tugging on a lamppost
atop a flight of stairs
by a blade they lost
they strength
waylaid
not without a fight
began to fade
between the teeth the skin
the beat it slows
to fin and many full
with sorrow
hearts
#katyamills
tugging on a lamppost
atop a flight of stairs
by a blade they lost
they strength
waylaid
not without a fight
began to fade
between the teeth the skin
the beat it slows
to fin and many full
with sorrow
hearts
#katyamills
he comes to you unafraid
dyslexic softly stabbing
wood all day with a
blade
humming
like a bird to feed
plants hanging around
awhile. dripping with smile
Childish. he dips into you
spellbound. a man he
gets his fill and
gone
you
spellbound
#katyamills
we took some shots you
caught me in transition on
a silver disc. years later we
met for dinner. i was lost
a cat back up hurt and poor
you gave a royal fanfare i
found out you’re gone by
internet. i will never forget you
my god of the sea and
to the sea you return
#katyamills
Don Hadlock, co-founder of PTI: the Process Therapy Institute in San Jose, passed away in January this year @ 77 years old. I wanted to tribute him as a leader and teacher and mentor and all around wonderful human being. I was blessed to encounter him within a year long Group Process Therapy series while I was enrolled as a Master’s level student in Holistic Counseling at JFK University in Campbell, CA. He and his wife Carol founded PTI 40 years ago, he said, after having had a revelation while driving through the Santa Cruz mountains about the difference between content and process. Content (in the context of therapy) is the words a client speaks. Process is what they are doing while they are speaking; essentially, any other ways they may be communicating through their behavior. Maybe they are biting their lip or laughing when they mean to cry. There is a wealth of information which may be overlooked by talk therapy focused on content. By holding space for and calling attention to process, one can guide someone through present-moment interventions, deepen the therapeutic alliance and cultivate both self and ego awareness. Process therapy is also trauma-informed. The ‘pain body’ as Tolle refers to it, encompasses how we hold our history of trauma in our body, which naturally extends to how we relate to the world: ourselves, our friends, family, and community. Mr. Hadlock taught us how to help a client interface the pain body from a gentle and invitational spirit. I am indebted to him. I believe my ability as a psychotherapist to create space and facilitate process and group process in my clinical practice, sources from many of his teachings. I think of him often in my work and I miss him.
The #metoo movement
a freight train out of Hollywood LA
on a runaway
watch out
she’s rolling down rails
touch the iron
feel her coming
for you
You let me stay
with you
one night
a moment’s notice
we were friends
our lives derelict
unusual
the music
the midnight
oil
bands like us
cannot make it
no more
traded street level
stories
left out
again. in the sunlight
soon to be
exposed
before dawn
you were kicking
back. i was several back
packs deep to and from
Magnolia street
several unsavory characters
wanted a piece
of me they
could not catch
me
thank god
for this
bicycle…
Cold, cold, the rain when you got a million fans and you’re gettin older and life is painful, seems it always hurts as god is your witness. Cold, cold the rain as you set your jet on target for the sun. I saw you there, once, dressed in black and white. Caught in the electrical storm, can-not-rise-a-bove-the-pur-ple-rain. The pills make it a little easier and won’t take you down, no, nothing can. Nobody can tell you what to do, your music heralded all around the world and god has blessed you, we held you here on high. Cold, cold the rain and you gave away the umbrella. You always liked it raw. Any stage any auditorium any stadium, the people they lined up for you. Cold, cold the rain falls in Minnesota. You gave us hope and power and free-dom-to-cre-ate-our-loving-selves. You gave me power and hope. Cold, cold the rain, the purple rain, tonight it falls for you. – 2 Prince. love KatYa
The photo caught her in black and white. 1984. Her hair all chopped off, like her stylist relegated the cut to a blind man with a chip on his shoulder. Or more than likely she cut it herself. Looked pretty good, to all punks everywhere. And this punk here.
She was an experimentalist. She was an inspiration to many writers anywhere. And this punk here. She took her freedom by the you know what, and shook it. That’s how experimental writers like it: shaken. And stirred. She was much more than any polaroid could capture. She was higher than your average .jpg image IQ. Americans anywhere could celebrate her, and did. And this American here.
How do you celebrate a great and enduring writer, postmortem? Hopefully the same way you celebrated her in the half-century of her life, if you were lucky to know of her, then. You read her shit! You read her alone, by candlelight. You read her before you go to bed, and after you wake up. You read her between sunset and sunrise. And then between sunrise and set. You read her in the backyard with the dogs. On the couch with the cats. Aloud with friends. In your bookclubs. In your cafes and open mic venues. In your classrooms.
You cannot wait to read her, if you’re anything like this one here. You thirst for her kinda message. Just like you thirst for your own fucking freedom. Visions of fireworks and red and white blues. Visions of what has been ours for centuries now, thanks to a bunch of dudes wearing wigs in Pennsylvania. Furrowing their brows in their graves, at the crack in the great and enduring liberty bell.
We cannot wait for our freedom. Not then, not now, not ever. This is the quality I think most strangers to this land find so magical about us Americans. We will stop for nothing, for our freedom. The Mexican-Americans and Latinos in our cities are rising to majority status in population. You can take off the hyphen. These are Americans now. You think the border dogs and barbed wire stopped them? Nah. Think again! They are like us.
Like this one here, born red hot aquarius on a cold winter day, in Hartford, Connecticut. Forty years breathing. Forty sheets to a gale force wind, fastened with all our might to hold the mainsail in place. So the wind can come up under and uplift me and you. Comes out from under us and into the sail. Natural born energies harnessed for a moment. To take us out through heavy, rolling seas and foam, over the course of each coffee-powered suntanned ragged weathered, leatherbound day. From the opening to the bookend. Known in the fix of an veteran stare, a survivor’s buddha half-smile, thereafter in the calm radiating through the cove where we find ourselves. At the end of the day.