blanco y

grew up white ina world 

where nobody hurt you like 

you hurt yourself where if you

got any color and spirit you 

got beat down now how can it be 

any wonder in the world 

today white is unpopular 

distrusted despised? 

#katyamills

white metal rabbit

survive and cast shadow (white metal rabbit)

There’s no world of all smiles, unless invented. In the real world we have rabbits we grab by the ears and make lucky feet for a keychain. We stuff them in hats and make them of chocolate. The white ones we want for a symbol of purity, and photograph them next to an egg.

Some of us tune our instruments to metal, find the harmonics, amplify them and get bent. I wanted to be one of those, but I didn’t have an amplifier or an instrument or a room or a friend. I prayed to god for a fireplace where I could burn for you. I would. I had become inflexible like the white metal rabbits and within the realm of being bent out of shape.

I was far from worn thin with love. I followed ideas tangentially to distant and unrelated ends… my younger self had grown old and retired. Typically far from inspired. I must have committed some literary felony, for soon I could no longer read. I had a curious relationship with speed. It’s a crime to torture a soul with words made from sounds of a cacophonous hole.

The ground I laid where I buried myself, the part of myself that was offensive. Myself who had been distasteful, rebellious, irreverent, and smart. My shadow now missing, a lack in the heart. The part that was human and fell down a lot. The part that refused to connect all the dots.

This is what i offer you, I told myself, dying. The black sheep’s fleece. To warm you like Kentucky’s finest. The past? no worries, shes fallen behind us. I urge you get waxy, let flow… the degenerate benevolence of liquid smooth language. One spirit, survived anguish so deep it near killed you.

I languished well near obscurity, until i found a little peace in letting go, to take with me down that long hall back home, the one without shadows or light. Water, laughter, a kind word, awaited me. Even prayer would be welcome there. These words ahead of me are here to be written. To describe all our likeness in ways and intangibles, to know with a knowing that cannot be described.

If you know what i mean, if you’ re grateful like I am, if you’ve survived and cast shadow…then go ahead and read these words I have trained to be and be still. May they bring you all out like flowers by the sun. I need your devious smile, your shadow, your light. Before the rabbit turns metal, then white.    – KatYa, 2017

rock out the red and white blues

Wanna really soak  up our red and white blues?

No ifs ands or buts?

Wanna love like you never loved before? Then we gotta take it now, as is!  Shaken and stirred, with cracks in it, explosive in the sky tonight. Even in the dry heat of Sacramento, thirty miles from where our ancestors once rushed for gold, for the freedom wealth bestows. Celebrate the land we have inherited! Ring church bells and show our true colors, all the same.  We gotta locate ourselves on the map, and rock out from the self-referential. Bass heavy; we don’t need no trouble from the treble. Rock out so hard, anyone can hear you.  Poor Canada’s getting rocked tonight on the border. Canada, overtaken with our red and white blues.  Sound waves. And the poor fish on the shelf , in the three touched seas: Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico. The salmon heading home, like we must as well, to the place of our personal and collective birth.

We can celebrate, the same, as those who came before us. We can set the precedent for what is to follow. But it has to be today, the defragmentation. Don’t put it off any longer, if you can. Just do the best you can! Impart upon our children that quality so magical and worshipped overseas, those freedoms people climb over one another and stampede and bum rush our stage for! The mosh pit of American lifestyle will not be subject to litigation! The tangible running up against ourselves is the only way for freedom. It cannot be prosecuted. It cannot be tamed! On the formerly solid now slightly cracked and bruised foundation of capital that got us here. Our foundation keeps us. But of course, it will always have cracks in it, that will be exploited by the earth when it quakes. But American freedoms, like mother nature, are a force beyond any judicial resolution. Not to punk justice. Just to represent what is true, though unfair!

We are the same, but we must honor the truth. There are great divides between us. The division of ethnicities, long since established and still enduring. The feeling we feel when we meet someone we never met, yet feel something deeper than the acquaintance. Something predisposed. Something heavy, yet intangible.  We can only be the same if we honor the truth of our differences. The native Americans, the tribes,  are always separate from us. We are not the same. Our ancestors settled the land in a predominantly violent and unsettling fashion. We cannot forget.  If we want to be free to celebrate what we have in common, we must first come at one another eye to eye, fingerprint to fingerprint. We can only connect from the longitude, the latitude, the experiential essential of confronting the divine at the crossing. Where converge the distinction of free spirits, the generosity of real attitude.

Take your punk out the trunk and display it for one another. Only then can we share our red and white blues. Something wonderful. Something source. Confrontational. Conversational. Electric! Divine. An equal sharp and undying thirst for the wild brand of freedom that pushes all boundaries out to infinity. Limitless freedom.  The kind the flying Wallendas know when they tightrope a quarter mile canyon, sanctioned by the Navajo tribe. This is the pure kind of real, definitely punk, red and white blues, we share. Where we get hot rocked by the us in the USA.

Sure, we will have our differences, we will partition and crack up and wikileak and fissure and branch arterial out to the very capillaries. But the blood returns home venously,  in the veins. Returns home to the heart that we share. The wild heart that risks everything, just to have it all. No borders can stop it. No barbed wire can hold it back. Pumping red white and blues out into the twenty-first, mother-loving, century. Meet you there. In the light. Wearing black. Painting red and blue over white.

Katya W. Mills  katyamills.com 07/13 – Daughter of the American Revolution

to those who are true and not afraid

Yes, this is all i can tell you. we loved one another for a very long time, okay. the flowers you braided in my hair i then pressed close to my heart, petal by petal, colors bleeding into my bloodstream, then out my pores and touching you touching me.

you carried me some times, part of the way. this was my path in yours. we could fight it, or we could like it. Or we could try to like it or love one another and our selves through it, embrace it, take it, appreciate it, hold it in our hands and hold it up to the light, let it reflect in the light. Absorb the light and take notice of the shadows also where they recessed. how they came over and dampened the heat of the white light, softened the potency…

The lines in our skins, the patterns, the spirals, the curve that our eyes traced and followed, lost and found, dipped into and cooled, rose out and ascended with our spirits to the open air. The boys who showed love all the time on front street. some curious wondering. most admiring. nice and sweet. strangers and how we meet.  and we made an organic whole. the wholeness we saw, they saw and reflected back to us. well that would bring on smiles. that would last, remember? for a little while at least.

we were really of the same kind, the same blood. This would only matter if we cared to come in line and believe in it, the world, in us, our family, in self, our selves. This seemed to me, the youngest, another chance for that to die for kind of attention. Received when i was not wanting or needing something impossible for you to give. Because this is true. That we are our most formidable challenges. This i would risk it all on. The whole house I do not own. The health i still possess, on a youth level. A phsyiological level.

The psychology is only so prominent as our experiences. The heavy traumas are fresh and remembered in my daily life, i cannot help how they run. They run sometimes close to the surface like salmon running home. The subtle ones are deep running, like they do not move at all, my eyes might suggest. Nothing going on down there, just peaceful easy subcurrent substorm lethargy of egg guarding and backward pull of crayfish tailspins. Yes, these are subdued or so seem. But you and I we have together swum the waters from top to tail. We have gone with, against, and stubbornly for the sake of love and love lost… i can say embedded in my heart, i often most did so unremitting and unfashionable. not so pretty, and without fail.

Well at our best we were grace. Full of grace. Inspired by our mothers. Mom, i love the gift she gave me in grace.  They had more to give, our moms, they could now but they refuse to part with their wisdom. Why? Were the transgressions of our youth so devastating to cause the divide? To deny us these wonderful blessings? Failure to give with the not knowing of outcome or consequence or even the course of the ride through to the outcome.  We have lost their expectations.  We are no longer predictable in any way.

Who will ever come to familiarity with the methods of survival in a relationship which manifested seven years of sincere absence? Who will not bleed by this Conscious impact? Who will feel the violence of this horrible Truth through omission? Rendered what was once a great and savory fullness of love and life and laughter and tears, to some empty background behind form, some staged back blender. The efforts to blend are lost even, as may be the efforts toward translation, communication so long lost. Why?

We long ago stopped asking …

we long ago lost the towns that sheltered us, the homes receding, the wood thinning, the blankets smothering, the smiles insincere, the feeling when the one who made you cannot forgive you. Digging subconsciously. Mining for the passion that once sustained the momentum you all started, when you contribute to creation.

Long before february first, nineteen seventy-three… even before my brother was born… before june, nineteen seventy….   before my love she came to be, before  may…. What happened to that love? All we feel today… is the

shy light, 2011 by Katya

absence.