clingy vines

on the first of august 

he contemplated murder and suicide

she was with another man now

he picked up the brushes 

instead of the rifle. drew some clingy 

vines over a fence. they was

only thoughts 

#katyamills

metal flower morning

she was a barista. my friend
gettin people high on stiff colombian shots!
she remarked

a cafe bar in a hotel
little round marble
tables. guys (and girls) feigned to read
watching her change money
serve drinks

looking around
thinking everyday thoughts i
waited for her to get off shift

listened to the steam
scream through silver
stems

metal flowers

how could anyone ever
kill themselves? i overheard
a woman say to her husband
behind a newspaper

what with the wonder
of the world i don't know

they can and
they do lady they can
and they do

shuffling cards laughing
looking and being looked upon
exchanging cash and feelings
young Americans

we had it good
we did

metal flowers
screamed across the tissue
smoking would kill us all
if we wanted to
so bad



#katyamills
remix 1998

true two

i reinvented myself in motion yet stillness was my hallmark. i used to stare into the eyes of hurricanes until they closed. now i am underneath them, plotting a course for open ocean. still they settle into land by choice and suicide.

i wonder how i survive the oppositions. chaos wants me for my calm. the depressions look to me for uplift. they both know i have survived them. i have survived my self. know me for family. for i have lived there, too.

death by MVA

There must have been 4 tons of car coming at you with a green light letting us through. Me in my Volkswagen, an old man in a Chevy, and a lady sliding off the highway in a Subaru. The time was 2pm, the city drenched by waves of heat. I saw you riding your bicycle slowly into the intersection ahead, and wondered would you stop? You kept pedaling with an icy stare into us, 3 lanes of traffic against your perpendicular. I'm not sure if you wanted to die, but you sure knew what you were doing. The physics, the mathematics of the equation, did not at all look promising yet you kept a steady pace, a mane of black hair falling behind your tan face. You looked maybe Latin or Native American, and ready to die by MVA. Why? Did you lose someone close to you? Were you socioeconomically starved? We all pressed into our brake pads, and the old man in the middle lane lay on his horn.

We were long gone when I wondered; were you laughing in the aftermath of an adrenaline rush? Or were you disappointed? Or had you gone on to Broadway, indifferent to us all, searching for cool water, a smoke, friends, and some shade.

Book Review - 'The Virgin Suicides' by Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book is told from the perspective of a young boy (and his friends) in suburban Detroit whose lives are basically put on hold as they are captivated by a mystery of 5 girls in adolescence. They watch the girls from behind trees and fences and blinds and a treehouse where they have - over time - collected minutia (photos, hairbrushes, shoes, etc) related to the girls whom they almost publicly obsess over. Suicide is obviously (from the first page) a topic of great concern.

Eugenides writing style is accessible and engaging throughout. He finds delicious language to describe the most common (and boring) affairs of suburban white America in the 70s, irony, like the city's aspirations to save the Elm trees by removing them one at a time until they are all gone. Their is an underlying sadness in the story, related to us through various characters from the OCD mom to the alcoholic neighbor to the unemployed teacher; an impotence against the fate not only of these young beauties but also of the home, the street, the neighborhood, the culture itself. You wonder if anything is sacred anymore.

I had a lot of fun reading about these boys and there efforts to establish contact if not connection with the girls, how they go about it. They report back on their mischief and it's all very entertaining. There's a desperation which drives the narrative of the spies. How can they get around the carefully constructed bubble the parents (and the culture) have created, to touch the objects of their adoration?

Something strange happens. Eugenides power of characterization could have really brought the girls to life (and I did begin to have feelings and bias towards each and every one of them), however the premise and setup prevent us (like the boys) from getting to know these 'virgin suicides'. I found myself thirsting at times for more direct quotes and closer proximity to Lux and her sisters. So the established POV is very powerful this way. I'm not sure I liked this aspect of the book. I mean, I think I wanted to get a more intimate view of everything. It's not always fun to be made into a voyeur by the author. But it's his book! And so the mysteries are not always gonna unravel.

In the end you are left to make your own judgments about everything. The narrator has his opinion and gives it to us, but not in a preachy way. Mostly we are given an intimate window to a place (post white flight suburbs of Detroit, the automotive center of the universe) and time (1970s) which will never exist again. Which makes me happy, because Eugenides kinda immortalizes it all in this book, so maybe something is sacred, after all.


View all my reviews

message in a stare

Sacred. Holy. One week to press.
With the weight of a half thousand years
i confess.

So many months deluged with so many hundred tears.
Will we find our way home
or the renaissance of our fears?

Half of no one really cares or cares
to think about her.
That girl allison who left her bike locked to the school bike rack
yesterday. Helmet like a cradle still hanging from the lock.
Fifteen & this young american life
sprouted up bold

with spice & kick !

only then to a stand 

still?

Please don't get me started. cause i understand the pain. i feel it tonight just worse than ever. I am tired. Half insane. Weary men and women listen! Cause we are here. Well, some of y'all will listen-- those who have enough left to hear. And other unidentified walking objects get a shout out. dripping off the gate like morning dew. cradled by the wind. back to source through the air. A message in a stare.

Like those before us, we shall be tracked by tracking systems until we can be tracked no more.  Then we are lost or free. or both, if both may be... Just not downgraded to immobile media coverage task. Just not downloaded. Not forced into play.  Just not packaged with advertisements. God help us that we not be, no way.

No time for us to be distracted, to be distracted eats up time. Take your files and get in line, steady forward to the task. every sector in the urban 50 mile sprawl must be covered, just in case they ask.  The year might be 2027. Or it may as well have been. So far gone and yet far ahead of them. We meet in present time, of course, in future time united. By spirits of our past, energetically protected.

The pharmacological solution for weariness sxs is just to reach market! Her derivatives are Non-narcotic, uncontrolled solution. Spirits, triple variables, this is the scenario! One constant holding ground like an anchor pressed into the seafloor forever into dissolution. Reunification with source spells the end of all fragmentation, source is like light, enlightens the solution.

Source is sacred ash and vulnerable.  Spiritual energy. Source is humble. Anchored in the message. Means running around in circles searching and searching no more.

No longer feeling lonely.

going out there with courage.

Encouraged! Where loneliness gets discouraged. Where death cannot flourish. Keep moving! Dropping to the hardwood floor. Dripping your feelings fast between planks. Bye bye to Loneliness (its confidence tanks). Its global toxicity becomes local then less.

Human duplicity fades away,

spun out of the spokes of

true unitive rims rolling away.

Girl, the world aint pretty when you're all fragments. Its sharp and cuts us something terrible. To reconstitute may be by means agonizing. Tragically stitched. Exposing that which was self-inflicted. Self-dealt. Out-played and played out.... sounds exhausting this transformation but let me tell you... she is universally-felt.

Our world she gets broken apart, polluted and cut into, whether or not we or you think its a sin too. Then she's swirled together like Missouri, Joplin weather.
Disconsonant elements,
mashed through and through.

Sacred if you accept it, if you will
through and through
Turns black to red to blue and back to black again
 like your dragon tattoo...

The flavor like white stripes to
detroit heights, higher. Up to the upper peninsula! So inspired.

Hike and hike your skirt and let the clothing pull away

and  plant your self 

(your body glistening white like source

bright against the moist earth, dry clothes)

directly in the maelstrom
in the very vortex of

the maelstrom of

your life.