1984 sketch

on holiday 

distant cheers from the parade 

they walk the paths radiating out from the park 

maples drop the generous leaves 

the youngest leaps to catch 

his sister follows far behind 

hands in pockets. listening to Psychedelic Furs 

disoriented by infatuation 

boy in shop class

#katyamills

photograph from a time long long ago

living off the land

you and your cousin 

captured for eternity

young men astride horses 

centered between generations

in the frame on the wall 

were you more happy

than sad? the question

had no answer even when

you were alive

#katyamills

o.ver

imagine the day we
may flood the streets we may

see ourselves
smiling and may
we embrace because it's
over

#katyamills

tra.nce join.t

no right no wrong simply colorful everything simply
all night long

roll tight trance joints 4 the crowd
2 feel

no. the future's not cold
computer. still

clouds pressured by
fronts to tears are
 driven
woven and rolling are feeling and warm
are driven are crying and living
are dying and rolling
are woven into
the life

tomorrows

you either can get past whatever you did in your past, or you cannot get past the past. today feels sorry for your tomorrows.

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

the last living smile

many years from now
when shyness is the greatest of virtues
and skepticism the license
to live

your eyes will come up over the ledge
of some old tome so heavy
in your hands

in a bare reading room
in the last living library
against the ticking
muffling the heart of
this city

and ask me
out from under the skein of our technocracy
what is goodwill?

and like a sun just risen
above any horizon
i will decorate the room
your face

will decorate
the room
my face

with the ancient
 smile

m x memory -ix

The true pioneers of mindful presence were now emblazoned in lifesize advertisements so real you thought they were meditating on you. Commuters dropped coin at their feet, which was quickly swept up by the children of atheists. Advertising for anything other than recreational weed had fallen out of fashion in 2023. Along with work. Working a steady forty, monday through friday, was now punishable by dominatrix for up to one month of nonconsensual slavery. Attaching ones org to a mission was also considered a violation of collective liberties, as the future was to be revered for all and not limited possibility. Proselytizing the sentients into a limited potential future based on some dreamers special mission was considered a flagrant and intentional crime, and prosecuted under the diversion clause. You could not go herding people into some other container, when they had already been successfully contained by strategic water cannon placement and acupressure machines. All individuality had to be compressed and pasteurized, homogenized, so to be useful to the state's personality packet program. The American dollar was of no value to China anymore. Their ports only accepted freight containing the balanced personalities of America. Global trade was mostly information these days. China in 2023 was the forefront global exporter of eastern solution to the world paradigm in similar packets which could be easily decompressed with a modern day can opener any toddler could figure out. A great demand for the nutrients in a non-violent and benevolent product, the wisdoms inherent in confucianism, buddhism, taoism, communism, sufism, among other subscribed philosophies which had evolved the eastern world into its current selfless, rugged, dialectic nature. Sentients efforted and fought over it as usual, but reverence was placed so much differently and more carefully in the world 2023, the landscapes of the last century's ruling global authority had become relics and often been archived, as interest fell mostly on the new world order, which struck most sentients as highly advantageous and useful to the species and collective inclination toward healthy unbiased purpose wherever possible... all the way to the ends of the earth, which were not ends after all, as awareness now informed us of non-finite individuation. this was accepted as practical science, contemporary thought-feeling-knowing. Yet still they go unnoticed, the silent ones. Love was underwater, perhaps devalued or defaced, below the heavy freight of packaged information and pasteurized personalities. This is as it is.

m x memory -viii

By the year twenty twenty-three, 99% of microscopes were melted down and recycled, whereas bifocals and bottle glasses had come back in fashion. And it was decreed that all laboratories be replaced with ashrams, following in the footsteps of a decentralization trend. Anyone caught with space foam running shoes and acoustic instruments got a one way ticket to the primeval forest being cultivated on Mars. These items became highly sought after. The principal objective was not to have one.

There were some (in the future) who could not hope to walk unseen down city streets. A loosely affiliated group of citizens who did not so much ask for the kind of attention they were given, collectively or individually.Which was a suitable regimentality for twenty twenty-four. Legend has them born of loose-fisted, assymetrical, left-handed, lipton teaheads just shy of true north. The truth was something else.

They tend to make a lot of noise without speaking, and move like waves.  Everyone else wanted to tell them what to do, and they wouldn't do anything other than what they were told if they were to do what was expected, so atypically they defied expectations. Otherwise they wouldn't really exist, would they. Ice water was in their throats, not their veins.

You cannot know them in traditional forms of knowing. They have something more intentional or focused, it seems, or something less violent-by-association. Anyone is guessing. They congregate in the shiny bars of the fringe-mainstream. On bicycle hill perhaps. Or in bookstores off the beaten path in the Mission. They have an aversion to snapping turtles and judgments and extemporaneous litigation.

Along with us, they envision a society where the only records are vinyl and photographic memories are stripped and laid out in the sun. But only visions are envisioned. Nothing has been empirically correlated and nothing ever will. The principal objective was not to have one.

m x memory -vi

What was (not by law) acceptable? You would have to be crystal (clear) to know that awareness had not changed. Not even by 2023. Awareness is like it was: half-whole. The industrio-technological revolution had consciousness in a blender and someone hit liquefy. The laws could not tourniquet the blood loss. In effect, all diverse perceptions broadcast by sentients and picked up on radios in tunnels, were to be accepted. Resistance, denial of telltale truths, revolt against the pioneers of particularly unpopular ideas, was punished by slow reflexology torture. The pedestrian access to all CNS points of sensitivity. Modern culture placed high value on sensitivity, for it was the easiest way under the skin and didn't cost a damn thing. But desensitivity treatments were about the most malevolent practice around. A desensitized sentient was today scorned and unforgiven... turns out all evolution has the fallout of consequential negative feedback, which angles off the light of the fresh vision and becomes the new bastion of ignorant factions which can be discredited yet never completely silenced by radiating waves of heart-centered caring intention...

excavating manhattan in the year 2030

All the civilizations and past lives are buried beneath us because they did not hire enough people to keep sweeping. Had they hired enough sweepers, we would have all the treasures of the past among us. We have the street sweepers now, machines, but they go about sweeping the roads which have paved over the past. Shouldn't we all be digging down into our gardens, down into the deep to unearth all the treasures? We all know how. One of the first things they gave us was a bucket and a shovel and a sandbox and naturally we began digging. In two hundred years all our treasures will be buried with us, and the future will be walking on our graves! Sure, some of the treasures will be exhumed and put on display. But what about your heirlooms? What about your creations? Like rings of a tree, the superficial layers of the earth if taken out by cross-section will tell of our lives and our tragedies. In New York City, in the year 2310, someone will excavate Manhattan and find that one thin ring of chalkdust from nine eleven and put the pieces together again so nothing will be lost on the timeline. On either side of that ring will be the slick almost watery syrup of the life and times of the most powerful nation on earth. I'm sure my grandmother's ballet slippers will be in there. And not far from that, ashes from my grandfather's cuban cigar. There will be reams of paper mulch on one side, and the other will be tested for trace amounts of silicon and plastic. The movement from the daily morning predawn paper delivery boy to the bloggers and vloggers logging onto their apples. The countryside will have imperceptible layers of poisons in the corn, and fluoride and pharmaceuticals will test positive all over the cities for sure. They will have to really work to determine why we brushed our teeth so rigorously back then. I mean now.

future.past.present

My future

innocent

untouched
pure

delicately woven
by my touch

i cry
to think
upon



My past is

starved
pale
and dark

thinking about it

i burst into
tears

sometimes



My life now

simple
not effortless

thrilling
not lonely

creation
behind the
keys

just

 
right


KatYa

Journal #05.07.15

Touch became a rare and valuable find in a market consisting mostly of audio-visual sensation. A new trend took place, whereby bodies were lying on the ground. Many people left the city for an hour or a lifetime, in order to find a field to borrow or to buy, in order to be able to finish breakfast and coffee and online communications, and head out of the house, off the bottom step, past where the pavement ends, into the center of said field, and dropping oneself first on to one's knees, then back on to one's back or forward even on to one's belly, with or without clothing, to feel the touch of the earth and all the organic matter therein and thereunder. Sun bathing was another form of intimate reception, but no longer viable due to melanomas. Human touch was another form of intimacy, but quite unlikely due to unfavorable market conditions, legalities and general phobic disinclinations. This sorta experience was almost miraculous in the year 2059. Metrosexuals would stop and circle and glom in an insatiable crowd. Certainly not within reasonable expectations. Anyone who cried out about lacking this sorta intimacy, would be ridiculed for sure. Like walking down the street expecting someone to hand you cash money without asking. They would wonder aloud what planet are you from? To which you might respond, Earth, circa 1973? After which, disheartened and alone, you slagged on back to your field of glory, removed your polyurethane skin, and dove headlong into the irrigated mud, hoping to drown. Good news. The exfoliating powers could be exponential.

Journal # 03.02.15

I wish I will live in self-forgotten. For now I look into the fog. Then turn on the space heater. My kittens all curled up in different rooms. They need the heat more than I do. One is topping a wicker basket of clothes. Another is curled upon the bed. The third, the lone wolf, on the belly of the armchair in my kitchen. I sit at my desk and wonder how life got its limits, so endless the moment it seems. I dare not look into the future. When all my kittens are gone. When perhaps I am here, at this same desk, with new kittens. Traitor! With new poems on my tongue. New paperbacks to my name. Ebooks on kindle. Traitor! I have forgiven myself already. For life trudging on. Forgive myself, towards self-forgotten. And once I forget myself complete? It will be left for someone else to remember who I was.

the light of future's present past

the quality of light
in the middle of the night
something hard to see
a candle dance
maybe


the lux
the quality
in the middle of the day
maybe less remarkable
than the light at night
in may

i once saw northern lights
purple green and blue
i once saw you
in my life
you and me and
me and you

the quality of sunshine
against a dark and dangerous sky
is just the kinda thing i need
so real so true
like you

the quality of lightless day
imprisoned in the mind
when all the world is simply shit
all the world
and mine

the quality of coming through
a really painful time
a midnight blue
an abstract lime

this is the quality
falls between us
still
i cannot help
loving you

i love the light
in darkness cast
the light of future's
present past

the eye of lighthouse
three sixty round and down below
the waves besmashed
down and round
ago

i see reflections
of the rocky rolling ocean spray
all day in lemon
squeeze

when contemplating all i've loved
and some who
gone away

i ask your hand
across dark land
across dark land with me

i ask your hand
across dark land
across dark land and sea

before the light diminish
quick!
before the light?
i ask of you

come with me now
come
please

retrospectral disinclination

There is nothing like a retrospective to take you out of time
Where do we go, when we go back?
I wanna know, where do we go?
If I leave this place too long,
can I still come back?

Or will I become some
retrospectral
memory of
me

Some sorry pseudo self
and signing out
apocryphally yours

I think
I will
stay

thank you very much
for the invitation
into collective checking out


like Robert Frost
the road less traveled
this moment
is my route