emo.z

yesterday i got lost
on gen z emo
rap and cried about the lean
the purple the blue
they turned
before their time
came due

thank god
the music lives
on

honestly i

so i lost it
what can i say
knuckles bleeding
today

they ran up on me
the thoughts rushing
my mind i had to ice a mf
hit me from
behind

picked some flowers
for my momma on
my way home
depleted of color
looking for a sign
fixed on my cell
i cannot see
whats happening
to me

blue bells for
momma a monster
in my heart

don't wanna wash
this blood away

honestly
i lost it what
can i say


#katyamills

what was

the future arrived
yesterday
maybe a loved one
 or two
you and me because
we knew
what was


#katyamills

june 10

i see you on video you look so good
all airbrushed like that lemme give you
a virtual hug or a heart. will i see you
in real life and when? i filtered the audio so your
voice is crystal clear. calling from a stitch
in a switch. damn. the game
finally swallowed us.

#katyamills

back yourself up

we danced to the old songs dated
back when life seemed less

complicated less strung out

on media talking to us from our pockets our screens keeping tabs all
night and day long we danced freely like we had some kind of voice some kind of choice in this automated cyber world you really gotta know deep down who you are

download yourself or get
tagged archived judged and encrypted
back yourself up

not

i was not gonna wait for anything. not for my day to get better. not to get along with you just so i might feel differently

no

i chose to take it and
make it my
own

crisis of an overcast

the sun wanted to reach

the land
the sea
the beach

the sky asked why
the sun beseeched

a child would smile
a flower now open
the dullest of days
so very outspoken

for a second
it all opened up

the blue
was a much deeper
blue

survive and cast shadow (white metal rabbit)

There's no world of all smiles, unless invented. In the real world we have rabbits we grab by the ears and make lucky feet for a keychain. We stuff them in hats and make them of chocolate. The white ones we want for a symbol of purity, and photograph them next to an egg.

Some of us tune our instruments to metal, find the harmonics, amplify them and get bent. I wanted to be one of those, but I didn't have an amplifier or an instrument or a room or a friend. I prayed to god for a fireplace where I could burn for you. I would. I had become inflexible like the white metal rabbits and within the realm of being bent out of shape.

I was far from worn thin with love. I followed ideas tangentially to distant and unrelated ends... my younger self had grown old and retired. Typically far from inspired. I must have committed some literary felony, for soon I could no longer read. I had a curious relationship with speed. It's a crime to torture a soul with words made from sounds of a cacophonous hole.

The ground I laid where I buried myself, the part of myself that was offensive. Myself who had been distasteful, rebellious, irreverent, and smart. My shadow now missing, a lack in the heart. The part that was human and fell down a lot. The part that refused to connect all the dots.

This is what i offer you, I told myself, dying. The black sheep's fleece. To warm you like Kentucky's finest. The past? no worries, shes fallen behind us. I urge you get waxy, let flow... the degenerate benevolence of liquid smooth language. One spirit, survived anguish so deep it near killed you.

I languished well near obscurity, until i found a little peace in letting go, to take with me down that long hall back home, the one without shadows or light. Water, laughter, a kind word, awaited me. Even prayer would be welcome there. These words ahead of me are here to be written. To describe all our likeness in ways and intangibles, to know with a knowing that cannot be described.

If you know what i mean, if you' re grateful like I am, if you've survived and cast shadow...then go ahead and read these words I have trained to be and be still. May they bring you all out like flowers by the sun. I need your devious smile, your shadow, your light. Before the rabbit turns metal, then white.    - KatYa, 2017

if friday was saturday

the cost of living was an abbreviated attention span and the tasteless smell of green in the back of your throat. the cost of living was a cold brew coffee fueling an organism programmed to turn on itself. the cost of living was an unholy alliance with anonymity, a television you paid the company to babysit for, hours on end in an armchair, and a remote to control you by. the cost of living was free.

when pennies were copper

mag wheels for eyes
roll out in silent film
silver screen dyes

down walkways
floorlit and salted
and buttered with
scenes

of someone else's storied
childhood

long legs falling in love
with strapping lads on streets
paved flat by
pennies

land without
cell phones

a sunday. 1955
a city. 1959

when churches were
sanctuaries

mark the time
by the bells and
the sun

we rest on
bloody knees

the automobile
extinct

home. 1936
the sky. 1910

the pool
1920 and two metres
deep

the denim
1969. when pennies
were copper

the board
she saw better
days

cut elbows
in ink

porcelain cheap
for the poor

inscripted
the names
in powder blue
soap

sliding down rails
to the subway

we saw better
days

laughter echoes

a certain
despair



- KatYa, July'17

off running. always dreaming

Life will always be troubling but we have to find our way and how i feel about myself has direct bearing on how it unfolds. what the hell it wasn't even a magical morning i woke up alone like usual with a not so friendly recollection on my mind and a not so super feeling like i probably blew a gasket. i got up and said hey! it's another effin day and either i'm gonna make something of it or it's gonna bury me. i got movin and french pressed around one in the afternoon, so i could kick it up a notch and pop my eyes in shake my hair out change up and get back to work. sure i said a mantra. i had to find myself in the mirror. when ready i hit the pavement and let the freeway style the day, and i got lucky enough to turn on the radio just before the last pony the one with the patch over its blind eye got into the final gate at the Kentucky Derby, and we were off running. Bukowski was somewhere mint julep in hand lucky ticket in his breast pocket, always dreamin.

promise

once there was a boy named bee 

upon my knee

softly telling me how rivers

did not reach the sea in the year 

twenty twenty three

some were black others blue

in twenty twenty two

and none could you wash your

self in

his eyelashes fluttered 

feeling me shudder

i could tell 

he honestly knew 

he unbuttoned my collar 

i cried and hollered and then he promised 

just breathe

then rolled up our sleeves so carefully

we could see those cuts on

our arms

with one finger 

he crossed my lips

tenderly looking into my eyes

and

we existed quietly there

until about quarter past one

bee upon my knee

and me

i wondered if all of the darkness

 he shared

could 

     ever

         be

          undone

yet i knew our

                 pain

             was

         the

same

- KatYa, 2017

you cannot miss my omission

tell us about it
about your path
they asked

listening and leaning in to me
with wild rambunctious eyes

when this moment arises
I say nothing
or little

I may say nothing later
I may never say anything
at all

or very little

you think you want 

my words

yet

you cannot miss
my omission


it is always a
most spectacular
event

four eyes

we are young -ii-

i hurt by all the friends i lost
by my involvement more than anything

 they ever did

a revolving door of well-meaning kids 

who tried to help this kid 

when this kid was deeply

 unreachable

now and again a horror
such a demon at times

 i been 

have i healed or will i ever
be so terrible you will
not wanna remember me

turn the blinds down
light up the no vacancy
keep me far away

have i done the same

 to you

i believe i suffered 

(before and after you)

i am young

lead me -- oh! -- very young what 

of darkness and derision

 to faith from 

indecision

inside out of me 

-- of us all -- like 

vapors we pass

 through

change us
 i am sorry

as we get older i believe

 in our presence

 

we are young

one and one makes one

with curiosity and presence i go
long on hopeful inquisition with you
the one who volunteered to
come and face me
and talk

kinda cool how we discovered

one and one makes

one

simply colorful everything. simply all night long.

What will the weekend be like, i wonder,  going into it alone and willing with a working spirit. i guess i feel better working than anything else anymore, which may be different than i once was. you see i once wanted to be reckless and free of responsibility, and searched a way out of the static. i went alone then, too, but always ready to be with anyone rolling the same way, as i am now. like me they might hold your hand for a moment longer than others, or hold your eyes with theirs. tractor beam. attraction. being chosen could be sacred again, not a consumer driven concept in the great malls of material faith now centrifuges and research labs for the subtle senses, the homes of renowned empiricists now filled by squatters, a luxury activity exclusive to the partially brilliant who move to town from city and sift and shift through the yet to be appropriated. today i would roll more with optimists and cynics, anyone who wants to roll up sleeves and kick ass for their country for family for the home made feeling, keeping to something meaningful even if it's not how you pay your mortgage or rent, your car note, insurance, your phone bill and grocery, your internet connection, electric, wardrobe and water. we may even get out and vote in a couple weeks, after we smash the pumpkins and drive the point home to the vampires. bloody hell. six sense perception dwindling down to three or four. age and race, time and place, seen and heard and felt, we come together then go it alone, swimming slow, canvassing the urban element. leaves fall off trees to the sidewalks awhile, people run past screaming from deranged clowns, tight trance joints in the clubs spilling out past security. social security. no, the future and 2023 are not cold, computer, the silent ones are chosen. they patronize the magazine stand and the cafe. tractor beam attraction. open to living different, no real right or wrong, simply colorful everything, simply all night long. Well, they might hold your hand. a moment longer than the others.

i wanna be electric

i got my ticket to chino in the outskirts of la trying to hit the grid and be captured by the cable i wanna be electric and extended stay america ina pocket just between the riveting room for you and me... a queen bed in a salt valley flat in the middle of november a room service setup so not to disturb alone in the center of a spiderweb of circuitry flashing mad in the pan like a siamese fighting fish all the betta to see you translucent of the soft sheets you ink on

cloud for sale. sinks in the middle

what with all was going on i began to think the world a dark place i could not find any light for seconds of every day not minutes just seconds not hours just seconds and me i was not sleeping well i had a boyfriend and the mattress i bought off the internet was supposed to float us on a cloud but if a cloud sinks in the middle well i did not know but this one does and what with all was going on in the world i began to think it a very very dark place and even the music i streamed into the audiowaves could hardly make me feel less insecure about our world our dark world our dark obvious future and then well the cloud it sunk in the middle the perfect cloud sunk me into my boyfriends arms and my insomnia went on and on in the dark and my boyfriend he got up and got dressed and left and left me there lying in the middle of a sinking cloud yes floating miserably so in the dark and cruel world you know but when i awoke and raised my head and got out of bed what with my bed what with my bed head and crawled up and out on the edge of this dark cloud and hit those goddam lights right and they were ecologically sound and bright white or not so and soft warm like the way i like them like old school kinda uneconomical old fashioned bulbs from way back when maybe the nineties remember then? and when i got up and fixed my bed head then said fuck it and put a hat over it all and looked me in the mirror and laughed and got my instant coffee made in the shade into my big silver bullet of a thermos in a cold and dark cruel world shattered by old yellow light from the eighties well... got my self to my insecure job ten miles away tryin not to do the old california rolling stops at the stop signs on the back roads dark and uneasy and unstable like sometimes but the highway and the stoplights led me to an open road below a very open and energetic sky for there yes there just above me and my politically disinclined am radio listening loser of an october preceding elections and what was it that blew the dark cold cruel world away but that gorgeous full wonderfully years of light brought forth like an opening in the sky for us harvest moon

a coverboys covergirls world

when we supposedly die, of the living only the closest to us remember us for very long and some of them keep to themselves, going to work coming home and maybe thinking aloud sometimes in a language the cats and dogs cannot decode, so only a trace of us remain, supposedly, and the witch hazel closes the roads and leaves us separate somewhere beneath the moisturizer beneath the foundation of a cover boy's Covergirl world... only those closest to the ones who remembered us remember someone remembering us, whomever we are, in black and white or monochromatic, sepia seeping slow into the imaginations of someone else's great grandchildren, who wear the looks of believers on buses to schools, and play on the playgrounds in old-fashioned ways, under timeless suns sucking up light and commonplace clouds through their straws, easily, atmospheres removed from the old pressures we once shared, before we learned our division, mettlesome in the worlds we changed and changed us, brought us up and down back when,  gave us the resilient half smiles we wore for one another, and shared with the world sometimes, filling them out for the ones closest to us, supposedly, as we laughed recreating other faces from the outside in, in a purportedly powerful way, carrying beyond anyone's wildest dreams across time and place and various things, young and mettlesome just like always, and never dying at all, anyway

dominoes. heaps of clothes -iii

They are dropping chlorine bombs again, while we splash our faces with the ones in our faucets, garnish with lemon and salt, now saddled with inhalers ready and breathless, in a homemade salt water sensory deprivation tank of fish, we are the fish, all is quiet and swimming in social medium. Crystal hot sauce splatters over the oysters in a postmodern spasm, slide off their rocks to Sitting Tongue who awaits. waiting. all we got this morning is waiting for confessions for paydays for unemployment checks for new leaders with new promises made, waiting for the promises to be made good, or not, or more to come.

i was waiting for you and my internal (programming) to stop the isolating (command) and go outside where you told me the sun still shines, waiting for the sun (listening to the Doors) in a bathtub on the run, completely thrilled was all i got (when i had you) and the two cats - Shy and Drama - somehow all my adult life all the cats again and again protect the sanctity of my life, but you, there is you and me and (we are) more than most (cats) can handle  - in 2011 - we had our homeless friends looking for homes we had our home which we would not have much longer, we had been told. you and me we have grown but not grown old. we have been abused and abused we have, tossed our litanies into the fire of another conjured argument with friends or enemies or one another and the same. all i got is you and our song remains the same. the hook is the only problem.

all we got is enemies. number one on the hot list of those who hate our guts? you. and me. in the space between us god bore witness, well, that's the kind of sentence got strung out and led to the forest path this morning, sometimes urgency in it, too, or swollen with bottom dwollen wrath (Allman brothers can soothe us only so long).

all i got is my music sometimes. this morning all i got is a cloud and the light so bright its perfectly loud and hurts my head a bit. but i got medication for that. OT and C what i got? i got meds and antibacterial handwash a tropical sea color blue with bubbles trapped in there like, well, like leaders trapped behind their military might in Syria in Egypt in Tunisia in Iran in Yemen in Algeria...trapped like bubbles in a cascading tropical Facebook blue ignited and (it had been said) long overdue...

like me and you. take us back and stamp us red and pay for us so we can recirculate back into the system where some unfortunate child some day will wander away and pull us off a darkened shelf in the horror section, to look through to the other side. ya, all i had back then was a pretty good feeling we would stay alive and survive the two and the ones (these numbers gotta add up to something), on a day was February twenty-one, twenty-eleven.  0.2.2.1.2.0.1.1. numbers add up to nine ...

number nine (by design)
number nine (lives)
number nine (sign)
KatYa, 2016 remix 2011