2.19.25

they swept the dust off each journal drawn from a box in the attic worn from use bindings half-threaded holding on a reservoir of material thirty years of thoughts and reveries to date and transcribe in the sunlight of the recovered life    #katyamills

post election blues

you can find beauty 

anywhere

even in a swamp 

holdin on for dear life 

by a vine thick 

as a rope in the sand 

quick 

desperate

breath of life quivers 

like a candle wick 

afire ... 

lit

#katyamills

10 post

 after the many many touches i bimble to the post. letting go this letter. from my heart to yours.

#katyamills

more space guesswork

Andromeda did not mind about the light years gone missing. Saturn or some body in space was happy to harbor them but they sure took their time arriving. Watch out you might get fractal off the rings, or maybe that's what was supposed to happen. I always cut up my years into months and smaller increments. I bake them in a pan and they come out all seasonal. That way kids know when they go bad, not to eat them. Andromeda takes them back when we send them, and turns them into meteor showers, the galaxy to exfoliate. Deep space is the safest place around, minimal pollution, air and sound. I wanna go there when my world fails me. I cannot stand the anxiety. Earth looks good from the outside, but just try burning through the atmosphere; you will soon discover it wasn't worth it. Sorry to let you down and all.

to the lighthouse cat by kat

in kind

Correspondence was not much fun anymore. i was lucky if i got a card in the mail. emails made me nervous because there were so many awaiting reply. the days of receiving long letters penned in script by hand in ink on someone's personal stationery were over. i had a thought. if i took the time to write letters the old way again, bypassing text and email and chat and video, and even bypassing phone, would I get a response in kind? and then might time turn back for us and write our lives the way we once wrote them, when we wrote long missives on personal stationery with silver trim and painted envelopes, hanging sideways over our elbows, quietly playing with each letter,  slowly, conscientiously by scripted hands, young and rolling in ink.

know things

there are things you know and oh, did i tell you i know some things, too, like how much i miss you and need you around, to fill up my heart with your being profound?

k @ home 2017

faux froid

La Verite was nowhere to be found. Faux Froid took over the town. A chill cast over the roads - trees - dirt - homes - faces - ankles - toes. Toenails soft as reflections bent around the way, only to be bent back around. Compensation had long ago -- long long ago, you know -- fled the sapling exchange-post.

type.writer -xiii

Day old adherents

keep pressing and pressing
free press makes a difference
but truth falls again
to the floor

nothing sticks
in a day. a month
not even a year

your expressions are painted
to resemble the real
the artwork's on sale again
imitating a steal

unless you step out of your comfort
and into your twilight zone you
cannot be credible and
that's how i feel

find out what you care most about
what you believe in
and share

at the end of every night
lie down with your work
to wake up with it

the cards are the same
they get dealt and
we deal

we suffer. we feel
that's how real gets to real

make friends with your fear
have tea with anxiety
have courage to say what you believe

let your island of opinions
into the weave

type.writer (archive #K) -iv

we drank coffee and squeezed oranges
in the morning. canadien whisky
at night with milk. smoking
4 finger lids

the letter c
started to stick
i had to find oil
and take arms
she was essential
to my vocabulary

tuning our guitars together
swimming out past the
sandbar to the lone buoy
the hammerheads liked to
circle

type.writer (archive #K) -i

1997
I had a Smith Corona postbellum typewriter

the war was for the world

so very wide

no.2 and sharp as a pencil

The body of the typewriter was a solid drab green

like a soldier

Millions were filled with lead

how sorry you are

the rain fell ona slant and i imagined they were all my tears i could not bear to cry. i raised my face to the wind and felt the sheets strike my skin. i stayed outside all morning long with you, reading the paper. we drank coffee without any intention other than to be helpful. lord knows we had once been thoughtless and unkind. you make mistakes. you demand more of people, places and things than you ask of yourselves. now i wanna grab hold and empty life of all its discontents. someone expects an apology outta you, and hunts you down. they may never know how sorry you are. the remainder of life, pushing and pulling those notifications, needled with predicate .coms and .orgs. comradery relocated to social media. if we subscribed it would be too soon... gimme the shelter of the rising sun, full moon. all these things we hope to have eternal, here and gone, then come again... to the faithful, pulled and pushed in the tug-of-war of a life. how sorry you are proclaimed deep space, to the star.

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.

if friday was saturday

the cost of living was an abbreviated attention span and the tasteless smell of green in the back of your throat. the cost of living was a cold brew coffee fueling an organism programmed to turn on itself. the cost of living was an unholy alliance with anonymity, a television you paid the company to babysit for, hours on end in an armchair, and a remote to control you by. the cost of living was free.

polyester cotton and the modern rain

the rains came and i began sleepin really sleepin...

when i awoke it was not over, all the walls and windows gone drenched, and warm my skin contoured by polyester cottons, i pulled the useless glass from my eyes and looked around me...

                                              we were all alike

k. summer'17

made my strikes

I went bowling over the weekend and made my strikes... we had nothing left to spare. I dropped some van halen on the ears and a ten pound marble on wax floors, and that puppy found its way to the void and disappeared, taking a whole lotta sticks with it to the hereafter. My form wasn't very good and gosh, I didn't care about the arrows or the baseball game or the scorecard on the screen next to it. All I cared about was turning around to look you in the eyes and know you loved me.

letter

one lonely night ona

edge ina pool
of light

inscribed by hand
taken from the scene

collected bya squeeze 

ofa heart

folded in thirds

double encrypted
inaccessible to all

but one

like pores
touched by witch

hazel

ona edge

ina pool

of light 

one candle

 night

kept

 from a
world and

given

you

- KatYa

when you stay where you are long enough

late friday. i came home after midnight to fall in love all over again, being with you, your stone cold fixed hold upon my gaze, all the week long work fallen off your leaden shoulders, and then we were both of us no longer struggling. replaced by an embrace there on the couch the cats have torn half to hell, believing in the same god who brought us together, rediscovering the colors in our eyes, feeling the common ground of recollected pain, the loss inside our former dreams... against the bright and soft-focused clarity that has replaced them.

midtown. by katya

dream sequence. march nine

What if I cannot live with anyone, ever again, I thought to myself, before falling asleep. I have been tired since I asked him politely to leave. He did not take it very well, and I did not take his not taking it well, well. I was tired by trying to share my space, and by trying not to share my space, and fell fast asleep.

Up the stairs the atmosphere was boisterous, everyone seemed happy like evolved, and my mind kept turning us over and over, wondering why we were so quiet, down here, so reserved, like somebody had died. I was in the midstream (exactly halfway up a long and straight stairwell) when the matron of the house came about before bed asking around and offering her hand, to make the last hour a good one, keeping us safe and needless, tidying up.

Her daughter, my friend, had left a small book behind, with a cover splashed in pink, which stood up on the floor by the couch. What if she never returns, ever again? The book had small truths littered about its pages. I wanted to offer it to the contemplative boy across from me on a broken chair, but I could not move. I'm not much of a lucid dreamer.

She spoke to us kindly, my friend's mom, she made me feel I was helping her just by being there. She had always been the kind to illuminate your presence for you. When I awoke, I wondered would I see her, ever again? She died many years before.

china. usa. bodhi

If china and the usa can meet for tea
 in the south china sea
what a dream this
    would be

then will i know my chinese brother
who wears the knitted hat
like me

given us by our nephews
to keep warm
in the mountains

in the valleys
in the winter

a dream is only worth
making real. like the two silver hearts
i wear around my neck
on a silver chain

as my sister. in china
given us by our young nieces
replacing our hearts
from their scattered
pieces across the world

jasmine tea
in the south china sea
you and me

i give you my cup
you give me yours
and fire up our ceramics
 against any twitter
polemics

arms locked at the elbows
we drink slowly

drink up. you and me
from the sunset west
looking east where she
shall rise again

red. blue and white
in the south china
sea

lighting the single candle
given us by an elder. in faith

by the bodhi
tree