SEP30

gossip turned to murder

in the glamorous

never amorous

days

#katyamills

SEP10

with all the violence and its deleterious effects on society i begin to wonder what sense is there? we are emotional we become our emotions and this gives rise to all the varied works of art we cherish and the same capacity taken to extreme can end in murder. 

#katyamills

accomplice

abstruse

the way he called out 

in the fog 

manipulating flashes

with his mobile

baying at the edge of a cranberry

bog

my gut cried: disappear!

into the liquid air

but like a dumb magnet 

i remained

shackled now. accomplice

2 murder

#katyamills

 heavy metal

something in him attracted 

me like a magnet

clingy vines

on the first of august 

he contemplated murder and suicide

she was with another man now

he picked up the brushes 

instead of the rifle. drew some clingy 

vines over a fence. they was

only thoughts 

#katyamills

then the voices

you could find her
predawn by
the old covered
bridge

if you moved like a shadow
conceived in the less than light

a world of silence
in her head
overtook the duck pond
by the lily pad bed

then the light
then traversed
the sky

only the pond
remained dark with
her reflection
and the night

then the voices
began to bubble
anaerobic from the depths

then the cry to stop
then the aeroplane
then the cry for help

an orchestra of crickets
picked up where
they left
off

you can find her
predawn by
the old covered
bridge

that's where she died
that's where she
lives

killer -ii

a killer is lost like a river wandered off became a stream then an eddy then a trickle until it dropped off the face of the earth and dried up into nothing, so far from the source was it

a killer -i

a killer dies by taking life. when you must take a life to have it, you have little life to begin with, to need it so bad. and then to steal that which is not yours, you confirm you have no guts.

GWB 1.22.2 a videobook

bigger than big hearts break in smaller than small town america

imagine the larger than large promise of a child born to bigger than big hearts in smaller than small town america, imagine the laughter and popping of cheap champagne in the paint-blistered home as neighbors and family gathered round to see the new love, imagine the tough days ahead and long hours daddy works to support his young family and coming home late in time to kiss his little girl goodnight and share the day's stories with his young wife who knows life is hard but so worth it cause everyone she loves is right there and to fight for is right for them all...

imagine years later the daughter is grown and out on her own, married with two kids and her own smaller than small home and the man whom she loves out working which leaves her alone, and life is real hard tryin' to make it when the economy's gone south in america and she's gotta start thinkin about working herself but she's not sure where, when, or how, and she's scared cause her man is old-fashioned and doesn't want her workin but the kids need basics they cannot always provide the way things are, not to mention her parents are gettin older and need help...

imagine she's got a girlfriend whose sorta lost with no life like hers, who sometimes comes to babysit or just cure her loneliness for awhile, and her friend has some friends who she's becoming friends with, too, and they are all very nice and see how tired she is and wanna help...

and help sometimes comes in the strangest of forms, like when people in smaller than small towns with bigger than big hearts come together for a quick and easy answer cause they ran out of patience and energy and hope, so they resort to small parties and quickening of pulses, alcohol and cheap cigarrettes, some weed and relax, put on some old chart-topping trax and get to dancing, maybe fun loves between former boys and girls, while daddy's out working away the long day, and babies are napping their pretty little heads down, and friends will be friendly and adrenaline rises with a chance for some hope to distract from the powerless normalities around here...

hope in the form of intimacies and attraction, the realization you could still be young again a little longer if you tried, if you let your guard down a little and weren't so old-fashioned, if you let down your hair and wore your old clothes a bit tighter, almost like you still had a chance, it's exciting, and yes there's a seam in this matrix which you all downplay, might be one of them cuts up a line of some shit, and not everyone partakes until everyone does, that kinda subtle peer pressure and understated delivery, and it's no big deal until it is...

imagine how that plays out over several weeks to several months, and now there's a bit of a problem in the judgment department, the insight department has broken down unawares, and some friends get more intimate against all expectations, now emotions involved, just imagine...

home life becomes 'boring' and the life is all 'chores' and the kids are so frustrating though never a 'nuisance' and daddy's always tired always tired always tired, and you wanna feel good again you like how it feels with your friends and alone seems so foreign so scary unbearable, so you go on with your ways which you know have got shady, in the smallest of small town america, what with your biggest of big hearts...

nobody knew nobody fathomed nobody could have seen how it played out in the end, imagine the heartbroken suprise that day they found out you were the one in the news who had died who was found in the most public of public places, naked and alone floating in an eddy in a slow moving wide part of the river. yet no one was really all that surprised, almost strangely relieved in a way, for several years you had broken their hearts as you faded or they faded you out of your home life, or somehow some way your big heart went astray and you kinda lost your mind followin some so-called friends off the map of your motherly responsible path, definitely on drugs and you admitted it, too, and several times the intervention came in the form of coffee and donuts and family in your living room, concerned faces whose concern you tried to talk off, and an angry tired man by your side with two scared and half-hungry little kids you just wanted to hug all the day long, but something inside you demanded be fed, and you long since left and lost your little head though your big of big hearts was the same just the same...

it was like despite all that and the love all around you, nothing could be done to get it all right, something was lacking in money and resources, something was strained past the point of any use, and family could not know how to be... other than deeply and morbidly depressed when the thought of what to do about you came to light. so when you died it was almost like relief to them all, but others around your so-called friends started coming up headlines as well, and the smallest of small towns in small town america was about to make international headlines, you know, cause these young women dying for no good reason was too much for the eyes of the world to pass up for too long, and it turns out there were others in some status and addiction to power out taking great and greedy advantage of the desperate situation of impoverished peoples with the biggest of bigger than big hearts and minds long since lost in the smallest of smaller than small town america...

imagine the manipulations concocted by these exact people in positions of great power in such small places, demanding small intimacies from these lost women to heal their long since broken capacity for real and genuine warmth. and it even went off kinda well or so it seemed, i mean it oiled a system long since cracked from coast to coast so how could that be wrong? or terrible? or unholy? nobody would check themselves and why should they, when you and your friends had been paid for your services and conveniently fit into the transactional nature of corporate america...

 forget the emotions underlying and the hearts beating bright for a chance and some hope, and young half-starved children all waiting extended out into wings, out on the margins where they found you all brutally murdered or left to die with cocaine in your system, or meth or whatever... the biggest of bigger than big hearts forever broken in the smallest of smaller than small towns, that's what.

murder by memory -v

There are those fictional and real beings who happen to silently make their way through city streets. Their real or imagined relatives may not even feel them for the blood connect got lost as matters with less import took precedence. Even if you're make believe, you have your fiction to fall back upon. It's a basic human right of the future, just ahead of actualization. You have yourself. Such has been proven on a non-empirical level by five sense deconstruction, boiled down to clarity of the sense beyond and boiling down, I mean the process, was never the most compassionate practice unless you were boiling rocks down to the mineral soup which cures most disease in the distant future. Mineral soup will not taste any better than the idea of liquid rock, but it sure will be good for you and your kids if you have them --not recommended but where there's a will-- don't worry, it won't harden your arteries and even if it did, in the future it's a luxury to live by your hearts. Turns out all this preaching to stay present was unnecessary. Tense-bending will create new dialects in a world where then now and soon become great playthings of the mind, impinged upon by harsh realities, softened by mineral soups. Filling the void where time once meant so much, with a concentrate of former here and now fullness of life --the great store of it must come to some use, if not refuse, some pretty brilliant bastard decided-- was considered a new discipline and people both fictional and real were paid to do it, in something that resembled real currency. You can still consider a lifestyle choice, that's what currency buys, but time will not be of the essence and watches no longer adorn wrists. Some are hidden under clothes of the nostalgic, tugging on ankles and scraping the pavements. Most everyone loves the sound and it's easier than live pets when on walks.

love and murder

2016 © KatYa 

i was in love with her 

if i hadn't been

 i wouldn't have wanted

 to murder her 

that day 

i had a choice 

to break her neck 

to be a monster 

and go to prison for life 

(or a few weeks) 

depending upon 

my miserable 

gofund.me 

and how much i could raise 

to back my colorless 

innocence 

plea 

or take a public defender

 turn back time 

and hang 

by the neck 

until dead

murder at the movies

You spilled your popcorn - I stated the obvious. Kell was standing up now and stretching over me to cuff Bless in the ear with the side of her hand, but Bless was fixed on the man, and taking it all in, while up on the screen was a lesser sin, in black and white, walking the halls, inspiring the fright, shadows in the night, and the boyfriend was on his way back with an RC Cola exchanging pleasantries with the cashier, it was calm and quiet in here, the safest place you thought you could be, at a movie, watching life from the outside in, the silver screen… a lesser sin. And I was in between the clash, trying to hold Kell off, we can’t do anything, it’s done! And I led her away, while Bless finished him off and his boyfriend came upon the body slumped down, and saw the woman who seemed to be holding him up from behind and he went and held his friend, down on his knees, looking between the seats into the eyes which were aglow, but it was colorful and he wouldn’t but remember later, what was so off about it, asking her what happened? and she said innocently I don’t know, he just, he just had a seizure or something, I tried to hold him but you know they say to let them free, and, well, I didn’t want any harm to come to him so I did, but it sure was a bad seizure - is he on some medication?    -- Book 3 (teaser). Ame and the Tangy Energetic

Review: I Heard That Song Before

I Heard That Song Before by Mary Higgins Clark
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I need to start by saying I have been reading MH Clark's books since I was a teenager way back in the eighties, when computers were the size of small houses, Ronald Reagan was president, electric typewriters were fashionable, and photographs had to be developed to be seen (unless you had a slide projecter or viewfinder...uhh... S.O.S... what the hell is she talking about)? Anyway, libraries were still libraries and books were still books, then, and I read a lot of them in my alligator tee shirts drinking grape koolaid with a Canadian penny zippered inside the pocket on my sneakers. And all of her books I read were gripping, suspenseful, amazing!

Then I found this one a quarter century later, part of a Reader's Digest collection of four, while watching my clothes spin in the dryer at the laundromat down the street. They have books lined up on a ledge which runs along the washers, and it's give-a-book, take-a-book. So I took it and devoured it in a few days. Sadly the plot and characters and everything felt very rushed, almost like it was an outline for a much larger and longer work she didn't have time to write.

The setup was interesting, all the players moving in and around an old mansion which had been taken apart stone by stone and transported to New Jersey from Wales and re-assembled on 50 acres just a few miles from Manhattan. And the haunting memory of someone who disappeared there. Someone who died there. And someone else who disappeared. Intriguing! Old money, New York City. Ambassadors, landscape artists, drunks, addicts, art thieves, and shady personal attendants fill the pages.

Sadly the book did not live up to its potential.
Ironic it was a stone's throw from my spin cycle.

I know MH Clark has so much talent and I cannot end there, on a sour note, after having picked her up again. I decided I am gonna go back to her first bestseller she wrote in 1975 and read that one. I probably read it already, back when a trash compactor was your foot inside the bag, when Coleco and Atari were the gamer's games, but I want that old feeling back, when I was gripped by suspense and she had me, amazed.



View all my reviews

Review: Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was walking through my friend's house when I found this book randomly on a shelf. A 99 cent penguin classic. My friend's mom had died and she was preparing the house for an estate sale. Her parents smoked Marlboro Lights for fifty plus years in that house, and everything - including Thérèse Raquin - was yellow and smelled of tobacco. The flesh and body of the narrative turned out to be the same, yellow, describing the decay over time of a couple of cowards who sought to fool the world, and ended in fooling only themselves.

I chose the book the same way I choose any book; turn randomly to a page and start reading. I was excited because I had not read much of Zola. This was his first major novel, published in 1867 when he was 27 years old. Zola was quite wealthy and famous by his writing and politics, both of which had an impact in 19th century Paris, and may have been murdered (over the latter) when a chimney sweep later confided that he plugged up Zola's chimney deliberately, causing him to die by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902. Zola now shares a crypt with Victor Hugo in the Panthéon.

The first half of the book was interesting. A good story. I was pretty excited to discover what would happen next. All the characters were set up in rubber band like tension against one another, and I was just waiting to see which one would snap! And for sure they did snap. The aftermath (the second half of the book) was a big let down. There's a whole lot more telling than showing, and Zola goes into long-winded psychological analysis of the characters as they quickly become unhinged. Apparently he called this a study of 'temperaments'. But there is little development of plot and the scene is planted rather firmly inside a dingy house above a haberdashery. The story dries up in there, and I felt pulled alongside the author in his psycho-babble for far too long.

This story could have been a winner if you cut out about two thirds of the second half. I imagine something got lost in translation. I should try and polish up my French and try reading the original text. The book was met with widespread disapproval if not condemnation by the general public in 1867. I can see why. There's not much in the way of redemption, it is nihilistic. Even François, the house cat, is not spared. I thought to myself: come on, now! Zola! Give us somebody to love!

View all my reviews

Maze 2:12:3 Storytelling

Book Two

Daughter of Darkness Series

Chapter 12:3

In the last episode 2:12:2 Blood on the streets of Oakland! Panic on the streets of Oakland! Murder on the streets of Oakland! 

And here is the latest -- 5 star review -- for Maze. 

ghost train. revisited

Oh ghost train
what terrors do you hold
as you launch across the landscape
burning in the cold

Oh scarecrow
what terrors have you seen
hung up in a corn field
where the murders been

Oh October
harvest and the moon
colors of the
dying

now I light a candle
remembering the lost

so when they come
to call

in the dark hours
in the frost

see
 them by
their shadows
      playing

in the hall

murder by memory - part ii

A cultural analysis - or defrag - of the perceived madness and its development in the mind from inception on... The designated criminal who judged a fellow sentient for a difference on any continuum (ie sexuality, race, gender, education, age, ethnicity, body image, fanciful morality plays) would be taken to a room without furniture to stand upon an intelligent floor which assessed the sensitive points of any criminal scanning the foot with footprint technology, then, when any thought, feeling or behavior indicated a relapse into poor or judgmental bias, such would be confronted and corrected with a paralyzing shot of vibrational frequency dissonant to the criminal, and the corresponding organ would temporarily be shut down or limited of function for up to 24 hours. If the kidney got tapped, the subject would begin to experience blood toxicity and jaundice, and feel the attitude and judgment fall away as all energy became devoted to trying to locate and sweep out the source of infinite pain. An eradication of hate campaign was underway.

murder by memory  - part i

Will he come back to me? The silence in the house might break her delicate wrists in two, toss her on the woodpile, long nights, to keep warm. Abbreviated days. All of her memory of him coming home. The squeaking of the belt under the hood of his Jeep, where he parked beneath the sycamore tree. One of the kittens would bound out to meet him. Fatigue had not undone him. She would quickly get up and wrap a sweater around her, step into the sandals by their bed on the mahogany floors, and take the 45 steps down to the kitchen, the backs of her thongs clicking into her heels. She would grab a nice glazed ceramic bowl out of the cabinet, pour some oats and some water without measuring, into a pot on the stove. Oatmeal was his favorite. Then she would hop back up onto the landing, and click down to the front door to swing it open for him. The feeling of him pressing into her. The cool kiss on the neck. These were the memories.

on a murder

Last night before bed I read and I read, and I found a picture of a young girl in the Sacramento Bee who was killed in my city, in the dugout beside a diamond in a bad part of town, near where she lived with her mom and they fought, she stole her dad's Camels and headed out to the park, and swung on the swings with her Goth kinda look as described by the witnesses who saw her that night, after sunset in March, twenty twelve, after dark... they say she was unlike the style in the photo was released, where she looks like any American girl in the fifties, black hair kept up from her face, the bangs cut to the neck in a tame kinda way, this was not how she looked on that fateful night, after mom and the fight when she slipped away with dad's smokes, her hair was longer and pulled mostly over one side of her face, dripping down to the dirt as she hung her sad head, wishing to see dad with whom mom was estranged... two men in their twenties who saw her that night in the park asked if she felt safe, for no one was really no adults around, and she spoke with the confidence of an untested youth, she had a fight with mom and was not going home yet, she spoke out her truth and they left her, walked away in the dark ending light... some time later, they say, between eight and nine at night, when most kids are asleep tucked in by sheets white, she must have walked over across the fields by the diamond, then stepped down to the dugout maybe to hide herself from view, thinking it was safer and really who knew, she could have been lured by one of those young men who came by, it's all speculation no one really knows why he returned to accompany her for a smoke, to hang out... for they found his DNA and hers mixed into the snipes, nine butts on the ground, maybe six they had shared, the profile was submitted and just as they feared, the national database struck a match with a man ten years older, a domestic violence charge in his file, so they went to interview him for a while... he denied being there in Rosemont that night, denied meeting the girl at all, yet his friend (the other man on that fateful night) called him out as the one he was with in the park when they asked the girl was she safe when she wasn't, and they walked along to a third man's house who told the cops the two men talked about her before leaving, the girl in the park... so the cops had their man, locked him up for a trial, which began yesterday after a long delay, the defense lawyer balking at the profiled DNA, for many people do pick up cigarrettes already smoked, in low income areas and high income, too, to take the last drag before the filter is reached -- or to take the last breath of a girl whose been beaten and stabbed and asphyxiated to death, a middle schooler who came to an end too soon, found under a bench in the morning in her hoodie, with a hickey on her neck next to where she got stabbed, she must have resisted when she was grabbed... and no matter how it is framed, who did it or why, the loss of a child, a most painful goodbye.

murder by memory part - i -

Will he come back to me? The silence in the house might break her delicate wrists in two, toss her on the woodpile, long nights, to keep warm. Abbreviated days. All of her memory of him coming home. The squeaking of the belt under the hood of his Jeep, where he parked beneath the sycamore tree. One of the kittens would bound out to meet him. Fatigue had not undone him. She would quickly get up and wrap a sweater around her, step into the sandals by their bed on the mahogany floors, and take the 45 steps down to the kitchen, the backs of her thongs clicking into her heels. She would grab a nice glazed ceramic bowl out of the cabinet, pour some oats and some water without measuring, and throw it into the microwave. Oatmeal was his favorite. Then she would hop back up onto the landing, and click down to the front door to swing it open for him. The feeling of his abs pressing into her and his arms collapsing her shoulders. The cool kiss on the neck. These were the memories which were murdering her now.

K reading... murder. in the eyes

K IS SILENT @ wordpress
Original Spoken Word
Story by Katya 

Murder. In the eyes.
 by Katya Mills

She looked around the city night. 

The canopy provided by the trees made this street darker than others. 

Low hanging branches and leaves flecked shadow into the metallic orange light painting the sidewalks.

A sociopath stood unseen. 

Camouflaged against the papered concrete walls like a barred owl.
She sensed him and he sensed her sensing him.

Were she only distracted by an iphone or earbuds, he thought. 

But he would not be disappointed, standing there, silently watching her navigate the street in her fishnets and heels.

Only his pupils moved across the smudge of cirrhotic, ashen pale of eyes.

In the walkway between buildings, not far from there, beneath a basement apartment’s window well, out of sight, lay the crumpled formless residue of human life and spirit. 

Breathless and emptying itself of fluid.

The spirit of the dead hung heavily over the sociopath, like a large cotton overcoat immersed in a pool of blood of all the ones had died by his hand in the night. A parade of frozen faces preoccupied his mind, his thoughts.

She gripped her pepper spray tight. 

She knew the unnatural evils under city lights, 

might come out the woodwork and contend with her sex.

She remained unafraid, carrying herself gracefully across the pavements. 

Aware the heavies were awash in their own karma.
Some terror of what one has done and cannot undo. 

Gyre of samsara, spinning down toward the core of the earth. 

For infinity. Forever.