the night. To withstand the harshest critique. She has to hold.

oath of allegiance ina bath of silence

maybe i read too much shakespeare in high school. maybe i drank too much coke. i kept to myself with a few close friends. i made a pilgrimage to faulkner. i kept writing and writing though it seemed pointless at times, as there was no internet to share. i read my work in bars and cafes, in chicago and tampa in the late nineties, behind a highball whisky. maybe i smoked too much pot. i carried a leatherbound journal wherever i went. now i have a cell phone and press words in there. life is the same, although it changes. i may be getting older but i'm still young. maybe i watched too much tv. i will always love to ride trains, even subways. i take a bath of silence every morning. and an oath of allegiance to my creative process. i am very well, the way i live. but i went about things so poorly for so long, it still hurts. i blame myself for the blunders i made. i am also unwell. mostly for having hurt you. i hurt myself badly, too.

book.in.progress

i printed and read the latest draft of my book. the story holds together well. all is grammatically sound. i have spot checked for repetitions. what i studied this time around is how my story changes my mood from page to page. there's quite a bit of desperation in the lives of my characters. inevitably they find one another and find their way. well, not everybody. some of the mood flows alongside an adrenaline rush. some of the feelings get flooded. i wanna let the sun into some of the darker places. this is my hope as i continue on with my work. it's exciting. i think about the book all the time now.

45

i found that when i slept for exactly six hours, my body and mind woke up rested and ready for the day. however, if i did not rise then and decided to sleep another hour, i had dreams and awoke feeling tired. forty-five years old and i am still learning how to sleep and when to rise! there is no work you cannot do when you are rested. so take your rest and do not be so busy for so long.

partly sunny good chance for showers without you

i can say i have been honest with you, but my words sit on the hands of the clock, beside the point. the point is a solitary entry. markedly confident, rather lonely. a circle to itself. a hole in the moon. a vacancy. divided from the rest. full of its own opinion. terminally unique. you cannot know you can trust me, until you know you can trust someone. all the greatest liars in the world would have you believe they are abe lincoln honest. i miss you. it's partly sunny here. good chance for showers without you.

leniency of space

i wrapped my mind around a tree, i fell on a bent knee, all my thoughts were illogical, disorganized, scattered within a quarter mile radius of me. i would have to grow the circumference somehow to find some leniency of space. there were harleys, semis, and el caminos blasting through the place. i got tickled by the pavement, sandblasted in the face. i finally had enough. i stood up proud and centered myself, and left my thoughts beneath me. i walked into the middle of this four lane highway crossing a fourteen county spread. all the cars and trucks agreed to stop for me and the gray rabbit, the brown frog, the yellow duck, and the unnamed holy one. when the engines all cut out, we came to understand. we are all in this thing, together.

inside the margins

i got to wake up
outside the margins
where they chose
not to see me
the way I saw
myself

they preferred
not to see me
at all

blue the color of
the blood survived the suburbs
on meatloaf and
microwave popcorn

you spend a quality lifetime
with yourself. you know who you are

 latchkey
circles the neck

yet they suggest or imagine you
fit into an image they fashioned

i don't play inside the margins
i am no cookie to be cut

sitcom ina tv
cherry ina bonbon
chardonnay
ina box
ina fridge

to be seen is
my right
 if not
the law

singing @ alphabet

when all seems lost i look for four walls, some light, a wooden floor, my kittens, a wooden desk, my machine which connects me to the universe. when all seems lost i eat a salad, read a book. i lie to myself that everything will be okay. i get outdoors and stare at the sky. i go to work and get sucked inside office politics. i cherish everyone, especially the ones i least like. when all seems lost, i talk to my friend whose a painter. or another writer. or someone who cannot sing the alphabet. i try not to think. maybe i pray. all may be lost. i write a book about it. all is lost. i don't care. all is lost.

channel

i found myself purposed to be an instrument of some constituent pie charted and marketed and television saturated and worked, yes, worked, worked to the marrow to grow some boundless fruitless profit margin i would never see nor feel nor benefit from :: i found myself channeled to evolve our nation, grow her right off the fucking map, people, not unlike the old English empire. less colonialism. more physical land. smaller navy.

i found myself
and decided not
to participate
whatsoever

drama by katya

say

you are the new kid 

you work from within the system

you paint the walls in there some deeper colors

when the system changes you feel

a great sense of pride and ownership

you are local now

say

a new kid appears

they want to paint the walls

you resist. you worked so hard to paint them

they don't know what it was like before

they don't care

you care about different things

say

change is hard

her name was mom

the universe gave me life and no promises. the universe put me in a cell in a womb and i grew into a tiny body. hormones and organs and limbs developed. a dangerous mind came of a brain. i got too big for my apartment and, though i would have stayed, the landlady evicted me. her name was mom. i went out kicking and screaming, attached like an astronaut by a cord, into space. they cut the cord and let me float. they slapped me and put me in a basket. i escaped by sleeping. my dreaming body had yet to emerge so i slept peacefully until waking. mom took me home with some guy they called dad. there was even a little guy who was called big brother. i was scared and i waited a long time before opening my eyes. when i did i saw a world and mom was in it, so that made me happy. i tried to bargain with her but we did not speak the same language. so i had to wait. the applesauce tasted pretty good but the blended vegetables were god awful. the only way i survived was looking deep into moms eyes when i had to be awake. the world was cold and i was in it, against my will.