on a 1958 interview with Pearl Buck

The narrow mindedness of 1958 American media mentality can be clearly seen in interviews conducted by the gold standard bearers of the time, smoking Parliaments, talking to women like Pearl Buck, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Rather than base his interview on the masterful storytelling, the themes she covers and how she was able to write such captivating work, Mike Wallace focuses on clarifying her position on the role of the American woman in her family and community, and in relation to her man. She was diplomatic. If she were living today, and interviewed this way, she could sincerely have told him to fuck off.   #katyamills

six two

America today feels like the same old bedrock of world power we've maintained since the first world war.  a hundred years old. in her shadow she feels like fury and sound under an amphetamine sky. stout moral fortitude condensed into some lone wolf capital minded lobbyist fighting a tide of rising interest rates and people who care about something other than money. amortized forms trapped within a threadbare atmosphere. thinning arguments floated to buy time to solve the latest imperial conundrum. underclothes made of petrol product as we pitch our protests high against fossil fuels... wondering how can we unpack it... formulaic disobedience left unpunished to our dismay. we come home to blackened soot of unbecomings, where before was pastoral beauty. our unified material focused attention on one bloodbath after another through the news feed and sound byte of choice. amusement park of adrenal cells worked out again on the unoxygenated dashboard. we hold together somehow. like polar ice drifting toward the equator. maybe it's hope.    #katyamills

july 28

heavy metals hung off her

neck oiled and glistening up

against the market forces

she set her sights high above church steeples

lightning rods and monarch

crowns. the world would honor

you by letting you live awhile

so long as you gave her

your all

#katyamills

life in slo.mo

oil on the chain balance the wheels 

riding they bike round town real slow 

the day long timing the lights just right

you see memories of poverty not all

bad the simple things all 

they had   #katyamills

sapphire

you touch the sapphire eye for solace
without looking when
inconsolable

come to this country never been
here before

the ones you meet either like you
or dislike you for no good reason

america
a period to end all the sentences running
and running away

a pitch turning colors displaying a royal
flush of feathered tails

have another vodka sapphire eye sees
you home

bye bye 4th of july

settlers of land
painted faces and hair
nationalist fervor
fireworks stare

bye bye
bye bye

parading at night
smoke and bright light
cut through the forests
river of white

bye bye
bye bye

river of red
river of blue
fourth of july
goodbye

fare the well
stars by stripes
fifty two gun
salute

revolutionary snares
the flute

bye bye
world wars
peaceful sweet sandy
shores

bye bye

early morning americans

struck a balance with all, in the city in the summer after dawn, when the morning bird was heard and the sun at eye level, playin hide and seek behind deciduous trees, while the cat trailed you partways to the cafés, and the barista knew your name without asking, and the statesman laughed and folded his newspaper and nary a phone was ringing, the time was reserved for a church bell and silence. americas were thick with technology, in the cables in the air, and you wouldn't need to care in the early, early mornings. in the city on the streets, face values appreciated and if you looked past the wheels and the burden of homes that were carried, you were sure to find an honesty and goodness that survived any standing recession, knew more than money and politics combined, and had a penchant for pastimes of early morning. as deep as any faith, the devotion. rise and shine, america!

k. early morning devotée

last day of may the reverb

America. was the last day of may and all of the dead end streets look like never ending roads, and all the dead end relationships are enthusiastic pressing another go around with hopes one lucky night of what we once had may carry a small sound around and turn the johnny rotten back to first date territory with long lashes and laughter, and heal the deep gashes like reverb sweetening the deal, to hold a song's triumphant note deep into the memory of the night, a stripped mall's dollar store turned boutique, a dead end presidency turned back to camelot and kennedy days, a mid-preaching pause full of meaning, careless words begin to care, a rebellion to the cause of suffer leaning... it was the last day of may and we have a chance to be deep again, full again, and resonant

(we are) wall ball material

naked like ankles
bit by geese
scraped on thorns
bloodshot

our eyes

behind caked makeup an
low-grade petroleum
products
our scars

salvage yards

smoke trails
pic'n'pull
highways
bits of plastic
bits of plaster

bits of glass

we are
wall ball material
circa 1973

our water
steady boiling
ona stove
poached eggs

double-breasted
back-stabbings
on front street

the boardwalk vanishes 

in the fog
in the cloud

gas consumption
tele vacation
the coffee
sure is bitter
around here

for now
you made a friend
i made a friend
my gosh

you can do that
you see
young runaway
you did

see . saw

Some deity of prepossession took hold in America, leaving little room for argument and debate. Lady liberty gripped her torch so tight her hand began to crumble and her arm fissured and fell off, her torch falling into Hudson Bay where water met fire with the strangest sound. Water won and the western world was a little darker, hard to see. The thinker felt the ripple in time and stood up against his master's orders. Millions of women marched and the men, well, they also serve who stand and wait. Behind bulletproof glass and whitewashed timber, the purposeful and power-laden drew back the drapes and saw only panhandlers, holding signs and begging for change.

sing me a rueful old dirge

In America fear was bubbly again. All the creepy clowns were outlawed and nobody liked an incongruent affect anymore. The children were safe in their beds and Poltergeist was just a movie despite all indications to the contrary, the untimely deaths in subsequent years of several key players on the set. I was in the woods and came across a painted face, beckoning me from the shadows. He was smiling but not, shiny and hot, and had hospital scrubs for a clown suit. I followed him to a quaint house camouflaged by the moss, and inside I met others, none of whom spoke a single word. They served me venison and goose off the iron, flame-broiled with the world's animosity. Shriveled balloons were all about the dirty floor, and my feet were followed by the eyes of a cur beneath the table, with a dagger tail and long resting jaw. The scene had teeth. The food was outrageously good and the company so silent and modest. I felt ashamed for I was clothed in the fear of my culture, which made these good people recede to the margins. I thanked them prolifically large, then sang them a rueful old dirge. They applauded like grateful old mimes. My faced turned red as their smiles almost, and stayed that way somehow. My hair fell off my head in one lump into my hands, and my eyes widened as I looked at this wig. I looked around and before me at my empty plate, the utensils had grown twice the size or more. My hands went to grab them and that's when I saw my own hands had swelled up like balloons. The funny old woman with the green painted eyes, she drew out some plastic white gloves like the kind you see in the cartoons. She tenderly took my wrists while staring into my eyes, and pulled them over my hands. Some mangy children beneath the table had pulled off my shoes and replaced them with ones like the others. I got up to leave and tried to cry out but no words would escape from my mouth, and I honked and I bonked and puffed and huffed my way to the door of this godforsaken place. But someone tripped me or else I tripped on my silly fat shoes, and that guy with the cherry nose and beady eyes came and put me in a headlock. Out the corner of my eye I saw the hospital scrubs, lime green, being drawn over me where my clothing once was. That's when the face painters came - to finish me off.

it was obvious

i was in pain over life and just breathin was hard
i was reading Franny
then Zooey

i was falling asleep
listening to the world series

bathtubs and smokes
ashes and water and
manuscripts too

nothing's like 1955 anymore
but reading
listening to the world series
falling asleep

i was in pain over life
 just breathin was hard
someone and their make america great again campaign
make america hate again

make america
force america
love america
hate america

we would be stronger together
our future president proclaimed
my boyfriend kept calling and calling
 the ringer was off and
it was obvious

i gathered strength
 all alone

i was thinkin about god
 just thinkin about god
 clasping my hands around my pillow
 lying on my side

made the pain somewhat
made the pain
subside

bigger than big hearts break in smaller than small town america

imagine the larger than large promise of a child born to bigger than big hearts in smaller than small town america, imagine the laughter and popping of cheap champagne in the paint-blistered home as neighbors and family gathered round to see the new love, imagine the tough days ahead and long hours daddy works to support his young family and coming home late in time to kiss his little girl goodnight and share the day's stories with his young wife who knows life is hard but so worth it cause everyone she loves is right there and to fight for is right for them all...

imagine years later the daughter is grown and out on her own, married with two kids and her own smaller than small home and the man whom she loves out working which leaves her alone, and life is real hard tryin' to make it when the economy's gone south in america and she's gotta start thinkin about working herself but she's not sure where, when, or how, and she's scared cause her man is old-fashioned and doesn't want her workin but the kids need basics they cannot always provide the way things are, not to mention her parents are gettin older and need help...

imagine she's got a girlfriend whose sorta lost with no life like hers, who sometimes comes to babysit or just cure her loneliness for awhile, and her friend has some friends who she's becoming friends with, too, and they are all very nice and see how tired she is and wanna help...

and help sometimes comes in the strangest of forms, like when people in smaller than small towns with bigger than big hearts come together for a quick and easy answer cause they ran out of patience and energy and hope, so they resort to small parties and quickening of pulses, alcohol and cheap cigarrettes, some weed and relax, put on some old chart-topping trax and get to dancing, maybe fun loves between former boys and girls, while daddy's out working away the long day, and babies are napping their pretty little heads down, and friends will be friendly and adrenaline rises with a chance for some hope to distract from the powerless normalities around here...

hope in the form of intimacies and attraction, the realization you could still be young again a little longer if you tried, if you let your guard down a little and weren't so old-fashioned, if you let down your hair and wore your old clothes a bit tighter, almost like you still had a chance, it's exciting, and yes there's a seam in this matrix which you all downplay, might be one of them cuts up a line of some shit, and not everyone partakes until everyone does, that kinda subtle peer pressure and understated delivery, and it's no big deal until it is...

imagine how that plays out over several weeks to several months, and now there's a bit of a problem in the judgment department, the insight department has broken down unawares, and some friends get more intimate against all expectations, now emotions involved, just imagine...

home life becomes 'boring' and the life is all 'chores' and the kids are so frustrating though never a 'nuisance' and daddy's always tired always tired always tired, and you wanna feel good again you like how it feels with your friends and alone seems so foreign so scary unbearable, so you go on with your ways which you know have got shady, in the smallest of small town america, what with your biggest of big hearts...

nobody knew nobody fathomed nobody could have seen how it played out in the end, imagine the heartbroken suprise that day they found out you were the one in the news who had died who was found in the most public of public places, naked and alone floating in an eddy in a slow moving wide part of the river. yet no one was really all that surprised, almost strangely relieved in a way, for several years you had broken their hearts as you faded or they faded you out of your home life, or somehow some way your big heart went astray and you kinda lost your mind followin some so-called friends off the map of your motherly responsible path, definitely on drugs and you admitted it, too, and several times the intervention came in the form of coffee and donuts and family in your living room, concerned faces whose concern you tried to talk off, and an angry tired man by your side with two scared and half-hungry little kids you just wanted to hug all the day long, but something inside you demanded be fed, and you long since left and lost your little head though your big of big hearts was the same just the same...

it was like despite all that and the love all around you, nothing could be done to get it all right, something was lacking in money and resources, something was strained past the point of any use, and family could not know how to be... other than deeply and morbidly depressed when the thought of what to do about you came to light. so when you died it was almost like relief to them all, but others around your so-called friends started coming up headlines as well, and the smallest of small towns in small town america was about to make international headlines, you know, cause these young women dying for no good reason was too much for the eyes of the world to pass up for too long, and it turns out there were others in some status and addiction to power out taking great and greedy advantage of the desperate situation of impoverished peoples with the biggest of bigger than big hearts and minds long since lost in the smallest of smaller than small town america...

imagine the manipulations concocted by these exact people in positions of great power in such small places, demanding small intimacies from these lost women to heal their long since broken capacity for real and genuine warmth. and it even went off kinda well or so it seemed, i mean it oiled a system long since cracked from coast to coast so how could that be wrong? or terrible? or unholy? nobody would check themselves and why should they, when you and your friends had been paid for your services and conveniently fit into the transactional nature of corporate america...

 forget the emotions underlying and the hearts beating bright for a chance and some hope, and young half-starved children all waiting extended out into wings, out on the margins where they found you all brutally murdered or left to die with cocaine in your system, or meth or whatever... the biggest of bigger than big hearts forever broken in the smallest of smaller than small towns, that's what.

five four sixteen go

All was so promising so walk around the streets not made for walking. Step in front of the cars and ask for a ride. Someone gives you one. A big guy who used to drive a truck but now he's on disability, threw out his back. The fixed income has him stationary mostly, except when he gets behind the wheel of his powder blue Olds. Makes him feel young and picking me up reminds him of the sixties when hitching was proper. I can hold this hope with you, my friend. Fuck it. Roll down the windows and roll up a joint and let the edge off. I can feel you steppin on it, you take good care of it. We are together in this as the numbers roll over to zero. The sun hasn't changed in all these years, and tires are still made of rubber and pressured air. I lay my fingers on the back of your neck, and you smile and push down with one arm hooked out the window, the other latched to the top of the wheel. It's gonna be a brighter day than most.

Antipathy and the Six Million Villains - Part 7

Journal # 04.23.16

You had a yo-yo and could walk the dog and spin a bottle and beeline where it stopped, rushing into a body, knocking torn denim boots and books and knocked up if you don't watch out. And maybe you won't cause maybe you wanna raise a kid with me? Unless we think of the future. Big with it. Feeling it. And nobody else could be happy.

I remember the road trips very well. Close enough to see all the stars been pounded into the pavement. Shoe string budgets and the smell of gasoline. Stretching youth into the sun. I'm glad I made them with you. The nights of headlights and dashed lines and loving you inside your angst. How we found joy in the midst of an endless journey. Must have been the laughter over stupid shit. Got the character outta me and it cracked you up. Nirvana and Pearl Jam all over the radio. Immortality got a tan on the beach. I began to trust you and not myself. Bleach. Marley on a tape deck, and the clock on the screen is digital green. Glowing and the butts end over end flipping behind us, flicked out the windows when windows were rolled up and down. Life was more manual and maybe we liked it that way. The soundtrack of pre-millenium America. See the old Gulf gas signs above the bible belt bullshit?

 My stomach kept getting upset. I tried to calm her down with lengthy and prolonged cream and coffee, but it was no use, she continued to grumble and make my life hellish in the middle of the night. Flamingos and origami cranes. Paper journals on backseats with Big Books. She almost made me sick until I hit the joint. NA was put back another day. I lost the point. Tunnels to Mexico beneath us, Tijuana, and why are they all coming this way? Like you and you made me so happy. Goddamn. Lost the point like Marlon Brando on an island. Jane's addiction. Carefree when wet.

Today I was binging on Netflix in the dark. Remembering that three-legged dog in traffic by the tracks on Broadway. I postponed anything real, awash in afternoon rains. Maybe that's how I begin to remember the names and the places and searching for the kindness and laughter still so hard to find sometimes. The streets carry scent of flowers and here in the City of Trees -- all has turned green, too, like Chicago trying desperate to win back all the land it lost. Last winter. I love you.     - Katya, 2016

I and my country, no longer depressed

What becomes of us. Pine Sol was applied and life began to smell chemically sound. All the memories of the unnaturally clean gave an egregious sparkle to my calm. Anxiety B. Gone. Outstandingly purified past a point of recognition, the chemicals ran into our pharmaceutical futures. Sometimes I put the coffeepot under the tap, if I was lazy or rushing to get to work. What a mistake! My thoughts went sideways and up was down. Only the headlights of the car could save me, pointing into the rain. I saw the materials filling in the light, each raindrop one hundred thousand part prozac. I and my country, no longer depressed.

the child

O wide awake in America, big sky highway hollowing out the ears predawn, cut me like a cookie and may i taste good too, share myself with you and you and you, sweet sugar has me processed in dreams and tumbled out a foamy bed into my own personal despair, sliding down the inner sanctuary of a question mark to collect and drop whole you made of me, sweet sugary period, plastic in my blood, pharmaceuticals in my water, disaster strikes and i lick my lips like you and smile, but no one smiles like we do, upside down or kinda flat, tethered to the mobile phones we kill by our deep sleep, counting ringtones like sheep, shearing and swiping the hell out of an alphabet, on a jazz or classical base as the temperature begins to rise with the sun, another day washing dishes and dusting and cutting boxes the perfect size to ship my ass away to some infernal packaging depot to be fitted with my personal bar code, my very own, which is linear and bold, impervious to black mould, scanned or so I'm told, taped then situated in some draughty unremarkable corner in the cellar of a warehouse to grow old. All i know is no one can erase me even if they try, I am forever etched into your hard drive, America, no matter how the cleaners cleanse, efforts to coat me over bleach me out only leave my prominent lines bubbling up from the cracks and surfacing again with all the gasses, grilling the faces of the masses ordering me around, yet still i stay aloft in my dissociated safe place way up high, finding me in a cut up creatively commoned place looking down, streaming on your horizon, only the light protects us now in our projections. Back out where I belong, some ionic bond, trashing your paint job with my spraypainted flare, exposing your destination to the going nowhere, breaking out the bars when i decode the code, fingering you with my fingerprint, America, until you see your own stars and go black and white again, from Birmingham to Ferguson, up the checker board and Martin Luther King you at the end, redoubled on a chance, green felt absorbs your glance in a healthy tribal casino where all the bad blood is blue, you see, the karmic knot we work it out, massage it real well, strike it with needles until you finally falter, sweet vulnerable America shedding your suit, crying and opening like that before the seamstress. And my lines are out of order, spinning into circular pools fallen stars, and the many shades of blue wash over me and you, when the world forgives and finds a place in the heart for a renewable source, because somehow you were always meant to be pleasant on the eyes, America, and generous though talkative and combative perhaps, you wear out your welcome in a superfluous way, and everyone has a good laugh and pats you on the head, for you are the child and loved just the same. Back to bed now with prayers, and we will see you in the morning, the rubbing of eyes, tumbling down stairs in your nightgown, little one, big sky highway musculature, heavy with some imagined purpose, dreams of carbon and oxygen and coffee churning blue to black in post industrial aftermath, shining oily head to toe, shedding another skin, inspiring us with your renewals. I will be there, my love, somewhere in the corners of your eyes, sucking on Maybelline, about to exit the glistening curve and drop unseen into your wilderness... where i have always belonged.

1983

Tonight again I miss something we had, the je ne sais quoi from 1983. Togetherness. A bit wild we were in an America no longer the same, and I was a kid only ten... smell of petrol and tools, and cars that broke down, water that froze in the pipes in the winter, seasons we spent without cell phones. And where will we go when the earth meets the flow of the sea? Storms and long thaws, and it was never easy but we had eachother, laughing and bitching and fighting. I cried and I sulked when I couldn't get my way. We ran ourselves ragged by the end of each day, and tired at night all slowed to half  the pace, then half of half the pace - then a resurgence as the kids put to bed, the ice I heard clinking in the cocktails, new laughter arose and I wanted to be anything but tucked in, and found any excuse to go out to Mom and be with her then. Back to bed now, go on! The music stops playing and all is quite silent while under the water, heat lightning flashes the sky to highlight these tides, seen through the screens of the porch. The wind whistles.

We won't care so much when our senses our gone and an unbroken dawn cracks and poaches its whites by the sea, I promise, the rolling is fun and into the sun with the elements the same and no one to blame, neither you, neither me. The loss was magnificent and tragic, and you may never love that way again. And again we won't care so much having been there, in the sharp cutting glare where all is exposed as a life that has died as life always does, again and again, and again. So push up your hair with your hands, see where it stands, and roll your eyes all around the earth. You will see that we share an uncommon bond, untouched by time and strong as the vine, and wide as the sea may be long, so you can smile and laugh, sing a sweet epitaph, and roll your tongue merrily along under the names of the ones you have loved, again and again, and again. In memoriam, 1983.

Not-To-Mention, mentioned #iii)

Let us circle the wagons back to the horse and the automobile, and the loving kindness with which the horse gracefully agreed to help us build our cities (Sacramento) rather than fight us. The horse may not be indexed generally with the great predators of the world. Still, no one can deny that many a lineage came to its conclusion, behind a horse.The horses today, grandsons and granddaughters of the workhorses of yesteryear, could they not be more grateful to the vision we have together realized? Would they not sit down at desks with feather plumes and fountain pens, armed with loving kindness, beside troughs of ink,  hoof under chin, contemplating before composing epic love letters to Mr. Ford and his former and now widely forgotten associates?

From Stallion, with love. From associated former groups of poor single mares without stallions, on welfare. On behalf of all the mares who were forced to raise their kids single handedly. Single mares living through the nightmares on the farm. The instability of the stable. Untold abuses at the hands of the stablehands. Former oatwinners, shackled to the yoke and the shoe. Chasing mechanical rabbits like the poor greyhounds before them. Stallions reduced to workhorses, side by side with the most meagre of asses! Superlative, indeed.

How tragic, this history. But how the tragedy has turned on a dime and become cause celebre, 21st century! For generations pulling haycarts of America's least wanted. The hayseeds. The rednecks. The layabouts! The long awaited uses of manure toward betterment has arrived... shit for sale! Pulll up a cart! Take a number! They will form in line to worship Mr. Henry Ford et al. They will form a horsepower V, if propriety dictates. You thought the line of humans would be long to give a hug and a handshake to Henry Ford? You were right. Motorheads from as far away as Villarcayo de Merindad de Castilla la Vieja, Spain. Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll of the UK. Rumour has it some expatriates of the ministry of this settlement, which translates loosely as St. Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel , fled to the States and bestowed all formerly assigned virtues upon dear Henry. After all, it was he who made the migration possible, in original Ford motorcars, out of the hollow and on to an industrial era barge (surreptitiously with a payoff to the captain) to cross our dear lady the Atlantic.

And still the humans are outnumbered! Legend has it, innumerable studs pay homage to the birthplace of Mr. Ford. And to his gravesite. And to those great ruins of Detroit, including where stood his first assembly line factory. Untold fillys and colts of untold single white mares,  untold crews of anonymous black stallion studs worldwide, together take on the distance and swim the seas if necessary to paw the sacred ground. To hoof and trample any man, woman or child stands between them and their iconic father. Regional roundups from California on east, have witnessed the escape of denizens of horses gathered for such human affairs, rarely without fanfare or incident, and most certainly never pressed and published (for the shame that would inevitably fall upon the heads of the sacrosanct cowboys involved) by local media quickly lassoed. These uprisings would have most certainly made for great press, indeed! Alas, the captive reporters were instructed by the cattlemen to shuck it off in the alleyways of local obits in that American calm regurgitation: death by natural causes. 

Of course calm does lie at the center of it all. Mares and studs, men and women, live strangely yet peacably together under the watchful eye of the Fords. The great state of Michigan would certainly be no more than a footnote of Canada, were it not for the legacy. And it is quite thoroughly understood, the great parts both horses and humans alike played in the fanning out via motorcar of an American zeitgeist or pioneering spirit full of life. The wonderfully yet still violently marked canvas of towns and cities that spread like butter from Detroit once and still buttressed by its man and horsepower from Dearborn and Kalamazoo. In memory of the heaping spoonful of bastard foals and fillys from such strangely named townships as Bad Axe, Climax, Hell, and Jugville.  Those poor begotten desperates from the far reaches of the Upper Peninsula.