unauthorized autobiography

I am made up. I am made up of classic horror flix and criticism, behind the loving family. I am made of denim jeans and wrinkled dollar bills I try and iron with my fingers at the laundromat. I am made of blue-gray-green eyes and circles and ovals and triangles. I am made up of denial of certain harsh realities. When I embrace them, they are still wrapped in fantasy. My escape hatch is up through my head, where I sprout rare gardens reaching for the sun. I may be just starting when you are nearly done. My roots give up water to the moon and monsoon. I am a saline solution in a world full of problems. I have been known to border apathy to the east and sympathy to the west. My anxiety borders psychosis when I am not being true to myself. I am made of books and books are made of pages and pages are made of words and words are made of letters I transcribe in my heart out of blood. I can get by on French and butcher Spanish. The blood circulates all the way to my fingertips and comes out in English. I speak dead languages to bring us back to life. I would tell you more but I haven't been given permission.   xxx   KatYa

shaking salt. add pepper

Here's the spoken word for the piece i wrote this morning... I want to thank you all for adding pepper and salt to my eggs, you really made it interesting at high noon on a sunday. In return I took the liberty to rid you of those nasty demons which were casing you and infiltrating your energies. I gave them all a (verbal) lashing, and they should not bother anyone again. In fact, I turned them on to the UFC and they got really excited to get in the ring and take one another out like that. So call them ancient history!       xxx    KatYa

(so i write this letter) shaking salt at eggs on sunday

IF i could take your demons from you and battle them myself this day would be worthwhile, you see, it closes in on me and i don't know what to do inside my head inside my home shaking pepper on my eggs at the break of dawn on sunday. i could go to church but what difference would it make. i would rather go to see you and be with you. you won't criticize my hair or clothes behind my back. or in my face. we could laugh and talk about our boyfriends or our mothers over coffee. we used to go to the thrift stores together, remember? now i walk alone and ride the subways of my mind. my demons are okay they are not upset or acting out; even in the tunnels they sit still and quiet, hands folded, listening to the rails and feeling the side to side sway rock us into a new day. that's why i could battle yours if you would let me. the full moon fell out the window and the light is percolating and i don't know what to do inside my head inside my home shaking salt on my eggs on a sunday. so i write this letter and wait patiently for my chances. to meet someone new or be with you or you or you again, one of many long lost friends.

passages of clouds

I am giving up and giving in to sleep, and then awaken off melatonin with some fight in me for the full moon, stepping outdoors and looking up to her where she is reading clouds, passages of clouds, while I am slipping on my bare feet the black sneaks with the black soles and black laces, after lining them with powder. The clouds are assuaging the moon with great tales of restlessness and woe, and she: delighted, attentive, detached. I am pouring the water over the coffee grounds in slow circles, coming round to myself like i must every night, for when I walk into the world as I must, and raise my eyes to read the same unending jetstream from below, the passing encryption is solved, and the atmospherics release hail and torrents of rain to wash from me my apprehension, my anxiety, my indifference... and all mirage of dissembling.

some of the stuff i like about this life nonstop

The experience i have of living is so precious to me, from the moment I wake up and even while i sleep, and even when i feel controlled or having to wait in line somewhere, someone i might talk to can suddenly make me feel special, seen, even free! the moments i spit angrily upon the gray urban concrete overcast city even they may turn over in a flash when am i awash in spirit filled with color by a song from a window of a high rise, an automobile passing by, the blue notes warping orange and green and fuschia as we comes and go and the distance between us closes or grows... a street artist, a jump rope kid, a skater flipping the board under his feet upon a rail and sliding down in the balance... the bass on a hot summer day spills out a trunk in a traffic jam to meet the heat rising in oil and exhaust, or the decided will of nature pushing up out of a frost until the sprout cracks through somewhere, a sidewalk a tunnel, a floorboard, even through the eye socket of a skull or a broken shell, the inhabitant long since gone on... hell, it warms my heart! an otherwise cold unfeeling is replaced. Life is nonstop. How could I question my freedom after a sight like that?

lucky

I had a lucky childhood mostly, which I could not take for granted after the incident when I was in my mother's belly on a two lane highway, an oncoming schoolbus swerved over the line and almost collided with us. I think I remember. I got the best of education and parents and a brother who looked after me with great care. I had my own room at an early age, though I wished I could share a room with my older brother still, in a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian on a hill. We had a dog, a cookie jar, steam radiators, and a piano. My mother issued spankings by the mouth of its winding staircase. My father came home from work and the family gathered round the kitchen table nights, and we picked a prayer from a deck of cards inside a plastic loaf of bread, to read with our heads bowed and fingers clasped before our meal.

I had lots of chores to do and lots of books to explore. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia most. I cherished those books. I had one foot in the church and one foot out, in perfect reflection of my mother's Christianity and my father's atheism. I certainly enjoyed exploring the great cathedrals of New York City and participating in charitable events. And listening to music all the time. Years later I became agnostic and a social worker. Television became a terrible faith. Mindlessness and magical thinking and unreality. I was much better off reading and using my own imagination, playing outdoors with the neighborhood kids in any weather. Skating, running, listening to music, fighting, writing.

Thinking back on my life... there is no wonder i am changed and yet remain quite the same at the core, rock steady somehow, trying to be an innovator, trying to express myself in meaningful waves, and hopefully many more years even twice as many years in store, which i could not even say three years ago today, when was my time of dying. Some like myself cannot stand (for our health) lashing out upon the world when we feel we have been forsaken. Instead we go inward and hurt ourselves, which is no less terrible perhaps - but I would rather swallow the poison than poison you, if between the two was my only choice. That's just me.

the current

awaken to you
your strength in
the sun

awaken to me
black lashes
white walls

to the river
we go

your hand in mine
we watch
them drift along

i wrap myself
around your broad
back

i press myself
into you

the sky and the sun
the river and geese
me and you

by the current
taken