life of light and shadow

like a candle
measuring time
life will be brilliant and haunting
illuminating the unconscious
by symbols by dreams
casting shadows
life will be flammable
like an impulse
with a lock on
its aim

#katyamills

deadbolt

i remember when i
did not feel safe

without a
surgical steel
Stiletto switchblade
pressed in
my palm

behind
a dead and
bolted
door

still

the greatest
danger i faced
at that time
was me

survive and cast shadow (white metal rabbit)

There's no world of all smiles, unless invented. In the real world we have rabbits we grab by the ears and make lucky feet for a keychain. We stuff them in hats and make them of chocolate. The white ones we want for a symbol of purity, and photograph them next to an egg.

Some of us tune our instruments to metal, find the harmonics, amplify them and get bent. I wanted to be one of those, but I didn't have an amplifier or an instrument or a room or a friend. I prayed to god for a fireplace where I could burn for you. I would. I had become inflexible like the white metal rabbits and within the realm of being bent out of shape.

I was far from worn thin with love. I followed ideas tangentially to distant and unrelated ends... my younger self had grown old and retired. Typically far from inspired. I must have committed some literary felony, for soon I could no longer read. I had a curious relationship with speed. It's a crime to torture a soul with words made from sounds of a cacophonous hole.

The ground I laid where I buried myself, the part of myself that was offensive. Myself who had been distasteful, rebellious, irreverent, and smart. My shadow now missing, a lack in the heart. The part that was human and fell down a lot. The part that refused to connect all the dots.

This is what i offer you, I told myself, dying. The black sheep's fleece. To warm you like Kentucky's finest. The past? no worries, shes fallen behind us. I urge you get waxy, let flow... the degenerate benevolence of liquid smooth language. One spirit, survived anguish so deep it near killed you.

I languished well near obscurity, until i found a little peace in letting go, to take with me down that long hall back home, the one without shadows or light. Water, laughter, a kind word, awaited me. Even prayer would be welcome there. These words ahead of me are here to be written. To describe all our likeness in ways and intangibles, to know with a knowing that cannot be described.

If you know what i mean, if you' re grateful like I am, if you've survived and cast shadow...then go ahead and read these words I have trained to be and be still. May they bring you all out like flowers by the sun. I need your devious smile, your shadow, your light. Before the rabbit turns metal, then white.    - KatYa, 2017

SHADOWING

" I was hot with a madness. I was becoming accustomed to the darkness inherent in me. I may not have been happy about the violent quality, but I accepted it. I was conscious of it. I was not running from it anymore. The immediacy! I could access the power. I could nurse on the fear. I could feel it, I could compel it out of a human with no remorse." - K

shadow of a ghost town

A stranger was not necessarily what the townsfolk wanted or needed, in the shadow of a ghost town. But he was welcome just the same... this man who considered himself a cowboy, for he had roped a little spirit back in the day. Held it close to him for a hot second, got to know it real good, then quickly gave it away. And kept giving it away, because giving felt right. And so he lived large in generosity, in a small part of the world. Until one day he felt a calling, and listened to it carefully. The calling was legit, he decided. So he answered. Rode out away from home, and came into a long abandoned little part of the world, way off the beaten path. Outside a rural area. Off the grid, for sure. In the shadow of a ghost town.

A gentle influence of the very nearly unplanned, played into a general vague spontaneity of the townsfolk there. If you called it a town. There would be times of half-hearted devotion toward some undefined occupation there. There was little to no preoccupation with anything. The children raised themselves. The women worked the same as men, and neither very hard or long. Mother nature was the closest thing to God. And the men all had a proclivity towards horseshoes. A pasttime which neither legend nor fact attributes them, though they doubtless invented it. After the last horse took fright and upended its last rider, and galloped free and out from under this shadow of a ghost town. No other town known to man, ever had reason to make a game out of shoes of horses, what with the abundance of horses wherever their was an abundance of man. Each of which required not one but four shoes running.

Well, one of these recently made useless arches of iron, had just lodged an impression into the soft dirt of a pit, throwing up a piece of dust into the air, when this cowboy of the spirit came riding up on them out of nowhere, there. He said nothing other than that he had a calling, and answered it, to account for his coming. They welcomed the stranger, though they would have seen him going just as fast as he came. But no one became preoccupied with that sort of monkey business. Seeing a man going, that is.

And in return, over time, the townsfolk got all the seeing and knowing, caring and showing, guiding and allowing, they could possibly want out of a spirited (or unspirited, for that matter) man. In fact, they weren't sure they wanted all that, at all. But the stranger was welcome, just the same.

All that happened was witnessed by none other than the unmapped trickle of a river that kept this unknown place alive, in an otherwise lifeless area. Which the wild children tapped with buckets every day, carrying them back to their mothers and fathers, so as to be helpful in some way that went mostly unrecognized. Which was fine by them, anyway. They would not have known what to do with good old recognition most of the world around them had become dependent upon. Like the river, they went humbly on their way.

Then this stranger among them all in the shadow of a ghost town, started to act kinda strange. He started talking to himself (which was not uncommon, in fact they knew him to do it every day) about something he called trust. He would be looking at them talking, but talking to himself. They might look at him, too, but with a blank look. For what other kinda look was he looking for? And wherefore?

These were questions they did not ask themselves.  But they were not oblivious to the man's peculiar way of affect. Sometimes he began crying spontaneously and hysterically so. Sometimes he shook out the ancestral hardly-containable anger that rose up in his bones. Times he was hopping about, jumping and hollering, full of sand and lust. The children, they caught him in their arms when he was drained. They really just happened to be there. They gave him a great and vacant stare, when he showered them with praise. They had other matters at hand. Survival, for instance. Survival somehow trumped any kind of unasked for validation. Somehow. That's not to say validation wasn't welcome.

Over time (many years in fact, but no one was counting), the stranger became a familiar sort of stranger to the inhabitants of this unincorporated, practically uninhabitable land, in the shadow of a ghost town. He finally quieted down, both verbally and in affect, and that little spirit he once had roped and given away, came back to fill him up. He never knew it to be gone, honestly. Not until he really listened with the children, who had accepted him silently into their tribe, to the whispers of the refrain echoing off the hills and highs and lows, to thrills and cathartic expression, always back home on the backs of the four winds.

the end