whip

the barista and i have a moment. Lavazza café. hotel lobby. she can see i can see she’s not thrilled to be working over the holidays and i feel for her. all around us people are playing. a few of them winning a lot of them drinking some of them smoking. most of them losing. she asks me again. changes my heart on it. push the valve. soft top my mocha with whip

#katyamills

of the sun

across from the Bellagio

we watched the street performers

and the fountains a script of dances

night mistaken for day

the Cirque De Soleil

#katyamills

to Vegas

out in the Mojave and halfway to Barstow

i was feeling mighty lonely

flirtin with the speed limit when

Loretta Lynn started singin 

her heart out 

i stopped for some coffee 

gave my phone to a pack of coyotes

then rolled my happy ass east 

carefree as a tumbleweed

headway into the sun

#katyamills

star lost in space

Vegas was nothing like advertised

a stitch in the fabric and rather small

a star lost in space

the desert itself was bold

the canyons made the silence 

loud

#katyamills

biggest little city

touched by the gods

encircled by sierra peaks

Reno is some half century old Vegas

pawnshops and desperate cowboys

who lost they hats but found

they girls under the grand 

marquee

bird of vegas

the bird sung so well they gave her a stint in Vegas

a symphony orchestra a platinum 

bar dome the finest raw 

foods. weekends find her perched 

high in pecking order over raw chia pumpkin seed 

blends drinking oat milk throat coat 

tea couldn’t spot her tail feathers 

in a line up   #katyamills

lost ina video

He was an older man, single and retired and replete with cash, dating a woman he knew through her employment at a casino he frequented. He was forever dysconnected to a timeless place of artificial light and sound. He committed an atrocity, an even several hundred yards detached from the crime scene. He was once flesh and blood but got lost ina video poker game that never ended, and whatever connect he had to reality if any, was severed. Nobody can understand how this can happen to a man, and few will ever forgive him. His father was a known criminal and he was born into a family on the run. This cannot account for his psychotic break. He left behind him a timeless place of artificial light and sound. And thousands upon hundred thousands of broken hearts.

yummy gummy vitamins

My heart feels gummy like vitamins, flexible like you could push on it with the heel of your hand and it would bounce back so you knew i was still young to the faint drip of baseball through the radio in October, the Royals were unbelievably good again and I had been having a lot of contact. I guess I am still young. But I don’t see much of children anymore. I think they are a different kind of young, up to ten, still dreaming of the past lives while flying through the air, pendulums on swings. You could push on them with the heel of your hand and they would bounce back. God forbid they might fall from great heights, they would walk away unharmed, all cartilage, saved by being unformed. Not believing in death yet, wondering about the new life. Which adult was gonna boss them around next. That sorta thing… Kansas City was like a waystation back when the most important thing in the world was the goddam railroad and all those guys like Leland Stanford who got rich by it. Even my family lived there, generations ago, and they say fifty or sixty years ago it was what Vegas is now. Maybe I know too much. I go blank in the eyes when I remember ten years old, the pendulum, swinging, believing I was immortal. Really sorry to see the adults go, why cannot they live forever, too? Whose gonna boss me around then? I’m not gonna do my chores. I’m just gonna keep kicking my legs up and out to the sky. Why would I stop? I’m not on any clock, my heart is full of vitamins and I have been having a lot of contact. You can push me around. I won’t fall and even when I do, it won’t hurt. You can’t hurt me unless I let you. Come, let’s fall in love. We can live and love and last forever.