summer

reticent was the dawn ona summer morning. the birds chatted outlandishly at the edge of the river. all the people couldn't bother. full of coffee stepping on it, reaching speeds just shy of too fast for the highway.   -katya

idiot

was an idiot on
the road takin up
two lanes stepped
down from a ford
truck to deliver
fists on a prius
stopped behind
him

what are you doing
out on the road
with your rage
idiot

you gonna
get hit by a
car

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.

Journal # 05.02.15

 Some old paradigm element had us skimming across the Keys all the way to Key West. It was fantasy. You just don't do that. The islands are long and a long ways apart. They may be connected by bridge and culture and climate, yet each is an entity unto itself. If you stand next to someone in line for bread and water, are you family? The journey would be long from one to another. Harleys trailing exhaust for miles, coughing in clear cracks over the aqua blue magnitude. The fantasy might find redemption in a storm. Red sky in morning. The air shifting and accelerating until few birds could fly. Old nests would be blown out like paper. By afternoon, people stop and stare at the amazement of clouds. Hold onto your bloody mary. American flags begin to whip at the whitewash on the poles. The sky turns many colors with the sun reduced to a narrow band of grey-white above horizon. The clouds would compete with the sea. Pull your outdoor furniture inside. Find your pets. Businesses taped the glass. Lizards darted into porous ground. An ocean above and below. The fantasy lived in the storm. The fishermen took in the catch. The boats being secured all evening long, then the rains came. Only then could our splayed Keys reach and touch one another, falling together on the ring as the winds picked up to shore. All became monotone and inaudible. The sky, the sea. The earth. The mind. And from there we might finally, after too many cocktails and smoke and dissension, come together and unlock all the truth. A moment of clarity. In the morning, it was gone. It was fantasy.

Journal # 04.13.15

Consider yourself Crazy, rolling along the hills of Virginia and West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, Patsy Cline in your ears and leather wrapped around your fingers, and form, and the '66 engine sounds like a boat as you step on it, and your favorite one beside you steps on the volume with a painted fingernail to the dial, and the sky wraps around your eyes, a tinted line more blue than ever real could be blue, striped across the top of the curving windshield, and in the rearview the dreamy haze of the past hugs the heat of the highway where you leave it, in an exhaustive try, you leave it and let her slide around your mind. Life is still beautiful... in forms... but can you even stand to care?

Journal # 02.21.15

Saturday. Listening to BBC news. The English accents cannot dampen the enthusiasm. Apparently the world is spinning on an axis. The axis is made of butterfly wings and licorice sticks, and needs to be placed under construction due to its "deteriorating core infrastructure". World leaders met at an undisclosed location, and, after taking a virtual tour to the center of the earth, agreed to impose tariffs on the world peoples, for the Global Axis Reconstruction Project, aka GARP. A Global propraganda effort is being confabulated for the benefit of all humankind. Animals and plants are thought to derive secondary and tertiary benefit by GARP, but a study would have to be launched to determine wherefore. Fundraising efforts for any study must be deemed essential and sanctioned by the overarching global congress, before bake sales may be held. Pancake raffles are prohibited. Baked goods must meet International Food & Drug Standards, with the exception of McDonald's apple pies. No one is worried about the roaches, except the roaches. The global marketing campaign will include photoshopped imagery of the earth, coming off its axis at a near-future determined date, to incite fear in all peoples toward opening of wallets and purses to save their own souls. This has been determined by the United Nations to be a "healthy global fear" and thus worth capitalization. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which has tasked the Federal Highway Administration for the maintenance of the Eisenhower Interstate System of Highways, and put hundreds of thousands of road construction workers' children through college, will be spearheading GARP, or the World According to GARP, and transposing its mission statement upon all the world's peoples. Thus, "to improve mobility on the nation's highways" shall be rewritten as "to improve mobility of the earth, upon its axis". It is not yet clear if the world's people will "buy in", but the antecedent studies conducted by the Global Church of < insert deity here > of human psychology are hopeful, as humans contain "vast and promising capacities for imagination". 

repatriation flash

a star
was born
just last year
with dated expiration

some soldiers march
beneath a drone to
orders for
repatriation

a giving tree
taken down
to make room for a highway

a leader of an Eastern realm
tells the world
let's do it
my way

and the dandelions saw
their heads
lopped off

the roses all
dead-headed
too

all was left
by even
time

an imprint from
a single
shoe



Katya Mills, 2014
all rights reserved

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