reclamation of rhythms

I was upset. Unbalanced. You’re as moody as I am, she told me, and I’m bipolar. Have you thought about medication? All I wanted was to get out of here, and for a fast and uncomplicated transition. No submerging into my own introversions. No dizzying intoxications. Minimal stress and panic. Once settled I could go back to being unsettled. I tried to cherish the morning. I tried to read a book. I offered to watch over the kids of divorced parents next door. I tried and failed. Someone wanted my heart. To consume it. Jagged rocks ahead in the mist. She told me, you have no control over your life. She’s right. I don’t know how to say no. I drop everything important to me for nothing. Why? I have lost any cadence. I am in a sorry state. And this is why I am heading for the dead center of the city in the north where, inside its industrial rhythms, my own I may reclaim. 

by  #katyamills from [July 14, 1998] journals

Royal sessions [8.30.1998] part 2

 8.30.1998 (part 2)

There’s always one you say I love you to but you cannot love because they make you suffer, and the more you love them the more you suffer. And you know you’re not easy to love by any means. The red sky and screwdrivers settled the tension in my head. Can you blame the vodka for the first kiss that started it all? Spin the rack and pick your poison. Early autumn air tickles the throat and we share a hot shower on a winter night, candlelight. Here I am again. How? Why? Cea Cita sits by the bathroom door in cobra watching the curtain ripple, jabbed by elbows, and the auburn dye is bleeding off my head and into the drain as you hit me with the sponge. Tonight you will leave the party with an old acquaintance of mine and I will have to wonder why, of all the people in the world I had to run into randomly, that fateful night in Wicker Park, when I was so wonderfully disciplined in avoidance, it was you. I could not resist the euphoria. The dangerous way our blood spiked in contact. It surprised me as much as you. Your eyes were so wide. What was I to do, say hello and goodbye? In the intoxication of a Chicago night in July? Maybe it’s time to change the locks. Take the silver key you gave me put it in an envelope and slide it under your door.

 

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [9.30.1998]

I searched the dials for intelligence and found none. I stopped at the Chicago Press to pick up a letter and took the bandana off my head. One woman stared at my birds nest. She was old enough to have given birth to me. I stared back at her and noticed a touch of fear like she was worried the untamed mess might reach out and strangle her in this antique elevator which was no more than a cage in a shaft with shiny buttons smelling of oil and grease. There are many of these in the art district near north of Chicago. Here was an attendant sitting on a stool who operated the thing and I imagine whose secondary role was to watch over idiots or children tempted to extend limbs through the collapsible metal gates in the back and front. As we ascended he began fiddling with a small battery-powered radio searching for intelligence or a clear signal. Sometimes I get a feeling like elevator attendants are one with the elevators over which they preside. I know it's fucked up but I imagine they never have to leave, they have no appetites no urges no homes; that they occupy a time and space curled back on itself like an eyelash with super hold mascara: a complete circle, inseparable, unitive. I loved being in there with them and my birds nest. For a sacred moment my problems went away. The lady who could have given birth to me didn't ruin it with words. Her perfume was pungent and as offensive as my head. When I reached my floor I followed the signs in the hallways and everything went black and white. I'm in a Perry Mason episode. The frosted glass. The long quiet halls of oriental rug. The Times New Roman fonts. The antique lamps lighting the way. Film noir. A lady at a desk had my letter but it wasn't a letter. It's an architectural firm and a blueprint safely rolled inside a cardboard tube. Hazel eyes. A streak of gray in her brown hair styled around her round face. She smiles. They are not alike. I would have said this morning they are all alike but they are not. She saw something in me which I could not see in myself. A becoming? How mysterious. I did not dare ask because like many things it's better not to know. I prodded the truth and it did not yet hurt, not like the white lies. Not like the black coals that taught cats how to dance. I will hold on to this smile because it's the only one I'm going to get on this ten hour shift which will end far out past the suburbs on a deep stretch of highway, inhaling midwest farmland.   by #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.1.1998]

 10.1.1998

The cold front is here and I shut my windows which upset Raccoon who lost communication with the alley cats. Out of love for her I open one and she stretches down before me on her front paws with gratitude then leaps up to the sill. I had a cold but the cold front was so cold it killed my cold, swear to god. I am driving for a messenger company in my grandma’s Mercury Sable, may she rest in peace. I broke out my wool hat with the bulldog and pulled it over my ears and hit the road with my cell phone, pager, a boiled egg and green apple. There are leaves falling across my windshield and football on talk radio. I am waiting at a light on Ohio facing a billboard of a woman smoking Slims. I wave off a Chicago Sun Times salesman in a tan leather jacket and the junky asking for money at the gas station will have no luck with me today. The street cleaners left a neon orange ticked under my wiper blade demanding a fifty spot. You wouldn’t know they clean wallets. They don’t advertise that. Downtown a black man is passionate about how the whites are trying to put him down. A well-dressed woman in heels and a fur coat hails a cab. The modern art installments in front of the state administration buildings are eyesores to me. The sky high Amoco building gives me bearings; I am disoriented on Dearborn. I don’t get a lunch break but my mind wanders between deliveries. I am thinking of a guy I bailed out of jail in Florida last year. He called me again last night. Somehow the court has my address for him and sends letters about his failures to appear, and when he calls I open and read them to him. Are you wanted in many states? I asked him. This was meant to be a joke but he answered it seriously. Only two. He is a troubling glimpse at a chapter in an awfully frightening book. But when I think about it, he’s not that bad… it’s not all that bad. I am peeling and eating my egg. I’m curious about one thing… how did that nice guy who owed him money, die?  #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.3.1998]#2

Shadows, shadows. Sleeping on the mattress on the floor her head and feet were cold. The night before they went to the Montana for drinks. Someone told her she dressed like a common thief and she took it as a compliment. There were scratches up and down her arm where the cat thought she was a fish. She and her neighbor walked to a Costa Rican restaurant where they served up these phenomenal oatmeal shakes. Monetta kept her style big and loose to reflect her personality, and the many black curls were always reaching and playing and tangling. The world needs a good shake.

by #katyamills

Royal Typewritten 10.12.1998

As a child she was one of those angels. People who did not even believe in angels called her one. She flew into rooms with her singular dance, fingers stretching not for want but for joy, her arms wrapping around her father’s muscular neck, and she liked to lay on his shoulder while he read in his armchair. She gave herself freely to anyone she did not fear. In adolescence he passed away, her father, after an injury he sustained in a fall at work, and sadness of thoughts of him dominated her mind over anything like boys or hairstyles or makeup, or the girl who pushed her and called her a pig, an aggravation that quickly passed without meaning like any infomercial. She escaped into books like her father had before her. She became feverishly intimate with the written word, rubbed the many many ears and cracked bindings to the point where titles were no longer legible and pages fell randomly out. She kept them about, on her night table, under her bed, lost among the clothes lying around on the floor. She was known to bring single delicate slices out with her wherever she went and read them to friends. She did not tell anyone that her books were more important. She promised she would not forget them. She was quite learned by the time she dropped out of school which had been rendered useless. By this time there were men in her life who she met walking home past the factory where her father had worked. She must have turned down a hundred propositions before she did not. She found it strange that one liked to suck on her toes. He was otherwise a perfect gentleman in her eyes. Another found her tonsils with his tongue. She had sudden experiences with men who made her laugh and men who made her cry. It was unusual but there were second chances for those who were persistent enough in tracking her down, romantic enough with a flower between their teeth. She discovered if she had trouble breathing, this was a telltale sign that the relationship had run its course and she ended it, usually without complications. Factory men tended to be too tired and worked too hard to be difficult. There were one or two she had to shout down and run from. She gave herself freely to anyone she did not fear. The day she realized she was searching for her father in a man was the very same day she stopped caring, changed her number, packed a bag with a few cherished manuscripts she could not live without, took a bus took a train, and moved away.

by #katyamills

Typewritten on my Royal (2.26.98)

2.26.1998

A fifth of liquor followed four days of anger and then I was done. Done drinking, done being angry. I uncurled my toes like a good boy and sat patiently. I did not look up until she was standing above me. She was awfully still which meant she had made a decision. Well? I asked, what is it? I prayed she might surprise me but my prayers went unanswered. Now I had to take her spoken words seriously and bring myself to believe, though I could not be moved by them, by anything.  I had next to nothing left after a hundred hours of basic misery, watching tv until tv was essentially watching me, locked in my house, seated in the center of a room, dangerously safe, talking to myself, lost in a language full of images only I could decipher…Wrap the dutiful land with sky and milk, the clouds round and full with the dimmest hope, waiting to be sucked. The side of my face presses into an interminable chain link fence. Blood dripping like a leaky faucet. The pastures turn green. Sweat off the iron palms. My fingers wrap around the links and my body goes limp. Inseparable against the sky. Do not care if we live or die. The ghosts within me began to wail, long slow and rising from the caps of my knees to the pupils of my eyes. I woke from semi-consciousness to the aching of my calves and feet in Japanese position. My arms were somehow upraised with a power I had not bestowed. I remembered her and what she told me, before she even told me. And after she gave me her decision I was unable to be moved, I was speechless. I was sorry but I could not apologize. The good news was that the air began circulating again and the oil began lubricating my pores and I was no longer suffocating, and I could bring water to my lips and the chain link fence was gone. God had carved our lifelines and the sky was still with us.  

by #katyamills

2021 royal

royal in a dollar store 

sucking the life out a green apple 

lollipop coupled with angst

the dyed hair the 

cell phone stare the resignation 

of the throne. the press stalks

with bloody mary

#katyamills

type.writer -vi

the voice of the machine
unmistakable. a whole room listens as
the natgeo journalist in the forest of my mind
takes a tentative step forward

that night
the ritual

a quiet preparation of the scene
the placing of a sheet
rolling it into view

the smell of oiled letter arms
placement of the fingers
for some thought momentum

the ringing of a bell
the end of every line

i slap the arm to sweep the barrel
down the rail again
hit the block and then recoil

writer's block...
deus ex machina

carry on

type.writer -v

Soon you're sitting in some chair 

with your preponderance your
pool of feeling untranslated

unreckoned with...

now you got a Royal. glints
black beneath a gunmetal sky found its way
through the windows

stands there stern
with her keys
won't make a sound until
you touch her

underwood

underwood oh
underwood

i saw
you in the five
and dime

underwood
would you
be mine

       let me upright
live before your tumbling
    cascade of
                keys

touch you tack
alacka lacka
lack

my thoughts

your serious gray
bod we could be the
mod

situated for day long
reverie

pressed true
into the sheets

your sexy silver
chassis

pressed you

underwood oh
underwood

press my life
into ribbons
please