Royal sessions [8.30.1998]

This night they called the lover they wished they did not love, broke off the call and got a call back, not needing to communicate to read minds and end up together, effortlessly, despite both trying hard to stay apart. They felt like they were running stop signs. About to play out another drama in the heat of a summer night in the city. They walked six blocks to her house with a bottle of red and let it breathe on the table next to the cork on the screw while they caught up. The Persian cat lay on the arm of her beat up old couch with a casted paw she had broken from the three storey fall. She was going on about an incident between the couple who lived below her and how her girlfriend had come up crying because he was out of control again. They poured two glasses and took in the bitter taste, cheap wine, and put their elbows on a window sill and looked down. Their was an abandoned school bus on the corner of Washtenaw and Division. It was a pretty rough part of town and the streets were poorly lit. A few glasses of wine and she was getting moody. They anticipated something popping off and sunk deeper into the couch. Division was a thoroughfare and steady hopping. Could it be so bad even the cat wanted out?

by #katyamills

have a (violent) cry

emotions had to be worked through but not like this. they could not afford a ticket and did not wish to die. maybe bars - pick up men - drink for free - duck out? the spirit had so many terrible suggestions. they settled on a film. cried violently when the heart broke.  #katyamills

theatrical

life will always be a tragedy will

always be a comedy. may it be the most dramatic 

breathless thing you've ever known 

and go down fighting

#katyamills

talk show generics

She held the boundary for as long as she could and then caved. Her eight year long fascination with him subsided into a temperate love affair punctuated by flurries of drunken fists. This was a special kind of music few could hear, a subculture where the despotic meet those who prefer to be ruled. She had run out of furniture to blame on another blackened eye.

i (you) turn into your (my) arms

Chance set up the constellations
 through which we
astral traveled
legs tangled
deep kissing
hair tangled up
i (you) turn into your (my) arms

i wish you knew how much you always meant and still mean to me
im feeling real bad like part of me died or is lost

 im just gonna be sad and depressed about it all
 and without any closure
 you were i was the only one
 for me for you

 i wish that i could be given a pass
 and i (you) could see you (me) and we could embrace
 and watch the drama go by and smile
 together. again

 its really over
its never ever
 never again

will we never
 work through this?
 why?

 i can understand
 but only if you (i) tell me (you)
 but if you cannot tell me
i can understand that
 too

 i want to thank you. you
enriched my life almost
 every day and
 im sorry we had to go and fuck
 it up with our terrible fighting
tears are coming out my eyes
 right now as i write
 i miss you so bad
 but what do we have?

 eternal
 gratitude for our smiles and the
 kinda monotonous days we
 spent together walking around
 arguing and laughing and holding
 hands. playing the scratchers.
coffee. pastries. chinatown.
 sharing music and rearranging
 all the fucking furniture at 2am
 almost every day. my god.
 the rose garden. the echo glen.
 the walk between Annes house
 and Moss. all the amazing gifts
 we found on the sidewalks! the
 clothes the toasters the microwaves
and printers and tvs and copiers and
 nightstands

 the times we had our place so
setup and clean and we just fell into
 eachother on some secondhand
 mattress somewheres.
 and all the tea. i will
 always remember how you had tea
 for me all the fucking time. wow
 thank you

i love you so much for
 that. and for all the times you felt my
 six pulses or whatever and diagnosed
 me in the eastern style. took your time
 to explain it to me. the wind. the
 dampness. the cupping. the kidney and liver
imbalances you would help me to
 address. acupuncture

the way you (i) cared 
for me (you)

 reading and writing together
 watching tv. whatever
 im sorry
fuck
 what can i say?
 have a nice rest of
 our lives... i mean

your life
my life

- KatYa  based off a letter i wrote in 2012

the girl downstairs

The girl downstairs came up and knocked on my door. I asked who is it. ITS THE GIRL DOWNSTAIRS she said. I decided to open the door, for the girl downstairs. But i did not let her into my apartment. I didn't even know her name.

The girl downstairs is a blonde with a very well low-lit auburn section. She gets her hair done in LA, apparently. I can tell. Nobody up here in Sacramento can cut and color hair like hers. And if they can, I haven't seen it. Maybe i need to look a little harder. Maybe not. I would rather just feast my eyes on this LA situated hairdo, i told myself, and i did.

The girl downstairs was now dragging the girl upstairs, downstairs. Wow. And i didn't even know her fucking name! She was leading me like a horse, to water. And you cannot do that! Everybody knows! Lucky for her, I am not a horse. So she led me on downstairs and now we were like, two girls downstairs. If she had had a daughter, we could have called ourselves, two and a half girls. But she didn't have a daughter. Well, at least not downstairs she didn't.

The girl downstairs took me all the way back through an apparently identical apartment, to the bathroom. Which was WHERE THE PROBLEM IS. I guess she wanted to make her problem, my problem. But lucky for me. Today i don't take on other people's problems. Especially when i don't even know their fucking name. Hello!

The girl downstairs had an apartment almost identical to mine. Except for one key feature. The girl upstairs has VAULTED CEILINGS. Bitch! That would be me. I suspect. What with all the names she called our landlady in the span of five minutes while she showed me the bulge in her bathroom ceiling where apparently the water was collecting or WHO KNOWS WHAT.

The girl downstairs asked the girl upstairs, downstairs, without even asking really, to cosign on her conviction that the landlady was an alcoholic nightmare, post menopause. Well, i added the last part for effect.

You know, i really just had to introduce myself to this girl downstairs, before making my slow exit and tracing my path back upstairs and out of hell. Back to my vaulted ceilings and my bathroom which she had decided was imminent to COLLAPSE. It can be really hard not to cosign people who are strangers with convictions and right up in your face. And leading you around like that. I have to say I was rather uncomfortable by the whole kitten kaboodle.

But lucky for her, I wasn't gonna lead her into the street and allow a truck to run her down. I probably could have, because she was so lost in a zone of fury. But I am glad I smiled politely and excused myself. I said we could talk later, you know, WHEN THE FLOOR COLLAPSED AND DROPPED ME INTO HER BATHROOM. Maybe sometime this evening. I can't wait.

-by Katya, 09/15
(pssst... up until midnight PST, today only, my novel is free on amazon).

eyelids fallen like my guard (renewed -ii)

 Part II... of  renewed (completed 2/6/2012)

Guess i spoke up finally... and got startled by the sound of myself speaking. Why did I have to not be completely real? Well, I did not live under any dictate of authenticity. No dictate, no reprobate. Only self-sacrifice leading to pitiful sacrilege of self-hate. No one told me not to be real. But there is this pressure here, see? Pressure of loveless woebegotten punk ass you know fuckin who: punk ass competition.

I felt suffocated. Well, on this day in particular. Yes. You could call it an anomaly..the course of a few months of mainly predominant silence erupting from the chambers of my vox. I was not but felt pushed in from all around. Prod my vox box, for sound. I was surprised constantly by these affairs, surprised by irrational expectation. My childhood was magical, or so i remember.

Surrounded but not by caring faces of my old neighborhood, if that ever existed. Long distance memory or else I made it up. Hard to tell anymore. No one could doublecheck the facts with me. I am not some fucking twin, okay. And even if i were... even if i were.

Yeah. Magical that was. Magical this was not. When I let my vox up to the notch at the top of my throat, just basically facing and ready to approach the greater light that was both tangible real and warm. Sure I expected to see them again, the helpful compassionate animated faces. But no, not really. They did not so much appear, and I was not so much paranoid though possibly a little bit so. I wish I could honestly tell ya it was paranoia. Internal.

I found myself, not side by side holding hands with others, no, but walking in single zerofile formation, alone half the time in my filament of a head.  Thoughts racing...or pulled into some magnet. Then all became less material, more of a virtual feed. Got fed so quick, I could hardly catch up! Surround sound positioned to push me in then out, out, out to you.

Whatever i missed, well,  i never saw at all. Okay? Cannot report upon the specters down the hall. I won't guarantee nothing. Anyway, its unnecessary to care. All this happenstance was long on incredulous, short of meaning, in the end.

 Less static in the attic but no way to control the controls. Detangler unavailable for the tangles tangled up in the armchairs in the waiting room waiting. Come back tomorrow and reschedule. No reason to mention why. They want automatic? Tangled up in a knotty wish-u-were-a-weave! and refused to leave.

K.Drama by K

So i did what i was told, to be precise. No room to throw nobody off.
I fuckin' faded my style. Turned easy lush wall to wall (carpeting), into stained mandala glass tiles.
Not only to diss the blockade. But also to no longer agitate the tiles. Each mandala in its own expressive way,  expressed just exactly how being sidelined for a while felt like a fucking eternity! I got some abuse. I took it, yeah. This was the event subsequently referred to as the mandala holla.

Cut to the floor, my whole style was... all my asides and sudden escalator slides...cascades... escalades away in spinning fours....no longer suspended at all, except within the greater whole of cadillac so naturally resonant suspension. I thought I lost them off the the production line? Not one at a time but in multiples of 3,4,5 rolling off, like capital rolling off the edges of some horrific Madoff scamtable turning fraudulent yellow every minute a little more, then criminally bleached out into some white collar wine cellar parabolic! Underneath American through and through, dead yellow like ole yeller.

I knew i lost them there into the new restrained freedom of a greater yet still fully-contained world. Like a pen into a pen. Freedom for thought, he thought, until senses slapped him around and broke thought into a  bunch of wild ideas and presuppositions. Judgments waiting at the terminal. Waiting, posing in all sort of sophisticated statuesque Rodin type manners. Hastily wrapped up nice & given away in new annual leatherbound planners.

Well, the damndest of things. The restless of matters. My head, you see, i thought i lost you, too. There within my dome, between my dual ears, yes ma'am and yes sir, i did. I thought i lost you, too. Fuck how i am sorry.
But somehow you hung in there with your heart up against my beat, i noticed. I always had you for a witness. So you sewed together my image, backed by labels. The edge fell off my albums, but you sharpened those dull moments.
 I thought i fell off yesterday, wow. But thank you, you, 
You held out  -- to me --  tomorrow...

But thats really some kinda happy neverending. Back to my reality... they caught me, took their measurements, stretched me out thin, to my last track. They took what they could, to the end of my limits bled and scraped me dry. Sign a contract thats your life. They had me out on nothing nice. Thin ice.

 Lost my wide stare knowing. They had me. Glossy and matte, ego swollen and showing. Fooled by the promise. The suggestion they gave to trust them. Or was this conjured up? Had I let up on my controls? Momentary carelessness. Or was it yearning to not despair of trust? All the questions, all the answers. More stuff really, to deal with. Wrote it down, then lost my notebook.

When tired, you taught me, take an vodka tonic to your chair.
 Drink. Sit there. Until time become transparent like the liquor.
To relief. To feel religious. Climbing high above what standard what ever sliding standard slip.
Then take one step firm, then another. Into cool, oxygenated air.
 Filling the eyelids fallen like my guard.

Now they kick into my sides to burning! Ohh! They take me up and over drive. I believe they believe in me, I'm so very fucking alive! I let go of all misunderstandings; make trivial of true. Anything i might argue, gets fast intimidation in my head. I trip on me, my burdensome insecurities in outrage. Their currency is my gold standard. Decision. I let them get a lock on me...Derision.

 I suffer headaches. Tension too thick to mention. You know. I know We all know. I know we all know  what is about to happen: their sentiments left touching in thin air... that original, firm, comforting handshake they had? trails into some second hand see ya later lead into some cold, late, lonely night pin cushion never to return.
                   
you, too, would have left it that way.... like i had to ... let it go...like i
     did
you would have had me leave it like that,
up & walk away, wouldn't you?

before you
found and held
and loved the fuckin
hell out of me
mercilessly

to the expense
 of my breath
of my lungs

pressing me
pressing me out all whole again
in the end

goddamn i miss you 
goddamn

Renewed - gone large label back to navel

Some drama came into the scene. Drama! To excite the stale air. To fuck up anyone's agenda. Anarchy!
Some spent out on long nights and hazy days between command central (some adulator's basement or garage) and the civic center. Planned protest! The sound of it makes most young activists want to switch and become substitute teachers... probably most do. Or join the green party ranks. Or jump off some bridge. Or move to Amsterdam or Vancouver. Or talk on talk radio.  To be located and chicken-wired into a city 4 block radius by choice? Planned Protest? More like planned parenthood for dizzy girls spun dry from wet, half show up to the clinic because everyone's betting they will be -- but they aren't! -- pregnant yet.

All washes away, tears and problems and headaches and trash. But the drama remains. A great decompression hits the air, and electricity unloads upon the city and picks up pavement like legs over jumpropes. Feelings around the block are so diverse and tangential, burning like coals in the eyes and faces of those who live deep in the heart of the American city.  Every American city, from Quebec to Tijuana, Houston to Montreal, Toronto to Rio de Janeiro. Feelings are burning and so alive. Need no lighter fluid because the (sent by the sun) solar flares have arrived.

The fabric of life undervalued and torn. Woven across the city in dust colored thread, corn rows
and baggy clothes. Bare hands. Bare feet and calloused toes. Life in the streets was intense as hell, and when you survived the day and met the night, nothing else could be so sweet. Sewn back together ends of days - and carefully self-placed in the bed. Eye of needle sees the thread and closes ranks. Send in the dreams, the fortified tanks.

by Karen Garman, 2011

I found myself in a jam....reluctance berry preserves -- grown on common kinda ground, and a salve to the disheartened lost souls like myself. I knew. I saw them reaching for the same jars in the same grocery outlets. We had the same eyes and fears and blood pressure.

I found myself in a jam. Halfway through my peanut butter sandwich. But I saw no end to the torment I fought so hard to get over. I struggle and effort and fight and try. And why?  My mood, my status and my affect --my sense of myself in this chair this room this house this hood this town this city this country this world this universe this emptiness. Senseless sometimes. I can feel so foolish, my reputation fallen. My spirit lost and out there somewhere lookin' for me. Callin' and callin'.

I feel the shift always into drama.  Like when the burn through the subway the burn through the atmosphere the burn through my oats and honey and brown sugar. The burn in my belly. The burn of hot chlorinated tap water spraying out the pipes onto my thin skin.

 I might stop. Mid-sentence. Mid-summer. Mid-night. Or any other time I choose. I might.

 If we are speaking then of course I will not stop like that, no way. I cannot afford to stop! Hey! I might pull too quickly away from vacuuming the room to do the dishes. Or vice versa. Then in moments I realize the track switchers switched my tracks without my clear knowledge, and it burns me but its a slow burn like St Louis ribs or a the extremities exposed to high altitudes, low temperatures. I suppose i will taste good when the fuckers eat me the hell up! Haha. Hey! I did not mean to stop. I didn't stop at all, in fact. Prove it! No no no, give me another chance, will ya? I know its your show. I got carried away. Thought I was the main act! You got me excited, though, it was you! So come on man, shit. Give me a break!

Too fuckin' bad i am still without a studio. Thanks to my big mouth shot off again. Interviews so close to complete. Bank account so far from replete. To shut it all out and pay attention to this channel is all I know to do. All i can do, all i am able to. My last trick, come on. Show some compassion? Meet me underwater, where all distractions die and everyone knows the party's relocated to Paris. And Paris is right there, right fucking there! I swear!

I had to drop the many ways I came to greet you. No announcement. Like you.Your arrival unexpected, split second! Kinda brutal. We like it like that here in this little earthen corner of the sky earth water joint. Don't we get along so well? I study you within the four walls, floor and ceiling. But never confined, no, always free you are to float toward or away from me and us and this condition cannot condition the unconditionable -- that is you. You make me crazy, whatever whomever however you are.

 I was green, yes,  but not for long. Maybe only St Patricks, and felt like an imposter even then. Maybe as a kid? But I felt older then, when I was younger I felt much much older. Can you hear the stress in my voice as I raise to the rafters my own? my drama? I demand it, damn it! They get theirs, so im gonna get mine! I will be juvenile like third grade elementary if necessary. This is the kinda sacrifice I will make.

 I opened the door, yeah, but too many times. The door is now a japanese hand fan. Today and maybe tomorrow. The nickel bags of weed turned into quarter ounces rolled in dimes. This all started in the nineties, and took so long to leave behind me. The ones among them true, dropped out my life in pairs. I took the stairs and waved goodbye looking down at you in your descent, over the rail, and over my head you went.

You may have seen them in the hall, did you? Bounced like checks before they fall. You so fortunate, my dear, to see all this in the rear mirror view. Had you lit up the scene with your presence fine I know, the colors would bleed out. What commenced blue might have finished lacking color. Maybe not completely taken out, but still so far from feeling right. Like putting on those fresh dry unpressed cottons and feeling still too hot and yet beneath your skin you feel cold, ya know? Okay, well what is mine is mine! Something unique to me, calming that way, like I am somebody no one else be, like I am a singular moving object in a forest of trees.

Turn on, huh. Oxygenated really...wow what a turn on!   (to be continued)...