she rustled around for small bills
and change
poured the dregs of french roast
down her throat
dressed in many layers she
limped to the store by her cane
not caring how she came off
her mouth would get her out
of any trouble it got her in
#katyamills
good luck with the supercilious attitude
your shocking entrance and exit
good luck with the shabby
coat of titles and flawless conceit
i love to walk the runway in eighties
thrift and taste my buttered fingertips
watching this rerun play out
#katyamills
our hearts located
a drip away from 5
o.clock
your crow foot eyes
see
the past got nothing future
got nothing on you
on me
we got each other
in the city feel the kick
of life
hit the latitude
with attitude over dry and barren highways
east
not one degree short
of circling
encompassing the
earth
when you have someone who means the world to you and you are related by blood and you have no history of ever doing one another harm, you have about the best thing going in this life. be grateful. reach out to them if you can. talk to them.
‘Jaded as Jade’
by Katya Mills
There i was…
Headed out from my apartment on foot
Cheap walmart moccassins
Expose my toes
Dressed to kill fashion
With blood on my arms
Where my kittens attacked me
While sleeping off a one night stand
With my pen
There i was…
A young american
Single white female
Contemporary genXer
Using animated semi-fiction
to report
the hideous truths
could never be received
by the culture
embedded within
them
There i was…
Bicycle framed on my shoulder
Takin’ myself too seriously
And then some
All the way down the
Stairway to the
Street…
Tryin’ for light-hearted
All through the morning
Highlighted strands of hair
Fallin’ out behind my fuji feather
Lickin’ the base of my neck like
Blonde flames
Under the influence of anti-gravity
In the dark and baby blue of the dawn
There i was…
Down the street after dawn
Dealing with all the personalities of the world in a single room…
And then some
Tolerating as best i could tolerate
Day #5 without a cigarette
My own personality, the most difficult and least refreshing of them all
Splitting hairs with split personalities
Spitting in the wind
Jaded as jade
There i was…
Banana fucking split!
Upright on my bike
Riding back home
Five miles of
Legs and no
Hands
Praying i might take a dive on the railroad tracks
Just so i could feel something
Different
Split ends and all
my hair falling back ‘gainst
gravity to lick my
neck in the
wake of
me
There i was…
With the sinking depression that clung to my soul, all of my life
Sinking back into my pain, as the burning sun rose silently over my head
In central california
Here i am…
Split ends and all
In the wake of me
Without shade
Praying for a miracle
Jaded as
Jade
oppositional artwork by Katya Mills
American attitude art
by Katya Mills, 2014
Last year, this time…
Well, you may not want to know. Life was really messed up. I was acting a cougar for the first time ever. I was coming off a painful separation from a chick I loved and who loved me, too. Today we call each other best friends. I was deeply devoted to the study of chemicals. Let’s just say I had my PhD in pharmacology. Nothing could be closer to the truth.
So I gave myself to a punk from LA, last year, this time. A skater kid who had been taken to his knees by black, and was just now crawling back into the world and hoping to stand up again. Just the kind of guy for me. We met one otherwise endless night of my same old repeated impoverished kinda lifestyle, at the vending machine in a board & care in Oakland, California. On Telegraph Avenue.
I was trying to decide on the best runner up for Famous Amos’ chocolate chip cookies. In the hallway, by the office. I wanted to make my decision quickly, and get the hell back to my room. I did not get out much. i was studying chemicals as they moved through my bloodstream. I was no less than a fine mess.
I was paranoid and suffering from various mental illness. The office was behind me, and I knew the matriarch of the Indian family who ran the place, was gonna ask me about my cat again. I was still hiding her in my room. My cat Drama. Weeks ago I agreed to take her somewhere else, when I realized that cats were not allowed. They kept asking. I kept lying. But they knew. And I knew. And I knew I wanted to get back to my room as quickly as meow.
Inflexibility is a real key to success in the board & care industry, in Oakland. No cats, no exceptions. I had to get back to my room, cause I never liked lying. 
Anyway, I had settled on a pack of sugar wafers, when I noticed in the reflection of the vending machine glass, the kid. The Latin kid with the skateboard and the unshaven face. And the dirt punk get up. He really looked like a catch. So said the chemicals I was studying, by way of digestion. The one I would eventually hook up with, live with, share knowledge of chemical reactions with. Last time, this year. The one who would eventually abuse me and throw half my belongings out the window, over misplaced jealousies. The one who would hold me hostage by cutting up his arms when I got caught trying to leave him.
Last time, this year? I really knew how to pick them.
He had taken the metal tops of Bic lighters. and clasped them all up and down the tore up black denim of his jacket. Poor-man studs. I called it creativity. My kind of guy…last year, this time. Guess who snatched up the last of the Famos Amos cookies, and continually sold the vending machine out of them, week after week? My punk Latin kid from LA. The one who I started dating for almost no other reason than aimless compulsion; and an affinity toward all things punk, recipes of chemical romance… and crap vending machine cookies.
In the meanwhile all that is required of us, is to keep that punk attitude @ level main street. Not flaunt it. People get the shit wrong. People don’t understand (punk). They need some help, probably. Punk isn’t insulting, until it’s insulted. Punk isn’t violent unless its backed up against a wall, facing a violent death by censorship and suppression. Parental controls gone control freak, sometimes. Afraid their kids might turn punk on them, no! There’s a local punk show at the bowling alley, don’t go! like skid row. Punk is so far from that, I swear. Punk is not drunk or distancing itself from the life. Punk is life!
Punk is life.
In your face, maybe but not necessarily. Defensively perhaps. But when embraced and believed in, every punk is a mother-loving gift to the culture. A shooting star across the international waters divide. A high def play in your mono nucleosis. A comicon chameleon. A standout from the crowd, with flavor. A vintage black on chalk white heat streets. A friend to the end, when you are lucky enough to have one.
I’m not trying to get anyone to find a rare flower. I just think folks should give a punk a break. Give a punk some bottle water, if you see one. At noon, under electric in bucktown, Chicago. You cannot miss us. The black on white dream. The hairstyle to die for. Rhinestone and leather on a curb. Not even smoking. And there when it counts, in the madness of main street, the punks come down from the wells of the stairs, to help set shit straight.
Ready to exacto knife the badness, the pseudo fake-ass pathetic sadness. So obvious and a sore sight, to be washed off the street. The punk takes it on. The punk got your back, maybe, if you at least try and understand. You won’t be sorry, unless you apologize. Some day you may even come to relate. Because all that is asked is that you just represent. That means be yourself in the most yourself of the sense. In a pure play fingerprint identification of compatriot kinda way. Let your people and mine know that we exist, and support ourselves in the realization that we are not alone, in the difficult reality of our minds.
Every change is painful. Every push gets pushed back hard, and yeah, the pushback itself must get pushed aside in a tai chi kinda way, using the energetics of the situation in a natural way so that the force of the truth is preserved. The flavor of the night is working class punk. Cause it requires great effort with little apparent return. But well worth working toward. And so greatly appreciated by those who have such character as those in common with that uncommon and dramatic and seemingly inappropriate flare, ie, those like us. And we recognize one another, one way or another. We cannot always call upon the courage we have, but we must try, again and again. Every change is painful. And what do we do in the streets is our business. Social media yearns for our currency.
We don’t have to celebrate our connection by way of tattoos or cranium collisions or non-furtive glances, but we will if we want. Cause we have nothing to hide. We will show our tits to it. We will throw a picnic in its honor. We will break out in song for it. We will be our own amplifiers. In the midst of whatever wave of rock and roll, trend, or currency. We are at once the life of the street and the death of the dying. And you can be, too. You can be, too.
But hey, this is all just my half-jaded half-faded, semisweet opinion. Love it or hate it or like it or not. Plus one it or flag it or share it to tumblr. It’s in our best pinterest. Manhandle it, juice it, and tear it apart. See how it ticks. Pawn it, for sure. Do what you want, and just do it, for real. Drop it like a bad habit and archive it now. Or ask yourself why, Katya? and who? when or how? Whatever you do, just do it, please do. So do it, please do. And thank you, sincerely, thank you. Thank you.
-Katya 08/13 – http://www.katyamills.com
We stayed in the Motel Seven Deluxe Suite, you know, the one with the hydrogen bed and the nitrous oxide satellite feed? We fastened one another into the zero def chambres, where we felt HBO and TellTime into the night. Tactile feedback chambers were all the new rage. Supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, all visuals. Transcended temporal limits. The future! Was it really with us? In accordance with the present. Uhh…wow?
Wicked! was the exclamation all over Boston, when MIT held an open house to showcase the event. Of course, two billion watched at home. Only five or six thousand bipeds actually crossed the Charles River. Most of those took the Redline. Some took the bus. A few trifling souls, actually swam and never made it. The river was being sanitized, but the project yet to completion. Not everyone apparently knew. The Boston Harbor was much cleaner. Chalk it up to universal solvent. The Harvard crew team sculled right into one of the gas filled corpses, the next day on the river. It hardly made the news. What with the breaking of the tactile chamber phenomenom. What with the not-so-far-fetched claims that our human undertaking had finally brought the two into alignment, present and future. Despite the predictably unwelcome intelligentsia criticism. Which came back across the dirty Charles in elastic and immediate response. Faster than an EMT to an heart-stopping event.
The problem, the small world of most educated braintrust informed, was that said invention professing temporal re-alignment, if not a hype (which many knew right away, probably was), occasioned the grave consequence of leaving the consumer with no apparent future. But this was all shuttered into the past. Our emotional scales of distress smoothed out over and into the world, like the skips of skipping stones, behind us. The braintrust was archived. We could only remember how we virtually cried our carbon tears into the deluxe thick wet darkness of the light. At the moment of passing of the longest virtual night. How the tomatoes rolled off of their vines, and planted themselves in West Hollywood sauce vats. Sloughing off their celebrity skins. Their seeds and juices bubbling up effervescently, acid-mannered offspring of the rich and the famous. We could see red, again. Without having to immediately experience the frightening momentum of our great cultural furies. A safe and projective identification was no longer impossible. Standing on the sidelines of the regular though tawdry self-mortification which comes of a reacting-out upon the fingered source.
So was the way of the world, in the past. The common tale of intentions, paving the paths to hell. Now hollow and insensate, paved over in the gloss of primary colors, dutifully lacquered by some diligent postmodern botomaton. The thread of today, diving into the embroidery of tomorrow. So much for the phrase; to beg, steal, or borrow.
K IS SILENT 