mission.29

days and nights
the stress i gotta suppress
my feelings sometimes
before they run me
away from
you

nights and days you
give me a hard
time i don't
know exactly what
to say

not unusual like
any day i think i'll get up go

back to the
mission

#katyamills

the mission

we were in the hall, many strenuous faces all about. here and there one was found pacing, another breathing deeply through the nose, another actually fell to their knees for a prayer. outside a crowd had gathered, shoving and yelling, and someone had got behind the security and climbed the roof by a rope. her voice was punctuated by the underlying emotions like a sky pressured, holding weather, letting the first bursts of rain. you don't know how long it can carry before it breaks. we were listening through the walls yet thinking of ourselves. there were people shaking fences and fists in the air. one could only be touched by the energy and i was, too. beneath all the emotion, the anger, the efforts to draw attention no matter the cost, i saw a movement that reminded me of my past. i had fought for a similar cause in my own life. if only we could open these doors and open our arms! collect that energy, i dreamed, like water in a reservoir, and come to terms, and put it toward our mission!

m x memory -viii

By the year twenty twenty-three, 99% of microscopes were melted down and recycled, whereas bifocals and bottle glasses had come back in fashion. And it was decreed that all laboratories be replaced with ashrams, following in the footsteps of a decentralization trend. Anyone caught with space foam running shoes and acoustic instruments got a one way ticket to the primeval forest being cultivated on Mars. These items became highly sought after. The principal objective was not to have one.

There were some (in the future) who could not hope to walk unseen down city streets. A loosely affiliated group of citizens who did not so much ask for the kind of attention they were given, collectively or individually.Which was a suitable regimentality for twenty twenty-four. Legend has them born of loose-fisted, assymetrical, left-handed, lipton teaheads just shy of true north. The truth was something else.

They tend to make a lot of noise without speaking, and move like waves.  Everyone else wanted to tell them what to do, and they wouldn't do anything other than what they were told if they were to do what was expected, so atypically they defied expectations. Otherwise they wouldn't really exist, would they. Ice water was in their throats, not their veins.

You cannot know them in traditional forms of knowing. They have something more intentional or focused, it seems, or something less violent-by-association. Anyone is guessing. They congregate in the shiny bars of the fringe-mainstream. On bicycle hill perhaps. Or in bookstores off the beaten path in the Mission. They have an aversion to snapping turtles and judgments and extemporaneous litigation.

Along with us, they envision a society where the only records are vinyl and photographic memories are stripped and laid out in the sun. But only visions are envisioned. Nothing has been empirically correlated and nothing ever will. The principal objective was not to have one.