like pressure makes diamonds

up all night i remember us

survival turns seconds into minutes

sealed inside like pressure creates 

an equilibrium by which we

can roll. time got nothing on us

the city still and quiet makes

diamonds. we meet in the park after

dawn   #katyamills

cocoa and me

cocoa did her nails. then she did mine. she told me how happy i made her dad. she was a working girl and a high class escort. kept in a fancy hotel. SF. Civic Center. i was friends with her dad. Market Street felt alive and dead simultaneously. how could it be? i wondered what life was like. i lost my job and family and forgot how to pray. life was beginning to make sense.

11.7

2018. you will be with me and i, with you. we will not question. we will take on the world, every morning after prayer, and fight the good fight, long as the day gives light. then may we rest on the rooftop in Oakland. watching the sun set, either side of the seven eleven. then, in the incandescent, your heartbeat is mine.

another loss - vi

faith is porous on the streets. you only have what you see, and anyone wants you to believe there's somethin more for you, if only you trust them for a moment. you gotta keep your faith deep in your heart, and not extend it to those who would use you... i tried explainin' to you about your bike, and how i needed to switch it out for mine, and could get it back to you tomorrow if that was okay. but you lost some confidence in me and could i blame you? we did not run in the same circles anymore. we argued for a while. i implored you the bmx was safe inside my new digs on Magnolia. i offered you collateral if you wanted, i would leave my rings with you. if you wanted we could go and get it later. you thought about it and either you extended some faith in me or else you didn't wanna argue anymore, and let it lie. i helped you pack your stuff and clean your place so you could get your deposit back, and you let me shower there before checking out, because where i was going, well, they might have had the law behind them and plenty of cash, but these corrupt attorneys letting me a room, well, they coulda been arrested for uncleanliness...

another loss - v

the sun was edging into view and we were beginning to wake up to the reality of the world and our meagre places in it, the year twenty ten and family nowhere to be found, nobody's fault but yours, nobody's fault but mine. i was on the move again and it was your last night staying there, too. i began helping you pick up your place, between runs i made to Magnolia with my own belongings. check out time was noon and the landlords were no nonsense; there was a security detail they would call to kick people out. you see, something you understood about me and i related back to you was, on any given day, having no place to call home. all we had was our friends and our music and our journals, back then, and maybe a storage unit with our name to it. and out into a new day in the city, intense and unpredictable, helping one another a little bit when there's no one else you can trust, hoping to survive...

another loss -iv

i borrowed your bike because mine was already locked up in my future home, this cool and windless morning, and after passing through De Fremery Park,  i found my key under a stone and let myself into the ranch on Magnolia surrounded by high and gapless fence. after catching my breath, i switched out yours for mine, as my Motobecane was twice ten speed and yours BMX. i determined it too dangerous to travel slow through West Oakland at dawn. the lady of the house, an attorney corrupted by law, was dead asleep ina sheet ona couch in the living room. i held my new key close to my heart, and walked down the hall to see the project i had recently completed. two new coats of eggshell paint covered four walls, ready to receive the light and warm a heart or two. all the cat dander raised up in the disturbance, in my lungs now,  soon to wake me with fits of asthma overnight. once i would be lucky, with my dear Kali at my side in the cot, fourth of july, to help with pressure points and rifle through my many backpacks for my inhaler , to rescue me without breath.

another loss -iii

I was in
      between pages
a book without
binding

You let me stay
with you
one night
a moment's notice

we were friends
our lives derelict
 unusual

the music
the midnight
oil

      bands like us
cannot make it
no more

 traded street level
 stories

         left out
again. in the sunlight
 soon to be
exposed

 before dawn

 you were kicking
back. i was several back
packs deep to and from
Magnolia street

several unsavory characters
wanted a piece
of me they
could not catch
me

       thank god
 for this
       bicycle...

another loss -ii

We stayed up all the night long tradin' EDM cuts and smoking, and kept mostly quiet about all the damage our exes done us, knowing in our hearts the damage we done them, too. This here was as close to the street as I ever got, out of luck on the room I had paid for every week for several months, (someone had spotted my cat and complained, again, pets were not allowed) with the half-promise of a room in West Oakland, from the mouth of a corrupt attorney with one foot in the dope game and high all the time. I had no other recourse, none at all! This was twenty eleven. I had only to be willing to scrub and paint a small room full of furniture and covered in multiple cat stank, and I could stay there for the summer. This was the house of a second attorney, an alcoholic moonlighting as a cat doctor at home, who got in over her head on Magnolia by DeFremery Park. The day I met her she asked if I wanted to make a quick buck, and walked me downtown while instructing me how to serve papers. I remember hesitating as I approached the window, a government agent behind glass, and looked back to get a nudge on from under the wild gray-hair, permanent slouch, and a wandering eye. She offered me a drag off her pint of Southern Comfort on the way home. I was fifty bucks richer, cash, and desperate. My unemployment had finally run dry  in this boarding house on 28th @ Telegraph, telling time by Kojak episodes, and my friend whom I shared a room with finally got sick of me or spun out, and bailed. By that time I was already sharing a bed with a punk I met, upstairs, and not around much anymore. On my bicycle most of the days, a Motobecane i had mail-ordered online several months ago, and always brewing pots of some of the finest grounds from Indonesia I procured from Sweet Maria's down the way, a local coffee distributor a stone's throw from the Port of Oakland. Didn't have a job and wasn't really looking most of the time. PTSD was my common denominator, and divided up my senses, hanging them far and wide by the neck, until dead...

another loss -i

You let me stay one night in your room, many years ago,  i was in between places and spaces and a kick in the gut had landed me in Oakland with nowhere to go. Brown-outs were my life back then, and nobody can tell you what your psychosis is gonna look like or how it will feel, because they aren't buried behind your eyes. Electronic Dance Music was one thing we had in common that night, and we had what was left of my battered laptop to trade tracks that touched us...

READING - GTL - BOOK 1.27.2

READING - GTL - BOOK 1.27.1

GTL a book reading 1.23.4

GTL 1.22.2 a book reading

EXCERPT. BOOK#3

"Yes, I have been troubled and I bring my troubles with me wherever I go cause home is wherever I am at any moment. I gotta be dim to think home is static, no, life proves me wrong all the time, stretches and yawns over the blue marble upon which we roll and slip, in our blue dreams it surfaces and dips, rounding us, our edges, in our black and blue jeans, replete with street and graffiti on the walls. A little cream, a little sugar in the coffee and stir. I cannot stop looking at you in my windowpaned heart. Maze. I keep losing and losing you, the rains came and washed you away, the sheets were in the streets and offline, the beats pushing the feet as we walked, the rhythms searching and climbing into the greater sound; the image of what we once were working toward dematerialized again, and just like watching television on the radio it was painful good. And here you are and the whistle has blown, kicking your board up to your hand for the catch, wheels spinning and I’m worried but what the fuck. I got nothing to lose cause with all this time talkin about my faith and talkin and talkin not daring to confront you. Had I already lost you? No, no. Truth, will you lunge at me like this? Boy oh boy. Can I stand there and stand this? Do I have a choice? And yet the big sky is bigger, and I cannot look up and not be amazed by the beauty in a puffed up cloud floating off to nowhere like a poached egg white after the gas is turned off and the waters navy blue… the smiling buddha of spaces, the proclaimer of all things inverted. Girl oh girl. In discordance sliding off a continuum because they forgot to put an end to it. Directly, mathematically correlated to my ability to see what was really going on here in my life, all alone. Yeah, there’s a freedom there. A painful kinda freedom because I will find you if I look hard enough. Painful good. I will get you back, I swear!"

-Ame, Book#3

Grand Theft Life Book 1.21.1

Grand Theft Life Book 1.20.2

Grand Theft Life 1.19.4

GRAND THEFT LIFE 1.18.1

GRAND THEFT LIFE 1.15

Grand Theft Life 1.2.2 videobook