madness stops within you

to stop in yourself

the madness of the world

online and off

find what you stand for

tolerate disagreements

be properly outraged 

and mostly passionate

able to voice what you care about

and why

#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

hunting the unforgiven

I find it wild and a little unsettling to see my country focusing on witch hunts as the ranks of the unforgiven grow, though the feeling is matched by the redemptive quality which forms in our cultural atmosphere each time someone's longheld secret is released and truth stands up finally to power.

This year we have witnessed several figures of great power in Hollywood and the District of Columbia and Manhattan blasted on Twitter and sued and denounced on mainstream media, and a few who have been stripped of power, in those cases where they are clearly (if not by forensic evidence than by the numbers of allegations and survivors) guilty of abusing and betraying the public trust by their actions.

How do I reconcile my mixed reaction to these media moments of horror and truth and compassion? I was once guilty of betraying public trust. Day by day, for several years, I have been working my way back to respectability. Society is giving me a chance to learn from my mistakes. A life cut up by addiction. I left myself behind and lost my mind.

Only god knows if I will make it tomorrow. My past is history. Today I do my best to participate in life and help out, bringing all I have learned with me wherever I go. Sharing. Caring.

What of these public figures whose pasts have caught up with them? Outcasted from society and unforgiven? Why does it disturb me to see them disfigured and disrobed from their fraudulent personas? Isn't this justice and long overdue?

I guess it's sad to watch people die that way, publicly, and sometimes their loved ones have to die alongside them. Meanwhile the victims of their crimes survive. It is unsettling to uncover what they have lived through, the survivors. I know because I am one, too.

I wonder where forgiveness fits in, when it comes to the unforgiven? I wonder if there's a certain hell where healing never starts? A tail end and no beginning. And how it came to be this way?

the crime scene is permanent

Her great eyes fall on us
while we are looking

the medium

the monster

we give our all
to thank her
for the ocean

lackluster commentary
washes up on the shore

the droppings
of opinion
hit and run
hit and run

the crime scene
is permanent

she spreads us
lost and luster
thin sometimes

in a minute hand's
wide circling
lenient spin
sometimes

we do it
to ourselves

the hours
artfully wasted
the body
hardly moves

text necking in our photo
editing booths

manipulating
the age off our faces

pixel worship
while life gets scarier
out there

help me
i have forgotten
what's real

i don't wanna regret
all this screen time
like some washed up
porn star

 even that
must be real

god let me fall back
laughing in your arms

at a bar
at a laundromat
smoking reds

caring

force me through the holidays

I could take my happy freshly home-highlighted head on a smiling walk down the road, the street flanked by sycamore trees and not so many post office boxes anymore, throwing all their skinny winter arms into the empty sky asking for what? Ya I could on a head full of Peruvian Oro Verde.

I am makin' room for us so small in my head, I only have a cupboard left to rent  it's like New York City in there. Ya but I'll do it just to keep you. I could freeze and throw my arms up, too, and stand there until it's dark and a Ford Explorer with one headlight takes me out -- so how I feel is real --  I hurt the way you hate me, passively, denyin it all along like your some kinda saint cannot hate.

I love the way I remember us. I could continue, long past the ancient era of news and music and video on paper and tapes. Or I could shut the cupboard up and paint it, put the painting over it my friend just gave me. Something new, you know. Where love goes after a dead end. Left me stupid, left me dumb, left me empty at the end of a road, thanks a lot. Then told me keep going, right off the road. If I still loved you I could and you know I would.

 How much silence is left to dilute the poison in a media concentrated mind. Give me an ugly sweater, some pumpkin pie and a league of national football and force me through the holidays. Honey, I'm sorry, I don't mean to wake you...but... how much poison is left, is there enough to kill the silence?

No, no, fuck all that!

Gimme a broken home to fix.  I'll take my memories on multigrain, multiplatinum, put it on a wall, behind glass. Then one night in creative impulse, after he chases up my skirt and back down into a dream, I'll break the glass and pull the alarm, hover out on a hard drive's shiny disc, slicing through an mp3 made by you and me. I'll run away and then walk back. I'll love you in secret. I'll make love with a memory pulled out of a locket. I'll stab the knife into the socket. I'll pray for us in public. I'll stare into the eyes of the baby tigers.

cement mixer

If I had a cement mixer on wheels, I would clean it out immaculate and turn it into an old-fashioned ice cream mixer, and drive across the land pouring ice cream for all the world so I could see all the awestruck happy faces, and if the press began to follow me, I would drop ice cream slicks for them to slip upon, and shovel themselves out of rocky road.

To the writers out there... consider your mind a cement mixer, and never forget to drop the concrete into your ideas, your abstracts, so to pave the way to your success as measured by all the happy readers who you left with awestruck, happy faces.

Journal # 02.18.15

Wednesday. I was listening to the radio. The media was reporting about some celebrity gossip, and how gossiping was distracting from the real story. The media was talking about the media in a critical way, as though the media was not itself media. The media was reporting how it was wrong for the media in this country to focus on gossip and not the real story. Whatever the real story was. I was interested in the real story. But instead, all I got was strange psychological gyration. The phenomenon of media detaching from media, with hate. Media condemning media for gossiping. Media, gossiping about media. Projecting. The real story cried in a corner. Neglected. I switched channels to hear the real story. White noise. 

enveloped in media glaze - v

there we are
the us in nostradamus
under the bridge of celebrity
worship

drinking coffee
eating the media glazed
donuts

promising each other miracles
just to stay sane

there we are
lacing and weaving
the words
some of the dopest beats
just to stay sane

you and me
took the same classes
on different streets

hell razors
on a cold day. indeed

internally enveloped
not yet delivered
preoccupied with raising hell

a roll of the thumb
carries the imprint of culture

we made some premonitions
and put them in the freezer
no problem at all
to thaw

with the orange juice
on the counter
mix with water
then drink

effing with the time-space
continuum

uncover

Uncover your heart
one thousand words
one day

ascertain a movement
beneath the jabbering
fear

when all is really silent
a most delectable sound
to hear

stop the social media
for one minute
every hour

drop your fuckin cell phone
from atop the cell phone
tower

pull the plug
for life!

a blackout on this city

the darkest night
one moment

have faith!
have trust!

the eyes adjust

Rolling Allostasis Revisited -iii)

Shaking hands while shaking hands for votes of approval. What got overlooked: trash removal. On the other side of the trax, the real suffer the facts. Streets we cannot walk, hardly even drive. Cause our sense of reality got wedged between the seats, somewhere back in ‘85. One would statistically be wondering, how we're even alive. Check the pulse. Nothing there. The world under siege by an ergonomic chair. Lots of media distraction still keeps us at bay. Expecting, demanding conscious or unconscious reaction.  Poor self kept immobile. Poor spirit. In traction. A quick study, in quicksand. We need a bubble bath. Dear Calgon! Take me away! 

So we pray for you. And we pray for me. To get well and get conscious. Paradigmically free. Because it's hard every day. We fall back in odd patterns. Relearning our rings, all the way out to our Saturns. Whoops. There's another infraction: for shooting your mouth, your gun-- or your plan to extend nafta  further south. Like to yucatan peninsula. Somewhere most US Americans cannot locate on a map.

The media takes a nap on the reporting of corporate rule of one-star countries. Per Zagat new rating. Comp the countries like comparing motels. So offensive and intended, cause lord knows that shit sells. Controversy creation  a frequent occupation; if the interview for the position ends in controversy... you're hired. The placating drone in some den of iniquity down the street, getting wired. Lets pray another drone will not be sired. One model getting old? have it retired. Controversy prevention must be hardwired.

But what can we tell you about the one going sideways? The one whose engineering was perfectly misdirected. The one who took the controls away from the autopilot? The curiosity to all? The female Nietzche down the way? The fascinating one down the hall?

We could say chosen one, not for wanting to mislead. We can tell you for sure she was easy to love as the female lead. We learned to care about her, respect her, feeling her. Connecting on non-verbal levels. Collaborating on astral planes. Jumping the devil. Or 1940's era trains. The beat signature line. Ooh la la! She’s a part of you, a part of me. She may be difficult to see. She will get us out of our really tight spot. Shes the fancy persuasion. She's your connect. You're liaison. When she walks the street these days. Let's put it this way: its en masse, an Occasion...

[to be continued]