anti.social

Several years had passed and talking to others became refreshing and I was drawn off my guard. I could hold a dialogue with you, maybe withstand an argument. Then I could look into your eyes without losing my train of thought. Then you wouldn't mistake me for dishonest. My skin became a millimeter thicker and I wasn't so cold at night. Then I was not so sensitive to things you said. My social norm restoration experiment was paying off. Life was less a collection of used parts and problems I wished would only die away. Engagement became rewarding if not organic. I set my clock to the frequency of several functions a day. I demanded no less than I show up. Not every meeting was reciprocated, and not all of those that were, bore fruit. I found only one good conversation a day (face to face) was enough to keep my finger on the pulse of culture.

murder by memory -iv

the murder by memory series. parts i-iii go way back.
i hesitate to proceed with it, as it moves into something more like philosophy than simple creative writing. more like activism.   -k

torture was clearly a primitive defense of any society, forcing noncompliants into submission to meet specific aims of a culture. less clear was how a supposedly highly evolved culture involved in numerous humanitarian causes could keep it insular and protect the rudimentary institution of torture. if culture was to evolve, torture would cease to make sense. if culture was to be evolved, it would shutter the chambers and send all devices and mechanisms to their proper places behind glass cases in the future museums devoted to the betterment of the lives of the victims of torture. yet culture, like its individual constituents, tends to return to the primitive defense mechanisms when under duress: repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. and then covers it up in denial... torture. what would it matter the criminal or the crime? the use of an instrument reflects back on the one using it. if i pick up a sword and run it through someone, i am now a murderer. even if i kill a murderer with their own very sword, i am -nevertheless- a murderer, too.

the child

O wide awake in America, big sky highway hollowing out the ears predawn, cut me like a cookie and may i taste good too, share myself with you and you and you, sweet sugar has me processed in dreams and tumbled out a foamy bed into my own personal despair, sliding down the inner sanctuary of a question mark to collect and drop whole you made of me, sweet sugary period, plastic in my blood, pharmaceuticals in my water, disaster strikes and i lick my lips like you and smile, but no one smiles like we do, upside down or kinda flat, tethered to the mobile phones we kill by our deep sleep, counting ringtones like sheep, shearing and swiping the hell out of an alphabet, on a jazz or classical base as the temperature begins to rise with the sun, another day washing dishes and dusting and cutting boxes the perfect size to ship my ass away to some infernal packaging depot to be fitted with my personal bar code, my very own, which is linear and bold, impervious to black mould, scanned or so I'm told, taped then situated in some draughty unremarkable corner in the cellar of a warehouse to grow old. All i know is no one can erase me even if they try, I am forever etched into your hard drive, America, no matter how the cleaners cleanse, efforts to coat me over bleach me out only leave my prominent lines bubbling up from the cracks and surfacing again with all the gasses, grilling the faces of the masses ordering me around, yet still i stay aloft in my dissociated safe place way up high, finding me in a cut up creatively commoned place looking down, streaming on your horizon, only the light protects us now in our projections. Back out where I belong, some ionic bond, trashing your paint job with my spraypainted flare, exposing your destination to the going nowhere, breaking out the bars when i decode the code, fingering you with my fingerprint, America, until you see your own stars and go black and white again, from Birmingham to Ferguson, up the checker board and Martin Luther King you at the end, redoubled on a chance, green felt absorbs your glance in a healthy tribal casino where all the bad blood is blue, you see, the karmic knot we work it out, massage it real well, strike it with needles until you finally falter, sweet vulnerable America shedding your suit, crying and opening like that before the seamstress. And my lines are out of order, spinning into circular pools fallen stars, and the many shades of blue wash over me and you, when the world forgives and finds a place in the heart for a renewable source, because somehow you were always meant to be pleasant on the eyes, America, and generous though talkative and combative perhaps, you wear out your welcome in a superfluous way, and everyone has a good laugh and pats you on the head, for you are the child and loved just the same. Back to bed now with prayers, and we will see you in the morning, the rubbing of eyes, tumbling down stairs in your nightgown, little one, big sky highway musculature, heavy with some imagined purpose, dreams of carbon and oxygen and coffee churning blue to black in post industrial aftermath, shining oily head to toe, shedding another skin, inspiring us with your renewals. I will be there, my love, somewhere in the corners of your eyes, sucking on Maybelline, about to exit the glistening curve and drop unseen into your wilderness... where i have always belonged.

under an influence

I wonder about changes in perception a lot, in myself and other people. I love to be under the influence of marvelous ideas, and my perception of the world changes when I am immersed in the creative process; time becomes more pressing, life becomes more valuable, and a lot of toxicity is flushed from my system. I could be under the influence of a particular process, or a particular person, or a particular substance, or a particular form, or a particular place, or even a particular recurring dream or nightmare. Then there are collective influences like war, music, drugs, politics, books, coffee, environment, food, culture. Strange things happen when perceptions become altered and altered perceptions become new accepted norms and their own reality. I find myself taken aback almost yet always curious when confronted with various subcultures. There is the experience of being under the spell with others (immersion). Or being outside looking into (visiting) a subculture. There are the subcultures which we subconsciously accept (internalize) and those we reject. Change rolls in and covers a former way of being, and may sometimes obscure and distort, exaggerate or undermine what we know to be true. The truth becomes difficult to pinpoint.

All I know is it is hard and painful at times to be up against a subculture that I am not part of (rejection is too strong a word). If I walk down skid row, I will feel pain. If I go to a political convention, I will have trouble relating. If my friends are all on methadone (or any other drug), there may be something they are perceiving which I am missing, or something they are misperceiving which I am getting. This is curious to me. And how and why I would feel pain? I guess it is partially that my perception of reality is being undermined (rejection is too strong a word), and not really consciously. Usually subconsciously. When faced with a conscious rejection of my reality, recently, I stood up for myself -- I literally stopped my car and told the person to get out. I think they thought I was joking but I was not. We were only about a thousand yards from the destination, so it was not like I was stranding them. But it was a very painful split.

All I know is it is better to tread carefully and not reject anything completely out of hand, for I have felt the tremendous pain of having my world rejected out of hand and it feels terrible and violent to me. I would not like to impart this feeling on anyone, ever. But outside of personal relations and differences, how do we handle collective influences like war and indiscriminate violence? Aren't these also part of human nature, part of human experience? How then can I reject them? How can I not? IDK - I just wanna tread carefully and watch myself, and try and form and adhere to a personal code, so that I don't get swamped by my subconscious. But I cannot control my subconscious, that's why it is sub: under the surface goings on! But I do believe that what I am doing, consciously, every day, over and over, makes a tremendous imprint on my character. So this I can consciously control. And try and remain flexible in my self as reality goes through its changes and shifts around. Nobody wants to be left behind! But there is one thing remains eternal for me and always hopeful and refreshing, I believe, and this is the creative process. So I continue on, despite adversity and rejection and mistakes I have made. I am in constant search of a greater creative community of caring and sharing, enlarging upon this can only make life more worth living.

people work better when driven (insane) -- vi/i

people work better when driven (insane) -vi) 

subparticle i/iii
 by Katya Mills

The mouth has been watering for some time for a little taste of the really real! Far from the office-as-is. Far from the home-land-security-cam. Far from the life-support system. The Business class. The identical non pinstripe suits. The ladies unable to wear open-toed shoes. Life which is not a beach, even when you live directly on a beach. The gentleman frowned upon for windsor knotting their ties. This isn’t England. We don’t have time for that shit. Deducted from your paycheck. The mentality here. The program we must follow or else. Leave your dreams at home. Put your unpublished novels in the shredder. There’s no glory in your personal story of desecrated ennui. You owe yourself and your country some restitution, for all that rest. Bipolar? Autistic? Schizoaffective? Come one, come all! People wait in line for a diagnosis, just to get away. Fuck the stigma. Be the illness. Covet the experience no more. Self-actualized mental illnesses. You wanna work it like that? Stranger things are happening, so get in line. Start somewhere. Let a county physician try and know you better than you know yourself. Cognitive behave yourself badly. Be a kid again, or role reverse your kids into parenting you. This is the quiet desperation of those who have spent the better part of their wonderful miserable lives within cubicles.

flipping electrons

Get your red hots!
here
red hots!
here

we are serving 
them up!

unilaterally
premier quality
serving them
up!

flour and butter
bubbling 
up!

from the pan
from the soul
it's out of control!

on a red hot 
platter
of global 
flambeau!

the ground 
quaking
the consciousness
waking

red hots! 
come and get 'em
they're good 
they are
whole

a paradigm
a dozen!
get one 4 your
cousin!

flipping electrons
from minus to 
plus

from nyc
to cali
across all seven
seas. by bus!

someone come
some one
come

rescue
us

please

'people work better when driven. insane' -viii)

On the topic of  'SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY'
 
Original material performed by Katya Mills
from K IS SILENT
 
 
 
People work better when driven, like rain
Not like nails through plywood
Not like slaves
Nothing narrow
Driven to a point as deep as bone marrow
Where the levee breaks

The point of overflowing
To the point where sanity and reason dead end
Where we may become highly emotional
Charged
Where we conduct electricity and switch channels
(with ease, if you please)
 
 Irrational? for certain. Intelligence? Beyond standards. Insane? Well, not sane, in the best of any sense of not sane. A psychosis? Perhaps. Psychotic break? not necessarily. Long past the neurosis? Most likely.
Ferocious? Like a tiger!
Outlawed?
Most definitely, like the wild are outlawed
from tea parties.
 

sachomes #1 by k

What american culture seemed to have lost sight of, somehow, somewhere in the past;  was the continuity and emergence that soon comes to pass. That dead end or limit, got taken literally, indeed. Never mind if travel may continue on foot.
If left unbound and not institutionalized, unmedicated in some cases, people can relocate themselves in the land of the lost. What by all appearances looks hopeless, even criminally insane, may find self-remedy, in the realm of the spiritual.
The soul has no ordinary bounds, you see.
The soul was made for being extraordinary.
This is the soul’s inclination.  
Past the point of knowing, really nothing is clear.
Past the point of comfort, the mapped out area.
Past the well worn territory of both mind and body.
Past the breakpoint of rpms in your cousin's Ferrari.
Past familiar. Out of area. Quite impossible, and why?
Because part of our nature needs to learn how to fly.

Rolling allostasis -iv)

She was in her twenties, when she surfaced from the midsection of an iceberg, the frozen contents of some formerly fluid collective subconscious experience. In the middle of nowhere, mind you. A slow drip of unhappening. Congealed into living memories (consistency of molasses).  So she thawed from her heart out, and the ice around her began to soften in her light and heat, and collect supine at her feet. Aqua devotion. If water had hands... then prayer beneath her dry eyes. So rare did this sorta manifestation occur. The glaciers melt in their natural way before her. And she takes her damn time. You don’t hurry a glacier. You age it, like wine. Or wait for her to melt, to reference empirical evidence of global warming. Melting butter at room temperature. She never left the kitchen table. Painting her daily bread. Turning and turning yellow over time with the wallpaper. Gotta get worse before she gets better. Baby blue with white flowers, soft and malleable. Almost vulnerable, fallible – almost human again. As she wishes. As they want her. Sorry says the fight inside her, delivering the roundhouse Queen Anne Victorian style. Round one...TKO. From a frozen warrior #2 asana. Feel the heat. Sauna.