K reads her little poem (to you)

K reads K

from K IS SILENT

xxooooxo

 

the hollow

the night closed in
a hollowing of the sun

the fear dripped

everyone and flowers
bowed their heads

we would all have to
wait

and -
during those dark
and dreadful
endless of
hours

attend the madness

Book Review - 'Intruder In The Dust' by William Faulkner

This is ONLY my favorite tale from my favorite author. I have literally made a pilgrimage to Faulkner's home in Oxford, MS on more than one occasion. It helped of course that my good friend Oso Negro was living there and working on his PhD at Ole Miss. But I swear I would have gone anyway! Faulkner was my mentor, as I developed my own writing style over the years.

Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness writing style does not disappoint here. My experience reading this narrative can only be described as the feeling you get when arriving to your favorite body of water for laps in the undisturbed fog at dawn... diving into the lukewarm greenblue with cap and goggles and bathing suit all melted into you... and swimming slowly with a flutter of toes, cutting a clean line from page to page, beginning to end, melting into the body of water. Immaculate read from begin to end. More like a long poem, pages and pages without the constraint of constant unbearable punctuation.

Yes, with Faulkner, you the reader must be willing to work hard at times to figure out what's going on. But Intruder in the Dust was an unstoppable regular strong heartbeat pumping a cry of justice through my veins. The cry of justice is a subtle sound that grows louder to the point where it is almost deafening by the end. I wish I could spoil, because there is a late night movement into the heart of darkness, which casts a wonderful spell over the whole work.

In this masterpiece (and lesser-praised, lesser-known of his works), the narrative focuses through the eyes of a young boy, son of a benevolent lawyer who is self-appointed to defend a black man accused of murder in the deep south at a time when being a black man in the deep south is, well -- painful...impossible. You get a To Kill a Mockingbird feel from this book.

What I love about Intruder In the Dust is that I had already made my way with a great stubborn desire through most of Faulkner's long catalogue of works, from the ones that brought him fame and fortune to the relative sleepers 'the Mansion and 'the Town' (I really did use those tales to help me fall asleep, I confess!). I expected this one to be as dry and unbecoming as the aforementioned works.

Instead you get a delightful taste of the master at his level best. I believe his use of the boy through whose eyes we see all the insensate cruelties of the adult world around him, makes for a clear and sensitive treatment of the tale. You also have to wonder if this tale got less mass appeal for the same reason. More cryptic works like the Sound and the Fury have patterned coded truths embedded in them for academia to pick apart and decipher. This work is very straightforward.

As a writer, I simply had to absorb every word of the masterful Faulkner. This work is captivating and unusually heartfelt. Read it. Feel it. A good primer for anyone new to William Faulkner. If I was teaching ninth grade English, I would put it on the reading list for American literature,for sure. I keep it on my shelf. Physical.

Vox Witness (vw)

An inch worm
a centipede
one hundred days of
war

a nickel bag
a dollar store

a disturbing
violent
creed

penny candy
millipede
a mother and
a whore

a subterranean route
out of Syria no doubt
is what the people
need

the horse fly
on baby's breath

neglected
left for death

the aristocracy of effort
is blogging through the
mud

wondering how to translate
words to save our
flesh and
blood



Katya Mills, 2014
all rights reserved

repatriation flash

a star
was born
just last year
with dated expiration

some soldiers march
beneath a drone to
orders for
repatriation

a giving tree
taken down
to make room for a highway

a leader of an Eastern realm
tells the world
let's do it
my way

and the dandelions saw
their heads
lopped off

the roses all
dead-headed
too

all was left
by even
time

an imprint from
a single
shoe



Katya Mills, 2014
all rights reserved

Note to my readers...my debut novel, Girl Without Borders

is now marked down 90% to 99 cents

on sale on Amazon.com

Please support indie authors!



the author, k



silent sees me

Black tea
Green tea
White tea

the things i cannot see

Persian
Siamese
Maine Coon cats

tatted* up
with sleeves
like maps

cast my eyes
above horizon
forty-five degrees

if i can find
my way
back home

through streets
low-lit
alleys

on converse all-stars
on wiki dreams

on salient
flecking
waves of hope

dear god!
the pope
francis, assisi

the truth appears and
silent sees
me!


-copyright K, 2014
* slang for tattooed

sauvage love

the days were warm
the flowers
bold

my heart was
warm
the night was
cold

i fell in
 love
in two years time

you sailed off
on sauvignon
wine

quel dommage!
nature
sauvage

no blow job would
your heart
assuage

i followed you
my course was true
to catch a sailboat
by canoe

the wind picked up
good for you
no more love

the distance
grew by cork
screw

to the drowned

100 years of solitude
lapping up the shore
have you met your neighbors?
next door

239 missing
from Malaysia
facing east
on sunday

rising toward
the light
at the very
least

302 Korean kids
a billion hearts
turn blue

if only your captain
could have seen you
through


to the drowned....image by K, 2014

420 crowds light upto escape the human race
against the cards we're dealt
one-eyed Jack
a Queen
an ace

five hundred times
or more
I tell myself each day
time is of the essence

live!
write!
play!

l00 years of solitude
lapping up the shore
so sorry for the lives
the lost

i feel it in
my coeur

Rated X (it won't be pretty)

The ocean had a lake effect on the sea
the sea had a lake effect on me
the feelings fell in line
one two three
agree?

the oil eaters unleashed on the spill
saved some corporation
a pretty penny

the pretty penny went for absolute nothing on
the loving kindness market
panhandlers started skipping it
like stones
between the legs of passerbys
and out into the streets
of any city

shiny penny
in the street

someone said would you hit that?
meaning a tall
                   cool
             glass of water walking by

- American for
rated R for
sexuality -

some poor slang-lacking bastard
melting in
from another country
ran out after
the shiny penny
between two parked cars
any city

by the time rush hour traffic
got the green light, well...

let's just say
it wasn't pretty

recipe #867.5309

recipe  # 867.5309

chord progression
for your cream base
walking the fretboard
ten pace
in the mind

we played guitar
on indian rocks beach
Jack Kerouac's home
not far
out of reach

got loud enough there
to drown out the culture
the shock and the awe
the commercialism
vulture

the iguanas in the trees
looked down and listened
through ear holes in reptilian
nuclear brain fission

i smoked a joint
back then to get away

rhythm and choose
what clothes and
got laid

trouble was tuning
young turtles at night
they walked the wrong way

towards the street
light

i may have walked backward
as well

wore my clothes
inside out
the sea didn't care
churning about

life was
swell

itasca. usa.

The derelicts wait
to get out of jail
eating grass in the yard
sincerely,
snail mail

tricked some dumb girl
in Lincoln, Nebraska
to drop
all her clothes
in the family Winnebago
class A. Itasca

framed for a selfie
umm. wait... i dunno
omg. someone loves me!
i oughta...just do it!

the seeds
they parachute
around her parents fat asses
picknicking
oblivious
they think
she's in classes

the couple next door
in the '89 Sunflyer
uncouples

everyone in the trailer park
breathes a sigh of relief
after days upon days
bed springs
grinding teeth

here lies America
one part insane
three parts corn field
chicken fights
the great dane

sky of confetti
ticker tape patrol
on top of spaghetti
out on parole
all covered in glass
we lost all our marbles
trailer park cities
smoking the grass

had us some prilosec
for damage control
got the generic
omeprazole

over the counter
losing religions
fighting off viral
youtube derisions


fighting for freedom
across all the states
candy crushed pills
oxycontin
crazy eights

this is America
home of the rave
we party all night
our roads are all paved

we can
spy on your leaders
sell you our fruit juice
equal parts mother
hen turkey and
goose

we can
just because
we can
in god's name
we can
laissez-faire
we can
pollute air

the derelicts wait
to get out the pen
we can let them go
sincerely, usa

land of the free
prison industry
zen

the bloody truth

the blood moon
   got bloodied too soon
            the meridian maiden
                    found true love in june

a total eclipse of the
truth

mcdonalds.... burger king... subway
      walmart.... target....(the truth)....home depot
              I drank my heart up through a plastic straw
                                in a plastic bottle
                            on a vinyl chair
                      on rubber tires
             on a paved road
                 where the trees they no longer grow

the blood moon
       the lunar eclipse
              where is Berlin?
                     her international whips

Hilary Clinton
maybe the next president
elected by Pfizer, Glaxo and Chevron

I will vote for
             our first female president
                             or maybe transgender
                                       don't wanna offend her
the first piece of legislation
which crosses her desk
I hope will be (truth)
coming out of the closet

and then we have truth
   and then we have TRUTH
         and then its THE TRUTH

the blood moon in April
two thousand fourteen
evokes such a common
                    strange
                      indecent dream

now back to my cherry coke
high fructose corn shudder
the current so strong
it just broke the rudder

a symphony in G-minor (with snails)

She rocked back
trusting the chair
leaning
far back
and far away

deep into forests
where light and shadow
play

spinning yarn
spun forth
through her fingers
spinning time
through her mind

the crescent cut of wood
at the base of her rocker
cut right into tabby cat's
tail

outside god
cast water into stone
hail

electric cat nails
dug into hardwood floors
nine inches
deep down
where termites sleep

the yarn
began to spin
backwards now
wrapping itself around her

she was lost
in thought
trusting the chair

the spirit of her
long gone lover
conducted the scene

the yarn
the rocking
the chair
the cat
the nine inch
nails

and now steamrolling out
on the flat hardwood floors
a band of notorious garden
snails

she whose temples were rubbed -vi) ... the final cut)

She was not homicidal, she whose temples were rubbed
Violence was in her nature and yours. Maybe some Aztec. Some worship the sun
Maybe conceived on Mexican soil with a gun

Her parents became decidedly pacifist in the wake of all the bloodsport they boasted, as documented in the ledgers. Nobody read the ledgers. Pacifist was an unconditionally accepted façade

She wanted to live, made that choice early on
This was well-documented. On the cloud
The virtual copy spoke volumes
Real loud

Probably around four or five years
Suicide was dystonic to her and distasteful
She was clear as her favorite drink: one part lemon, one part tonic
She held it to the light like a chemist

To prevent its being corrupted, she drank it quickly
She was hard to figure
Was her finger on the pulse?
Or was it a trigger?

She excited all the men, and half the women
And one third of the royal family
A high figure
Indeed

Strange, how the only one (unseen) in all whom exist
who shakes up their rocks with a twist of her wrist
recovers her balance despite leaning - en list

now give us. 
        give us. now
give us a kiss

When all her luck seemed away from her
our loveless child of gen eXxers
true marinated in grunge
wore cycling reflectors

She drew to her temples
(like the strike of a match)
a guardian to protect her

Who held her down in the chair
where she cursed and she howled
caressing the pulse of her dome
where calm was endowed

The healing was practiced
not random
she could give a damn
about facebook and fandom


Damn! our girl cried
young girl, leaving youth
massaged all the way
-- past gloss and glass
and glitz and glamour --
all the way to the truth
and thereby enamored

The thoughts that once clamored
and crowdsurfed her brow
excised at the temples
the fingertips ploughed

The flying cuts flew
unlocking the locks
all the cuts
from her temples
right down to her socks

A wave of great and invigorate feeling
 this young girl, leaving youth
-once damning found expression-
self-resolved as they say

fresh love welled up
self-propelled
by the way         -- fin

she whose temples ... - v)

She loved the feeling of the sound of her teeth
up against the wall
mango flavored hi-chews
seven eleven in the fall
when the insomniac in her was alive and walking.

Feeling like they were gonna shatter. painlessly
her teeth
through the veneers she wove her own ideas
who was anyone (or herself) to take her away the pragmatic reality?
what kinda place to live is there? (there)
in the heart of a shapeless heart-shaped box.
in the fire in the belly of the sky.
what so obviously presents itself to us
sunrise. sun set. rise. set.
No one could answer her.
not just yet.

The rocks in her glass, they came in contact and chattered about. sublimating down.
vespers. dawn. aperitif
conclusion of the day
demerit. thief
they sublimated down to water. in the base of the glass
they took the form of the glass
they worshipped the glass
the glass began to perspire
the rocks they cracked and chattered
A boisterous lot, indeed. Something like an audience.

k selfie 04/14

Reminiscent of audiences of years past....
Lenny Bruce's audience. Caesar's Palace. Vegas
Bad Brains audience. CBGB. NYC
Audience to the guillotine. French Revolution. July 14th. Bastille Day
Audience to Nine Inch Nails
Audience to Aleister Crowley.
The Order throws a party for #4
both major and minor arcana are invited
all suits. preferably hearts alongside spades.
preferably against the grain
the motor activity
motor city
throb

Audience to nothing.
Axl Rose won't come out tonight. his vocals need chakra treatment.
Elton John's done to much blow.
Billy Joel is scared.
Janis is laughing and drinking.
Phil Spector made a crime scene of the wall of sound.
Hall and Oates are making love.
Jim is in the bathtub. with gin.
That dude is coming out to sledgehammer watermelons again.
Mick Jagger's bff just offed herself.
Chris Brown's in jail.
Bieber's dodging Miley on a wrecking ball.
Rihanna behind her.
pushing

Witnessing the moving standstill of time.
Amusement park. Painted ponies impaled on recycled pole dancer poles.
Up and down. Robot lovemaking. Tin man grinding.
Judy Garland drunk underneath the platform.
She got in for free.
She can never leave.
Contemplation of navels.
Contemplation of labels.

Contemplation...
That something frozen cold could move quick
and lightly float like soft-boiled eggs popping out
of the clouds, bubbling down the gravity pressurized earthen
atmospheres, down...

down into soils
taking on nitrogen
feeling alive
glancing off roots
excavating now
unintentionally
sub sub conscious
Judy Garland
submarine sandwich
Malaysian flight
deep hollow
blue

deep down there lay
her temples
some fucking
where

the girl whose temples -iv)

Irregardless of age, race, creed, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, disability, awake, asleep, dreaming, fantasizing. Life was almost unbearable for her now. Irregardless of age, time, potential, history, or conscious presence. Irregardless of proprioceptive superstandard socialscapes and escapes.

Suck the colors out and it’s a fact. Thank god she could see it for what it was, almost unbearable but not. Or don’t thank god or anyone. Whenever she came to the crux of a decision to live or die, the choice was easy. Live. Experiment. Play with options. Do it differently, with no expectations. Except to suffer still. To love a lot. To feel a lot. To have a hamster in a wheel in her head who never stopped running. What an experiment! She put on her labcoat and stockings and sexy swag fitted label eyewear, her rose-colored lenses, and found her thirst for life. Yes, another day would come to pass of misinterpretation of her. Accepting it, sidelining all that crap, going back to the lab, had to be her undeniable satisfaction.

In a world that could offer little solace through bloodlines.
In a town that courted all its layman judges.
Citizens arrest. Unwelcomeness.
On a path that led to no known end.

The silence and her favorite drink, the feelings she did or did not feel, the strange form she took getting bigger herself every day as they tried to make her small by cruelties they inflicted or unkind words they would say, those around her... what influence had they? Maybe some. Maybe alot. But she tried to appreciate the ongoing evolution of her self. In trying she was almost able. And she tried to appreciate her only known given life almost as much as she could... and almost, she could.

 In subsidiary was the account of the days of her youth... through a precipitation of all things heretoformentioned and avowed... through the fallen rain of colored locks of hair... through which all ugly jaundiced countenances saw to the unconditional freeze of her powerful icy stare...in this antiquated world of salons and sociopolitical theatrics of penelopes and patricks...of bulbs bare and loud enough to make the head ache...until a dull scream fell out of some poor child’s mother’s spleen. Or so somebody said. Fell out and fell down on the ground with a thud. Like an ice cream cone scoop of dark semisweet chocolate. Insensate.

 She would not rub her temples then. Postmortem.
 She would have.
She could not rub her temples then.
She would have if she could have.
She did not rub her temples because someone else.
Someone else knew.
Someone else knew what she would not do.
Someone else knew that she could not do but would have if she could have.

 Someone else rubbed our friends temples with a fullness. A fullness that cannot come of judgment or jaundice or class action. A full indescribable spontaneous burst of parenthetically deserted straight up true natural overflowing...some semisweet one got her back.

she whose temples -- iii)

She was not homicidal, but violence was in her nature and yours. Her parents became decidedly pacifist in the wake of all the bloodsport they boasted, as documented in the ledgers. Nobody read the ledgers, so pacifist was an unconditionally accepted facade. Neighbors only knew something funny about the spicy chili they spooned out at the annual neighborhood watch block parties, so spiced up with habanero and wasabi to silence the smell of powdered ear lobes, sending a rush of icy air through your sinuses and mine, getting accolades blockwide and block long. Nobody heard the powdered cries of the powdered owners of the powdered ear lobes they could not discern. Suffice it to say, the neighborhood watch was not watching.

She wanted to live, and made that choice early on. Probably around four or five years. Suicide was dystonic to her and distasteful. She knew this clear as her favorite drink in her hand; one part lemon, one part tonic. She held it up quickly at times when her arm and wrist began to falter. To prevent its being corrupted, she drank it quickly. An old and tired lemon and tonic was sad like the first rainfall in the city and all the imminent inevitable car crashes slding on the oils arisen from the asphalt. She approached the Bible the same way. She was confirmed in a Protestant Church, and the version was Good News. She scanned it that year, and basically never picked it up again. Except to box it with the other books every time she had to relocate. Why she held on to a text she found so sad and possibly corrupted, no one can say and certainly not herself. Maybe it was her name engraved on the leather cover? She was hard to figure.     - to be continued

she whose temples were rubbed - ii)

she whose temples were rubbed (a series of posts)
by Katya Mills, 2014

27 June 2011 at 01:24

PublicFriendsFriends except acquaintancesOnly meCustomClose FriendsFamilySee all lists...The Sequoia CenterOakland, California AreaNorthwestern UniversityJohn F. Kennedy UniversityAcquaintancesGo Back

Part -i) ::: revisited

Anecdote from the cutting room floor, circa 2009 …  cuts fresh falling off her aura, this girl. Locks of her soft layers of dyed hair flashing in the fluorescent light for the last time, in silence, her silence, the silence of her stylist, of her boots up on the old steel footrest.

She was sickly aware of being one of millions in her country. one of billions in the world. Any megalomania of her youth had been drowned or subsided into a pale ascertain of some kinda amegalomania minority status in the pantheon of petty class passive-aggressive weaker-than-war fare.

She was sick from feeling cold and sick of being stepped on like every footrest in every goddamn hair salon or rickety down home kitchen in the not so deep south where she hailed from. Snailed from. Slow to wake up out that hot and humid daydream.

Part -ii) ::: with tribute to Kurt Cobain, on the 20th anniversary of his young death

She knew she could neither recover the day nor the dream. She knew she would not recover, for she had nothing she wished to hide from herself anymore. What she had uncovered, well, it was all the darkness you could expect to find under an old rock toward the far edge of a garden, revisited after years of neglect.

 

She was a despondent girl.  Our girl. And still people dared to stare back at her silent icy stare. For they knew her as the daughter of disgust and disgrace.
Fuck, she thought, hers was the legend she would carry all her life and to her grave. Hers was the standard by which all could measure, even the lowest of the low, and still be seen as if from below. Her only entitlement for all she was aware, was straight up misery. Not unlike Kurt Cobain. And she wore interesting sweaters over floral button down shirts, not unlike him, beneath her cold hard eyes true. Looking back at you.

So she stared. And she could have cared how you reacted, whether you cared or did not care. Or did not care enough not to care or care. Many if not most were subjected in her presence to having her eyes upon them. The uncomfortable, unwelcome, malevolent glossy glare.

The silence of falling years of color, could not have felt more free on this day however. She sighed in the chair, having untied her hair. By the weight of her breath, one would not have thought freedom. But feeling was the heaviness set forth in the room, bouncing across mirrors.

Rippling earth through the room.

Folks shied away, children started crying. For what sensation she lacked, she made one without effort. A natural audience surfaced from magazines.  A natural uneasiness surfaced from her longstanding psychic wounds and kept people away like the bubbling molten rock volcanic.
It was said that those who ventured too close to her -- well... all anyone might hear was gutteral cries someone lost somewhere in their spleen. No one needed to know anymore.

She had some feelings about feeling. She did. She was not therefore unfeeling.
Who was?
Not to feel might be too plastic.
Whereas feeling was often way too dramatic.
So she strove for some middle path.
Which, despite her fair effort, often led her to static.
Whats wrong with static?

The silence that followed or preceded both her stares and her static...
she considered 
This silence was beautiful, she thought, like her glock automatic.
This was her gun, not a clock, not a toy.
She found it beautiful yet deadly. Two incompatible traits. Incompatible but not impossible.
 Her gun was something she kept neither to use nor enjoy. She found it in the pond by the old shed, where the shallows found coy.
Some spirit had told her she would find it there, and not only that she should or could - truly she had no desire to - but that she must go and retrieve and polish and learn the gun.
She did so reluctantly.
Then sent the spirit away with her stare...         --  to be continued --

she whose temples were rubbed part - i )

Anecdote from the cutting room floor, circa 2009 … 
cuts
    fresh falling off her aura,
 this girl.
Locks of her soft layers
                              dyed hair flashing in fluorescent light for the last time
 in silence
 her silence
 the silence of her stylist
                     her boots up on the old steel footrest.

She was sickly aware of being one of millions in her country.
One of billions in the world.
Most of whom had been counted by McDonalds
one billion served

Any megalomania of her youth had been drowned
                                                                       or subsided into a pale ascertain of some kinda amegalomania
minority status
in the pantheon of petty class
                              passive-aggressive
                                              weaker-than-war
fare.

She was sick from feeling cold
sick of being stepped on
like every footrest in
every goddamn hair salon
and rickety down home kitchen in the not so deep south where she hailed from.
Snailed from.
Slow to wake up was she
out her hot and humid daydream...  - to be continued

daughter of darkness

i got a label on my life
this life by design
might be Francois Girbaud
maybe Calvin Klein

not really sure how I survived
the car crash. age fourteen
T-boned in an Audi
skin and bones and spleen

i guess i was supposed to
kick it on to college
blue jeans. straight up Levis made me
dreamy at eighteen

then was drug related
polysubstance codependent
waitress at a seafood joint
far from holy
faded

pulp fiction and nirvana
kept me up at night
tupac singing dear mama
now i wanna fight

got a number in my mind
i think it's seventeen
trying to unravel
Chicago's lean and mean

by twenty-eight. my Saturn
second coming round
i check my self
my widening gyre
and then self
intervene

not sure how it happened
the china got intense
wrote myself right off a page
somehow found a fence

maybe it was the pacific
California's rugged coast
stopped me from my crumbling self
catastrophy
burnt toast...

all i really know now
my life is by design
whose label soaked into my neck
reads 'enivid'
divine

who i am
inked my heart
who i'm supposed to be
where i been
tagged my soul
where i'm meant to go


i am survivor's sister now
daughter of the darkness
i laugh into the alleys narrow
and feel the love
rush back
god bless

April fools

April fools are on the scene
6am in limousines

groping backseat blues
and rhythm

texting
tits and ass
amass

April fools are shooting dope
in Midwest Mexi
trafficked trade

April fools are found all blue
a point made
heart stopped
too

April fools out from march
madness streaking
naked
   into streets

crowdsourced clockwork
orange and green

April fools
on the scene