for Peach Bricks and roses.

I took my first breaths in a brick home.  the bricks were the color of peaches, the color of my hair as I took those first breaths, and that house was as long as our kitchen is today.

We had a door that has since been painted red, above two front steps where I sat with my neighbor friends and our little black cat, dressed in halloween costumes and witches hats. I don't remember winter there; Halloween and fall, sweet, sticky grapes and apples, green grass and sunshine are a part of that house.  but my memories are only warm.

In that little brick kitchen I burned myself on breakfast and in our tilted attic I remember a quilt, scrapped from violets and blues and some yellow, and it was thick.

An apple tree spilled over our fence and grape vines spilled through our neighbor's, whose brick was strawberry-colored and stood stacked into two square floors.  they had more steps than we did, but we never sat there-- our place was on the swings in the back, picking grapes and staying away from the dog that was tied under the sheetmetal we thought was a garage.

there was a water spicket that dripped into pebbles, and a hose nearby and in the summer we drenched and dried in the grass and the sunshine, and we chalked our outlines on the sidewalk and when we were brave we stayed a little closer to the dog.

Driving past that little brick home the neighbor friends are no longer there.  Neither is the dog or the chalk outlines and the grass hasn't seen our footprints since the twentieth century.  halloween doesn't look like those two front steps and the door is now rose red and fall isn't sticky like those grapes and it doesn't taste like our apple tree anymore --

but the sun was shining yesterday,
                                                and the bricks were still painted with peaches.

you hollowed me out with a plastic orange knife

pumpkin .

when you left me
there was nothing inside of me

i was all hollowed out.
you scooped out everything and left a hole
you hollowed me out then
were gone

like a jack o lantern
you hollowed me out
with a knife, a plastic carving tool, and a spoon
took out my insides
scraped out my heart
with everything attached and dropped it in a bowl and

it was all just play

you left me with a frozen, carved-out face
on the front porch
you left me Confused, breaking, broken, Hurting from the daggers
so that i could hardly breathe
i thought i had punctured a lung.
i would have cried but i couldn't
until later
then i couldn't stop.
you left me,
something that could only rot

you lit a candle and put it inside
i had let you in
and then you laughed at the flames
and at the crudely-cut face
and put the dunce cap on my head
and went on your way

i stayed and the candle cooked me from the inside

the heat burned my chest and my skin was boiling and i was FEVER
i was
burned
melted on the inside
from the inside out, from the heat and the boiling wax
       (rotted)
and i shriveled
and the cap fell into my hollowed-out self
and I was filled with smoke

and then the flames went out
and I was left in the dark
and it got cold.






everett mills

love love love

 Love, love, love.

I'm in love with open spaces.
I'm in love with the
        270750 miles on the car. With barbed wire fences that protect the road from all of the cows around us, because really I don't love cows.
                                But I love the fences that go on forever, and I love the mesas and the hills whose sillouettes at sundown look like fortresses over the skyline of the nothingness; of the cows, and the barbed wire fences, and the grass and sagebrush and the abandoned volkswagon hippy van thats parked in the field of cows and grass.

I'm in love with lines, the ones that I see as I sit driving in my car.  The lines of trees along the road,
the lines of the mountains above the line of hills
above the lines of houses.
the lines of the ballfields I pass, of the sidewalks and of the fence along the walk, like the one covered in vines that touch the sidewalk and spill into the path of the line of kids on scooters, one on a bike.

I'm in love with the "memories" that I'm building now, that I know will someday be important to me and maybe even last for a long time. I'm in love with the fact that even though I don't appreciate them now I will someday, because memories work like that, and I'm in love with memories.

I'm in love with a person who talked to me for an hour about spiders:
who told me that jumping spiders are fuzzy and cute, and have two eyes like ours and so are more relatable to us than other spiders are, and that they are very
responsive
and will follow the sound of your voice with their two big eyes, and that they're friendly
and you can pick them up and hold them and they won't ever bite.
And so I learned that it doesn't matter what you love--love is love, and even if
you love a spider thats ok, because people will still love you for it.

and there are so many good people its hard not to love them-- not to love someone, not to love people, maybe its even impossible to not love.
your heart would stop beating because love is what your heart needs, right?
And when your heart is broken it can't pump the blood through your body, and it can't get yourself the oxygen your body needs, and thats when you die.  People need love, to stay alive.  People need other people, to keep their heart pumping that must-have oxygen through them.  I would say that love is what your heart pumps through your body, its what keeps you breathing and living.

even if all you love is a spider, its a start.

I'm in love with rain, even though I've never danced in it.

 And maybe I've never danced in the rain because people love me whether I've done it or not.

I'm in love with the feeling I get that makes me feel like  

Open Spaces. 

the feeling of so much space and as much sky, with just a road down the middle of it all.  Open spaces that make me feel like my mind is just as open and just as wide and welcoming,                          
                          like my limits are on the other side of the hemisphere,
like there's so much freedom we could pass it around
               and there's so much space we should put the wild horses right there and let them run and live forever.

I'm in love with the sky, desperately.  With the nothingness
that exists above my head and is full of color
                                                              and clouds,
that extends forever around this sphere we live on and that keeps going once it leaves earth, maybe forever and ever.
I'm in love with the light in the sky that turns color like a bottle with layers of colored sand, arranged into patterns.
The sky that sometimes is a Dreamworks cloudscape and sometimes
like an upside-down ocean,
with waves and ruffles of color and blue.

I'm in love with that blue stuff we call oxygen that we can't see and that doesn't have a color, but that looks beautiful above our heads and with the sun.

I'm in love. I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love
and I'm still working on falling in love with a boy, because i've never done that.
   But i'm in love with a lot and I think thats a great start, because who really needs a boy when you've got the sky and spiders, 
and open spaces with fences and memories and rain.
Unless that boy loved all those things too, and me just as much.

I guess love is love, no matter what its for.

Everett Mills

I'm not hungry tomorrow

When did everything stop being simple?  Things have to change, i suppose, but I never noticed them getting complex until i looked back and wondered where first grade went, and where freeze tag at recess went, and when i found the tooth fairy's tooth collection in my mom's drawer and started staying up late to help the easter bunny, and when i could no longer order kids meals at nice restaurants without feeling embarrassed.  

And since then things just haven't been so simple.  I've had to put on the big-kid screen and look at everything skeptically, and then i had to put on the grown-up glasses and things have just gotten foggier ever since.  What would it be like to take off these glasses and see clearly?  I'm worried that my vision has adjusted and if i take them off I'll be so used to being grown-up that I can't see things clearly, like I could as a kid. Really I'm worried that I'm growing up for good. I never was in neverland but I always figured I would never be a grown-up.

Really I want to see clearly.  

To be able to think what a friend of mine said to me, one who's a long way off from any kind of vision-enhancers. 

"your teacher should talk to my teacher about take-home homework.  I never have any take home homework."

kids are gifted, and if people say we're getting more lazy and less gifted as a species, maybe we should just try backward-development because really our perceptions seem much too complex, and could only improve with simplification.

And you know when something is so true it stops your breath?  i wonder when that started happening to me, because kids accept truth as they see it and keep on breathing.  

can you still say 

"I'm not hungry tomorrow" 

when you don't want to make your sack lunch for school the next day, and have life just be that simple? 

But people say that if everyone saw things simply there would be a lot more problems.  i wonder if instead there would just be more honesty and a more to learn from, and a lot more happy people.

just thinking,
Everett Mills

I'm still not sure this means i'm human

I would pinch myself but I'm still not sure that would mean I'm human.
I would assume that even a machine could feel pain, if you unplugged it too often or overloaded that poor bunch of metal.
I would state as a fact that animals feel pain the same as any human, assuming thats what I am.

     and so I concluded that my feeling pain is a terrible indicator of humanity.
     I won't pinch myself today.

But luckily, there are easier ways.
easier ways to feel pain
easier ways to explain
          that maybe I'm a real Intelligence,
that maybe I'm a real human
like the kind I assume you all are.

there's a voice in my head that sounds like an echo
but a human echo
and it tells me what to do
and what i did
and why it was wrong.

theres a skip in my step and I'm skipping through  clouds
and then I trip
and i fall from Cloud 9 to the dust of the earth where i live.

I sing loud and I don't think I care if my voice cracks or if I'm out of tune
but no one can hear
its not a real song
and at the end of the day i don't think i was ever really singing.

I drift in my thoughts and I stare at the sky and I mow the lawn and I go to school and i
fight
I yell
i Sing,
i dream and I
wonder
and i hope
eat drink sleep
fall,
grow wise and
grow tall
disappoint
i'm disjointed sometimes
i cry
fly
play
write.

and i wonder if I'm really human?
You would think that I am.
that these indicators can't be wrong
that my made-up song
that my fall
that my mind
that my thoughts
and these things
are a guarantee

you'd think that my skin and the color of my blood,
and the experiences of every day, day after day, for the past
Seventeen years have proved that I am in fact
Human.

In fact, I'd almost convinced myself,
I'd almost convinced everybody else,
and I'd almost convinced humanity that I was one of its kind,
whatever kind that is,
whatever humanity means,
I was almost convinced I was it.

until they asked me,
and I answered.

Where's that chip, the one in your chest, and where're your wires?

what's that?
i said, and said
goodbye to my hope of humanity.

i've only got a heart.

everett mills

The one sure indicator that the world is at its end

Have you considered your shadow recently?

take a look.
Notice that your shadow is your reverse;
your reflection, but in gray.

Have you realized that there is a world of reverse everywhere? that for every action there is an opposite, shaded one that occurs in shadow?
Imagine the world that runs in reverse, full of shadows of our life.
Reflections on the pavement.
Imagine that everything is done twice; one with sound and the other done the same, but detached from the noise-making part of the world.
part of a different world.

and then theres my own personal shadow.
it follows me everywhere. I know because I've been watching it.
I wonder, what would it be like to not have one?
to look down or to the side and not have it even occur to me that I'm missing something,
that there's a part of me, a reflection,
that's been misplaced.
mine is like a checkerboard of grays. I sometimes like to think that I'm in control,
that I dictate its path, but in truth I have no power over this thing I call my shadow.
It follows me.

There is a reverse world thats attached at the soles of our feet.
A shadow-world, a reflection of our world;
and its always there, always following,
too close,
too fast for us to catch their moments of freedom.

its not hard to imagine that we're being followed.
that the something that is shadowing us is not not just an absence of light.
that the world that begins at our feet, at the cars tires, at at the places where we make
contact.
is getting closer.

When the shadows disappear into the mass of shadows, of reflected world.
of shades that covers us in what we like to call night.
Then, where are the shadows? where do they go?

if there is one sure indicator that the world is at its end,
that our world will stop
that the world is beyond us and out of human hands, (though i think it will be in hands still)

                       i think the shaded thing that follows me wont be following any longer.

heres to hoping we're on good terms.

Everett Mills

words on a string

                                    “I can’t freakin think of what to write. This is too hard.” 

Thank you, fellow student, for the inspiration.                

                   really. 

It brought a dream, a vision of reality. I’ll paint it for you;

play the words, 

pray for truth, 

write it blunt,

shut the stupid voice in your brain and write what comes, its easy

just like poetry. 

Just

Write. 

Hook a string from your fingers to your thinking, lift the string and watch the fingers type, up and down, back and forth.

Its an instinct, you just need some training; fingers don’t

speak often—sometimes you need practice. So if it takes some time,

If it takes some practice.

Don’t worry,

It will come,

Your soul just needs to work your fingers into shape.

And maybe your thoughts just a little bit too.

And your courage,

But that part’s easy. 

It comes just like poetry,

Tugged from your thoughts by that string around your tongue,

By that string knotted to your heart,

and by the string that’s working your fingers up and down, back and forth.

Across the keyboard.

Just.

Words will come.  They always do. 

keep writing.

everett Mills

who's a Crayon

would you say I'm the kind of crayon with the wrapper peeled off or the one that looks straight from the box?  Am I dandelion or magenta? would you scribble me hard until you rip the page, or would I be a crayon that is only pressed gently because you are afraid to color outside the lines?

would you feel comfortable using me to color in your house? or just your sidewalk?

do I look like a fine, artist's brush? or a piece of chalk found in the pile under the desk?

I would answer the same for you, but frankly you look nothing like a crayon to me.

actually,
You
look like
a
masterpiece.

I've chosen not to label you
as any certain kind of crayon
you look like a person
to me.

If you consider yourself a certain color
I'm sorry
maybe I'll realize it soon
but today when I saw you
I saw a rainbow.

Maybe you're a fresh
clean
out-of-the-box
kind,
but I didn't notice.
and maybe you've had your wrapper peeled off
in strips bit by bit
and you've been colored on your side
to fill in a large area of sky.
and I saw that.

I also saw the picture you made
and I thought it was beautiful
but I couldn't tell what kind of crayon
colored it
I just saw something beautiful
and thought

Wow. Crayons are cool.

we should use them more often.

make It beautiful, 

Everett Mills