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when i meditate on those i knew who went down hard and whom, after all the shock had been absorbed, by anyone who meant anything to them, ascended to the heights of recollection, i am filled with great sadness, giving a damn, decidedly, when i got no damns to give.  #katyamills

IT'S HARD

i remember our old town, early eighties. we were kids, riding our ten speeds out for some records or ice cream or pizza or movies, and usually to your house same day. find some trees to climb or trouble to get into. even then i felt different and it made me uneasy around people. painful sometimes. but i always felt i could be myself around you. i wonder what you're up to now. life is hard, isn't it? i wish i could find you and take you down some dirt path where we could talk, and i thank you.

the lucky ones have no phones

our technology was killing us a little bit each day, and the lucky ones had no phones. i saw a lone wolf pay phone in the city outside a restaurant by a busy intersection. remember how we used to get on then off these phones? you dropped a quarter in and set the world aside for a few minutes. when you hung the receiver up there was a chime, the change fell and you could scoop it out with one finger into your palm. look up and the world was right there for you, confrontation, and you wanted to face everything. you were in it! we didn't know any different back then. we were the lucky ones. i wanna be lucky like that again. i'm gonna keep this crap phone and this crap service as long as i possibly can, until i'm so sick of it i won't ever pick it up unless you need me. 

forty years ago

i wanna go back to the world the way i remember... is it because i was younger or life was less complicated? or have i forgotten i felt the same way about the world then as i feel about her now? i wanna walk in ona sun, rising this morning, and see if it's the same it was as forty years ago.

chalk it off as existential slowburn -ii

... i dont know how to write this. i want to think before i write, but i cannot. i want to treat this
with the attention it requires. the gravity it inspires. the sensitivity it needs. i am even now
holding back from trying to rush to disagree with you on some of your points you made,
because i do feel differently, yes, and thats okay, yes. however, i cannot disagree with your
overall vision. because this is also what i see. atleast i think our visions of us are pretty
much alike. it doesnt matter if they are or they aren't, though. i truly believe that.

god i feel like im in church all of a sudden. because my spirit is aching. i feel my spirit through
my body in that powerful way like i did on the best sundays in the earliest 1980s, when my family
was a young family, the 4 of us were tight, we had a big old queene anne victorian to tear around
in, a big old lawn wrapping around her, and a little peke-a-poo dog named buttons. its fur was like
the worst case of jerry curls when she was just a pup. my moms radiant joyfulness at having
all of us together singing hymns on sunday, well, it just filled us up, also. but my dad wasnt
really into it. so the kids werent either. so looking back its an aching kind of spirit i felt ...

fragment

from a letter i wrote to someone i once loved
- KatYa

Mt Rose, 2016

"i love you. we've been through alot. i wont forget it.
all i can do now is just live through it with you. until maybe
i need to live through it without you? i dont know. its different
looking one day to the next."  (2011)

Journal # 06.08.16

The kids were at play across the way and I wondered how to set myself loose like that, again, is my only forum in my head anymore? Summer strikes up a breeze from the delta and I know the blues and oughta sing. You keep that inside and you risk intimidating your blood. I have quarantined myself off the frolicking ocean of internet, maybe as much for you as for me. I wonder do you still have nothing to do but play with your phone all day. Is there anyone holds you anymore? I hope you have someone who loves you, sometimes I still wish it could be me. Today like most days I am trying real hard to simply love the life I have been given. There was a time I didn't have to try, I sure was a lucky kid. I have my moments but it's a lot harder to reach the beach. Please don't ever forget that I love you, maybe not as clearly or definitively like when we were in each other's arms, okay, but the memory of us warms my heart and I won't forget the terror of it all. Cause being honest keeps it real.

kids

we were kids we carried book bags we threw rocks at each other for fun we drank milk and ate cookies and laughed crumbs and stamped them out with our kicks with our boots with our sneaks with our heels with our might, we cried and we raged and we kissed -- harmlessly -- and if the winters storms had blustered and the snow had fallen and melted and then frozen overnight well it would break loose when we thundered down on it and you could hear the earth cracking under us and we laughed fearless, convinced we would never ever never ever never ever ever ever, die

lost in books

When I was a little kid and the youngest of my family, I remember there was a lot of safety in intimacy I mean touch, there was a lot of playful gripping and holding and caressing and embracing, playful fighting and running and pushing and pulling, between kids and kids and adults and kids and friends and cousins and kids and family, there was a lot of charging and edging and rolling and rough handling of me, picking me up and tossing me in the air, or letting me get on your back or sit up on top of your shoulders when I was young enough to be light enough to be carried that way to be held that way to be safe that way and those days were so wonderful they could not last long enough. There was even a sad time somewhere when I could not reach out to you - nor you me - and I knew not what to do with myself, only get lost in my books.

sundays

Sundays were never dark even when it rained, and it rained a lot. I would drip drip dry in the back of the house then take off my clothes all soaked to the bone, hang them on hooks (the wood floors start to groan) then run up the back stairs in my underwear in sandals, all ten toes goodness knows i was quick on them, too, and my brother in his room tryin' to learn the guitar, dad in his study with rifles on the wall, and where is mom? well she's coming with a big colored towel, and wraps me inside then takes one to my head as I try to evade, and there's nothing in this world for this life I could trade, growing up lucky in a country so fine... god blessed america is what i want to believe, returning to my knees like i did in my youth (for what's in the heart does not need living proof), i made my own hell by my thoughts and beliefs but i turned it around and hung it on hooks, ran up the stairs for some help  i would look --then fly into the arms of someone who cares, even if it's just god or a pet or a stranger you met, or yourself in the darkness running for light, in the darkest of darkest of darkest of night.

JOURNAL # 05.31.15

corvette summer by Katya

Thoughts passed and flashed like headlights in the night. Searching. Remembering how it was when we were a little younger and times a little bit brighter, or so it seems. Someone was always killing a pack of Menthols a day and didn't care. Someone might have words with you. The colors of the cars will never look that way again, those lead paint jobs are gone forever. Someone really cared and they still do now... only we won't let them act out on it the same way. You could get sued if you try to help. These things are hard to talk about. The way we get to show we care. Hey, isn't it the last day of May? Let's go have coffee and make it up as we go. Paint the town in some of those beautiful old dangerous colors.

Journal #05.11.15

When I was about eleven years old, my passions were stirred by the boys and girls my age. I guess I can say looking back I was inherently bi -- my attraction to boys was equally as strong as my attraction to girls. I had a girlfriend whom I mostly saw in school, and we would cut classes to go get swedish fish at the candystore just outside the perimeter of the fields. We would sit on the hill under the oak trees above the courts and sometimes touch. Our mouths were candy red and stained our lips like lipstick. She had clear and intelligent eyes rarely looked in one direction for long. Her bangs cut short and sharp against her pudgy cheeks, her skin softer and whiter than mine. We were both tall for our age. I cannot recollect why she liked me, but we would go adventure after school and find places to makeout. Other girls had actually taught me to french kiss in the freestanding garage next to the house I grew up in. And under the stairs on a bet in one of the latchkey kid's homes while listening to Tainted Love. The year was 1984. I shared Sylvia Plath's hometown (long before I knew she grew up there), a suburb of Boston, and I wore a navy blue jacket on cool spring and autumn days, with red felt lettering across the back. Boston Red Sox. Yaz was King at Fenway. Clemens was still a boy in Texas. An author named Samuel. The boys I knew not from school but from the neighborhood, and we grew up together already. Our gang would be dissolved over late night cocktail talk and mulling over choices and final decisions to send some of us to boarding or semi-boarding schools. We were in bed. The public school system was pretty good but not good enough. In my town, this was true of almost everything. People, places, things. Rare was contentment. The boys were loyal friends of mine. And I had long summer dances with them up and over the sloping hills. On either side of the tracks. Curfews were solidly enforced, and I rarely challenged my parents. I guess I was a good kid. But not behind their backs. I would fight with the boys, and it was playful. They were intent on sports. Their sisters were intent on yogurt and soaps. We watched serial horror in installments on film. We skated the ponds in the winter. Rare was contentment. In our home town. But back then, being a kid was glorious freedom from all the narrow-mindedness. They called us rascals as though we were getting away with something. Maybe we were getting away from something. We found content in small places, and exploited it for all it was worth.

Journal # 03.21.15

 What is left for us is a chance. A chance to wake up again. A chance to rest from the maddening pace of the modern world. I am gonna crack the window now and let some atmosphere in. Maybe some particularly meaningful memory will drift along, so I may forget how strange and hard it can be to be alone. There. There now. You are with me. We are holding one another and it feels amazing. They might call us names but we won't care. Lesbians. Bitches. Whatever you want us to be. Because you may as well be on another planet, pressing your old aching fingers up against the glass, trying to get in. I will feel for you later. Not now. All the arrowheads soften in the glacial tug. I remember how you made me feel. Sure, I had loves before you. And you before me. But nothing was two thousand ten like you and me. Pushing over laptops to get to you. We both lived on the floor. We both lived with guys who worshipped us. We both were running out of money. We both had vices become habits.

looking at you. K by K 4 K. 2015

The pain seemed so endless, typing away at keyboards. Losing weight. Listening to Sneaker Pimps. Deeper into darkness past anything I ever knew. We both had a marginal place in our families. We both lived on the outskirts of the world of a city. We both loved wasabi peas and scratchers and arizonas. Somehow I pushed past all that and got back to you and you held me. Together we weighed under three hundred pounds. Pushovers. You with your martial arts. Sticking acupuncture needles right where they belonged. You got under my skin. I got under yours. The fleeting moments we pushed past the cats and the cardboard boxes, and fell softly into walmart pillows... and cried out the damage like bleeding? This is what lights my way to resurgence. I only wish it worked out differently. Like we could find us in the bodies of our paragraphs, again. Lord only knows... the margins of our lives.

Journal # 03.03.15

Life tends to surprise with its falling apart. The clothes I was dressed in, down the lengths of my arms to the cuffs, down my legs to the ankles, holding tight to my heart now  fall off me. I am exposed again. A wise man once told me the 'oil' of life is relationship. My oil got heated and then burned, turned black again. + + +  I wouldn't have believed you if you told me how difficult it is to make and keep true friends. I think I will never stop trying. But I cannot hold our friendship over your head. There is no leverage. Only family has any leverage, in the end. Only blood. I am gonna do whatever I want, and you will do the same. + + + The cost of the freedom looks like the many paths of gunpowder shot out of a canister, touched to the flame for a great detonation. Lifestyle is explosive. When you realize you have a chance and you go for it, you're a bat out of hell. Relocations. Rearrangements. Rebirths. Repatterning. By the end of your course across the sky, you may find your oil is burned. + + + I still have my freedom and I am happy this way. But to drift the way I have, East to West over time, across the States, has had a great cost. I have suffered losses of fragments of myself burned and fallen off, a real moulting of snakeskin or plumage or traits of personality. + + + Those bygone lovers and friends, every one of them so critical in my becoming who I am, are mostly memories, and the loss of them, with or without a proper adieu, hurt so bad as the oil, gone black, and paper trails of self like colored confetti tumbling in the wake of us, flipping over and over and spreading out with the sun rays across the infinite sea, logged by water at the surface... then falling, falling deep down into the dark and maybe never to be retrieved. 

memory of a using life. oakland 2012

the dull ache
behind my eyes
in this deadened
room

ima rag doll
i am

a benign tremour
moves
my hand against
me

a blue light
and white
tells
the papered
walls
how to feel

and somewhere
back there
someone's got
so bad

someone's got a blade
and cuttin
up
their arms

i know him
i left him
he pushed me and his
hands into a
mirror

shattered
what was love
or was it?

just a using me
using you

you left me
in this loveless
board and
care

steely-eyed
people talkin
to themselves
and no one
hears

will that be
me? how long
in the
becoming?

bored and careless
days are running
through the
years

down my arms
of sun-scarred wood some
porous lettin
through

the crime and
all the fears

the people turn
away

in this
dark corner
of gods earth

someone raises hell
and hand
and people
turn away

and screams of dreams
the horrors
passin
through

rag doll city
heart of dark
stake and claim
and clawed away

possessive
minded
revolving door

leave me be
some more

find me gone
inside my mind
benign
tremors hold my head

how can i
turn away?

peel back time
peel back the skin
define your days
of dyin

using ways
come back upon us
karma's all i
know

and then my heart
its in my chest
beats out an
ultimatum

your gonna go
you gotta go
please slash and burn
and leave

i see my heart
i feel my heart
i wear it on my
sleeve


© Katya Mills

'and we miss you'

and we miss you

by Katya Mills

about innocence, lost

So they finally came over me… wonderfully…. sadly… terribly powerful but so could I only be humbled and basically in tears and sudden mourning and of course, somewhat secretly as is the fashion i guess,  a process instinctuelle - not contrived or deliberated or prepared…no, like all matters of things diverse and sundry, the need comes over me to tell somebody (and possibly nobody), though my faith resides all over planet heart to the core.  

Lineage download to the system 32, or in my case, 39 going on in cautious anticipation through the forty filter which now is like static or push off of some tropical blemish on some warm yummy blue sky caribbean dream day.

Every green spread of earth above sea level, from cuba to barbados across the cuts of rough waters swirling all directions and drawn into tight circles by the rising winds of an incubating tropical depression…

Hell!

The waves lap up against my thoughts with an empathic kiss and on slipping out away moments later. 

A child learning to read and write and get along. 

Just passed that frightening entrance into the great institution.

Now feeling warm and even cared for many days of the week.

Perhaps 'well-acclimated' and relieved to have been ushered in so sweetly…

with all my being I swear I would tear the fucking eyes out the head of the evil which came across and stole them from us…

giving a damn when you got no more damns to give

when i meditate on those i knew who went down hard and whom, after all the shock had been absorbed, by anyone who meant anything to them, ascended to the heights of recollection, i am filled with great sadness. when you boil it all down and the steam rises up, what's important in life is just giving a damn, decidedly, when you got no more damns to give.   #katyamills