When you need a reason to be happy

Smile. 

Just because. 

Even when it's hard to find a reason. 

Smile because someone somewhere is in love, because mothers somewhere are tucking in their children, because somewhere a little girl is dancing in the rain. 
Smile because of the little boys playing dress-up, smile for the stranger who changed your flat, 
smile for the man playing cello with his eyes closed. 

Smile for the rose smell of Sunday afternoon years ago. 

Smile for grandma who dresses weird and still loves you. 
Smile because of sand castles and sea shells, smile because there are children with dimples holding sidewalk chalk. 

Smile because you ran through the sprinklers every summer, 
smile for meeting Cinderella and 
smile for the smell of grass and those moonlit nights on the trampoline

Smile because tomorrow waking up might be easy, smile now for the rain-torn storms and the rainbows, smile because your crying hurts, smile and pretend. Smile darling, please. 

Smile for your children. Smile for the day you lost a tooth at school, for story time with daddy, for Christmas eve and the scent of peppermint. Grin for little brothers and older brothers making jokes, chuckle at wrestling with dad, look up into starlight and feel the world is beautiful

Honey don't hold it all down. Don't grit your teeth forever 

open your eyes through the tears and taste the salt, think of beach days in the past and sunsets in the future and cry your fears away, but smile

I'll show you reasons for laughter.

If you don't remember the reasons to smile

Let me be one,

and lets start right here with "hello

You look like you need a hug"

I'll hold you and

Lets sit awhile and Reminisce

Over hot chocolate and roses.

everett mills.

Sweeet Dreams

we are

for nights when the moon is gold

swings above our houses

Like some great alien spying on earth life.

As if they didn't know how to hold hands and midnight bike 

in all of the rest of the cosmos

so they were watching just us

the two of us

learning how.

 

Everett Mills

unpublished

I've decided to do something original and publish all of my drafts.
Because I didn't publish anything for a long time and because I have as many drafts as published posts.  And because this relates to our WEEKLY PROMPT in an indirect way, and because I want to be brave, and mostly because I Just Feel Like It.

these were my drafts. more will be coming.


October 26, 2014
10/26/14

I wonder if I'll ever  miss the empty spaces.

everyone is cold.
Everyone is scared.

your faults are only what you have control over.
your complexion is not a fault; your family situation is not a fault,
so don't apologize.

Half of skiing is confidence.
Half of life, too. at least.

Right now I want to write.  What does it say that I would rather do this than anything else?  That I stay up until midnight writing posts that I may not ever publish?

i stay up until midnight writing posts that I'll probably never publish because I'm paranoid I'll forget my thoughts.  that i'll forget

         something.

and thinking words just isn't the same as writing it down, in a place where you, dear reader, can touch it. As if i care if you can touch it, i just want to MESS WITH your brain, play around with your heart because i'm dealing with words and yes They CAN mess with your heart, and i want to make you THINK and make ME think and let all of the junk and the thoughts and the turmoil and the peace go somewhere other than trapped inside of me.  Oh man, it feels so nice when its lifted off your heart. I just want to put it somewhere else, and if it touches you then thats just frees up my heart a little more.

But really, i sometimes think what does it matter if i write a brilliant post if no one else sees it, because if they don't they're just my thoughts and I've got those anyway, i don't need a hard copy.
                and so really I write for you.

everett mills

November 18, 2014
11/18/14

I really kind of don't care anymore.  for keeping secrets at least.
Maybe I just don't care for hiding?
My brother behind me doesn't worry me so much, because if he reads my blog I am I'm still alive, and so is he and you.

Because when I closed my mind it was to silence.

There was a boy.  His name I don't remember, and maybe it was Eduardo but he was ten years old.
The women who was Eduardo's mother cleaned the building. She wore an apron and unlocked cupboards and prepared meals and organized.


I want to paint my soul.

I want to paint a lot of things.
like how I'm feeling right now.  Like why it didn't work, i want to paint the sound of my running shoes that let in water as they pound the sidewalk by starlight.  I want to paint the gloves that I gave away. the gloves that meant something to me and that i gave to someone who meant nothing to me, because he was cold.  Because he was a salesman from Georgia and an orphan and his hands were cold, and my mom usually doesn't listen to salesmen but she listened to him.

I hate the cold.

I want you to listen to me.  I'm still not sure who I am, and I haven't learned how to paint my soul quite yet, and we don't know each other but I'm tired of living alone.  Life alone should not exist,  you and me lets be friends and just the way Thoreau went into the woods to live authentic, lets be real. Lets go somewhere and live for nature, for human's nature of overcoming. I don't care if you tell me your problems, I don't care if you have problems, are you alive?  then lets go to this place we call living and grow up some and maybe even be friendly, maybe be brave, maybe.


my soul hasn't been painted yet but chances are you can't paint a soul either and I don't want to try until we've slept in pillow forts and played cowboy and indian and maybe broken each other's toys. maybe we can freeze water balloons and throw them into the road.

my mom also gave that boy from Georgia a coat.
the ten year-old kid, he watched me draw between tears for a solid hour-and-a-half.
and I've given up painting, for now.

A collection of thoughts doesn't need to have meaning.  thats good, I have none.

everett mills.


October 30, 2014
10/30/14

death.  death. death.  if you say it like that it sounds so heavy.  like its got a ring to it, but the kind of ring from a gong in the Himalayas in a night storm.
Death.  or if you say it that way you could think its something happy, something exciting  and light.
Unless you said it a different way than I did.
Death is too heavy to talk about right now and too heavy to talk about PERIOD.
(except for when its real) (like maybe now) (for all of us) (we're all going to die) (maybe soon, maybe not)  (but SHHHH nobody's supposed to know that yet)  (its a surprise) (like the surprise birthday party i'm planning for you) (Spoiler Alert: yes its planned, the party and death) And I'm tired of pressing shift+9 and shift+0 and so I'm done with the parenthesis and the hush-hush because YES death is real and yes it sucks and yes I'm sorry you had to go through it, would you do it again?  Do you like where it spit you out?  And if i told you that death is really all right, that its not real how would you look back at me?  Because any way you look back at me would be right.  You would be right.  I don't know what death is for us humans.  I don't know how it works and I don't want to think so much about it.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ THIS BECAUSE I THINK I'M FINALLY WRITING THIS FOR MYSELF

it doesn't matter what you think, but for some reason it does.  People beat death all the time.  Death is just a curtain, that's what Sirius Black discovered.  Just a curtain, and then he was gone.  

Death is when you left, they told eachother.

death was his crying,  the little boy who would never see Daddy again and he didn't know WHY and maybe he didn't care why he just wanted him back

death was what broke the grown woman who worked in the building and rode the bus and wore shoes and a dress and looked nice everyday and smiled until the day you didn't see her at all.

death is what gave my arms and legs and the small of my back goosebumps just now, unless that was only the cold, but they're friends, is what people say.

unless death isn't so evil and we're just so caught up in being human that it "is."  yeah its rough, really rough, but so is life.  life and death, they're the same thing, and dying just means your living starts over.  

I want to believe something less dark.  I believe that death means you go to heaven, and then you come back and help the people who miss you.  I believe that death 

death is like an old shoebox.  you never know what you'll find inside but it always smells foul.

death.  oh man.  I don't want to write about you.  you realize everyone hates you and still you keep coming for more?  or is it really your fault that you're stuck with the job.

I'm tired of depressing, life is too short to live in the dark all the time.  

and i think i finally realized why the sad things connect us more: it's because darkness has an edge.  happiness doesn't. 

Edges I don't like.  They're there to be fallen off of, jumped over, avoided, sharpened, I don't want that so I'm done with darkness. I don't like edges at all and I'm in no mood to fall in, so I'm stepping away from it now.

I've never been afraid of death, mine at least.  I'm not afraid of my death, but I really don't want to go there yet.  Life is too full and there's so much I'm looking forward to.  Like sleep tonight.



.....................I've got so many unpublished posts its getting intimidating to look at the list. I've really got to change that.  And I'm done with spilling all the sad thoughts I've ever had.

If you're reading this you deserve better.

Everett Mills.



more drafts coming.
this feels weird.
(this feels like reading through a journal)

-ADT, Everett Mills

the Why

we all need a reason to write

I'm not an inner city kid, I'm the furthest thing from it
And I can't hate-fight like
can't look like look after myself or
fear, thief like, 
i have never frozen, starved, gratified 
taken the night trains nowhere to home
lived
the way you have and haven't 
But

your face was louder than anatomy

louder than all the structure my pencil traced

louder than my heart could hear

and so i didn't listen 

I didn't.

Didn't see the thoughts eyes carried to me, 

the white washed walls

the breathing of the hard fear framed into what you couldn't call home

couldn't you hear my thoughts, of your snapshots,
the shots on that mantle
taken in leisure
mug shots
prison decor
the scaffolds were drawn in your nightmares.

your face sounds like graffiti

i can hear the cans

smell the fumes

taste the grit and the night's street-darklight

and 

you were always 

too much

for 

me

to smile.

why

why couldn't

you break apart in my arms

you lost homage

you lost

sight

sound

the touch of humanity

tried to reclaim it in the guitar strings your fingers bled to

become

this is reality

this is not your sin

not your soul

forget your fault because

this is not yours

and the spray cans smell like your hair but

you keep saying

"possibility"

"possibility"

we were south of main street but no one knew

i'm telling reality

to shut up now,

because your life is louder than the fires at our backdoor

I cant hear a thing.

lightning only strikes once  Cram it sense, you're anything but common

and terror reports only 12 dead from the storm.

Its like the world is telling us that broken things are easier to understand

we must be really dense or else smoking simplicity because the world is 

breaking our ankles one at a time

the grand canyon took how many millennia to form well we're 
falling in falling into 
city streetlights and the wrong crowds 6,093 feet screaming from the rim we are losing memory

we are falling 

hearts aching in 

china shard explosions

innocence suspended in time,

above the surface waiting shattered in corner slums by night

the #1 recorded killer of humanity is life.

i didn't hear you because my pencil broke 
when i looked into the whites of your eyes.

everett mills.

you're running through my head

you're getting too old to be patient

you yell the words because you're angry and then you yell them when you're not;
pride doesn't allow compromise or kindness and you're afraid of looking weak

you're my conscience.  i'm having conversations with you all the time, laughing with you, asking you questions, watching your reaction in my head. which is stupid really because I can't talk to you for more than 5 seconds without losing my focus, wow your eyes shine so blue

you're going to beat us if you see us

i like that you're not too caught up in your pride to break your own patterns and avoid something stupid

will you ever learn to speak without threats?

you say life is beautiful why are your eyes so angry

its only a matter of time.  patience can't last forever and you've dealt with her for 27 years now

can we talk, please? just you and me

you're on the edge now, I can tell you're breaking down and I'm scared for us if you fall

they say i look like you. that makes me hate you more

DON'T YOU DARE hurt him

you won't see who I am

i love you.  i don't know if she does anymore and
you're hurting me, but still
you make me feel safe, and i didn't want you to, so
you say its my fault, well if thats true

i'm sorry.

I don't want it all to be my fault. 

but no one else will take the blame 

so lets go back to the start, I'll begin and we can go around the circle like this is

brokens anonymous 

please, listen to me confess
I'm praying to lose my stupid pride
I'll take the blame for everyone broken

if we can please go back to the childhood memories that look less like 

black memoirs 

and more like mozart storytime midnight snacks and kittens
i know I was wrong sometimes take my stupid journals search for my sins slap me again pull out your belt I'll take the whipping if you lay off them, I was hard on you too I'm sorry for hating you. I'm trying not to.  And its getting easier to say I Love You.

now its your turn,
stand up,
please,
confess.
just like that.  
hi, my name is  
 ________            
And i'm sorry.

everett mills.

hey there from me. its been awhile.

I thought of starting with a love poem or making a dramatic re-entrance but
who knew coming back could be so emotional,

so naturally I'll do neither.

For months i've been meaning to write down all of the posts I've thought out,
and i've had a lot of thoughts on my fingertips and haven't actually typed them out
or hit publish.
you could say its been driving me insaaaaaaaane, so...

I am giving you my posts, my posts that I never published.
there are a lot.
think what you want.
i am not always the speaker.
Some I wrote on my hands in sunday school
           on spare scraps of paper
           in my journal
           in my head while people-watching
           here on blogger
           some last fall
           some last night
they all remind me of that Paris place we put so much into
the city we built from scratch, of black and white typed words,
of confession sessions, rants, heartbreaks,
we wrote a cityscape of emotion that somehow changed my life--

I'm addicted to words and I've been fighting one o'clock am epilogues,
keep clinging to beautiful thoughts because they remind me of nelson,
Madeline I went LITERALLY all of last year with the words
"my fingers could say anything close to unshakable" haunting me

I've been giving things up and i don't want words to be one of them
so throwback to hey there from me.
its been awhile.

everett mills

there's about to be a flood.

now you see me

Cold tires.

I'm #1, you're #2.

Cloud cover washed away our tracks and flooded the sandbox.   
covered our grape vines in ash and left the fence empty, thinking about hornets.  our animal feet left 
sanded frozen 
footprints,

cloud cover time-lapses
meshed mud & snow 
left us with only animal tracks and pink faces
and memories that hurt,
left us with empty spaces we would label
heartbreaksuicidecancerhatecarcrashshootingsdivorceonandonand
but we never know until after the fact and labeling only hurts more,
it won't erase this crevice, the one that you call a memory and i call the present

Stop 

stuck film rolling through my hands my body is seeing things stop them please. 

Slides of 8th grade health class abusive relationship lesson been in my head ever since because it was too familiar to pretend otherwise 

our halls are echoing with cries for help

Help

The quiet kind

The I don't need you kind of help

The I don't want you I don't want to need you kind of help

the I've been lost since seventh grade kind of Help

the give me hope give me distraction

the I've lost myself 

the i used to think i had courage kind of help

I want to say your heart is red

because thats what everyone else says.  

but since when has everyone else been right.

you've got hair and a nose and eyes that see the

 world

 green 

black
but

I don't see them

anymore.

There was wind in your hair in the calm 
Because you
Put the air into motion and 

cold in the warmth and fire in the air 

that burnt your fingertips and your heart, that was pulsing and pounding red blood

You were contradiction

 you're a lie,

you're hurt,

so am i,

but when people ask ARE YOU OK

post-it-note messages and seminary lessons aren't enough to

tell make your heart believe

YES I AM

so we got left.

cold in my brain numb 
fire thats turned blonde hair to ash and melts my will and 

I'm wrapped in a blanket painted horses, sewn manes and woolen hooves 

they're trampling my thoughts and.

closing doors.

this was grandma's blanket

it smells like sundays and friends 

feels heavier than memories that won't come back

we're cemented in

fearing in

flames. in things gone memories gone like 

lighter fluid will take this away

  listening to the echoes of your fire and the lightening that killed 

it. words words on strings words rolling film rolling my eyes my tongue that is silent,

film rolling in my head silent pictures open motion untouched rolling still rolling films faces places I've never been places I've been places I don't remember faces I've never seen You.  

Maybe your heart is blue. 

I'll take it however.

all i can do is play the piano and i thought that was enough for Johnny.

 it wasn't.

We Are

they took it all
the ones with their faces everywhere
they took the magazine cover and they took
his home-screen and they
thought they took over everything.
All the other people in line were staring at her Vogue perfect face
but,
I'm too busy thinking about you
pray-thinking
about the way You pick me up the way You
say you've loved me forever and the way you
will love me always
we are the ones who forget it
i forget that You don't make things broken
You make fixing things
beautiful things
you make people and
they call you Creator.

I've tried that,
tried creating with my fingers on the keys and my foot on the pedal
and my heart somewhere up close to You
and my fingertips are telling you
thank you for grand pianos
my fingertips are hugging you so hard
on those keys that
perfection is closer to these sounds coming from my heart than
her lungs are to oxygen
we're all a part of this air of this something
You tell me we're a part of You
a part of together
parts that don't break
parts that you made perfect
but we forget sometimes.

Heaven made us right
Hurt made us strong
I'm making rhythm the way that she makes pavement fly beneath her feet The way that
you love
The way his hands make pictures
The way her voice believes, and believes in,
We are the scarred
The scared
The broken-burning-angry
You made perfect
souls so
Thank You.

I don't stare for beauty I search for your perfection
home-made
in a keyboard
in smiles with crooked teeth
the foot of this ADHD kid tapping time
for hopes that grow kindness
in flaws making us real
for details
working bodies
love

I'm thanking humanity for the broken ones
that give dreams and hope
she calls retouch perfect, well

we've got hearts not power cords
my memory card doesn't have a limit
we're alive
and that Vogue cover is not
these shoes never will be
these piano keys are breathing through my lungs not their own
breathing my life
because flawless is a state of being
a human condition
a side-effect of souls
and heartbeats.
Let's get used to imperfection
because we do it perfectly.
we are humanity
we are beauty
we are soul.
let's just
let ourselves
Be.

the artist

Slam Poetry

aren't sunsets lovely dear
just like my dreams lately and your freckles
lovely the way that wrinkled old man sits at the corner bench.
and the stars, i think that ones venus but
i've never taken the time to learn
the way your brother never took the time to smile.
i wished on a shooting star
and on every wishable time on the clock
and i never told you my wishes because
each wish was a prayer.
and the moon is dark.  a sliver of light and i think God drew it
there just for snowshoes at midnight,
just for the scientist to play with probes on
just so the cow had something to jump over
just for the cheesemakers.
the stars are lovely dear,
but it hurts to breathe.
this air froze with my fingertips and i'm breathing down too many icicles
but the breathing doesn't stop.
its a humanity problem
they're addicted to this thing called Life
and some of us wish we weren't,
because the problem with this addiction is that
it doesn't give you lung cancer.
it shows you beauty and it hurts. like the icicles in my lungs.

i was rocking out to the latino radio station
and so were you,
and it scares me that we're so alike.
you wonder if anyone cares enough to tear down these walls you've built up,

well Last week I dreamed about you five nights in a row
and I'm still afraid.

you're afraid of cake boxes and barbie dolls and a long list of other things
with a list of reasons to match
and you say you're afraid of cake boxes because you never know what its really gonna be like
and of barbie dolls because people act fake enough as it is

and we're caught in some kind of Limbo where no one can tell what's real and what not
Least of all you
and maybe if things felt more real you would be honest, but
you're still convinced the top never stopped spinning...

These are the things I understand.

I understand that you exist on a colorwheel, that you breathe color and even though your lungs
are drowning in them
color is all that keeps you alive,
and the paint inside your veins is all that keep you real.

But the reason I never showed you my soul is that
YOU SHOWED ME YOURS FIRST
and its still stained in acrylics
You thought that if you drew on enough hands and
etched your name into enough hearts
it would make up for all the plastic in the world and for
all the illusions we've penned onto our faces

but I think you've got some kind of color constricting your lungs because
you
CAN'T
KEEP
BREATH.
It slips out.
and your lungs are filling with
drowning with
the illusions of paint
and real life.

There are things I understand and things I don't.

I understand that blue is too many dreams to call a color but people do it anyway
I understand that pianos are black and white but
give me one and I'll create all the color you've never dreamed of
I understand that you've got a color connecting you to reality
because it has always been easier for you to pretend
until
maybe it had something to do with the starlight
but you
finally
exhaled
all the color you've kept in.

and because you've never really known what was real
you closed your eyes for seven seconds

and asked.

this day was lost

I'm just trying to connect the dots

I feel like I'm waiting for something
that isn't even there
and too many of my thoughts are dead-ends.

because, I don't want to think
but I'm stuck
on remembering
a little girl whose clothes are dirty and whose hands are dirtier,
and she wouldn't meet my eyes because her pride is stained darker than them both.
The bruises across her back hurt
but nothing like the welts on her innocence, so
she paces the house that is her cage with her head down and her eyes hanging even lower

and SHE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME

but my heart won't let me forget

There's a little boy who didn't walk at all
he just cried, on the floor with his back pressed against the wall like it would save him, like that wall was his father and nothing would separate them again.
because he is only 9 and Seventy is too many years of waiting to hug his Papi again.

And i couldn't even tell him I Care.

so I know its been said before, but

you've hurt too many people

and maybe your name is Death                                            but maybe that doesn't matter.

you've been known as Divorce, and She called you Abuse,

I know too many people who think you're a mirror telling them lies, 

but

we've all got a common problem.

our problem is you, its the fact that

YOU WALK LIKE YOU LIVE HERE

And you don't. You shouldn't.

We never let you in, we never gave you permission, we never gave you anything

let alone our souls.

and for some reason you exist

YOU ARE TRAGEDY

and pain and fear and hatred

the tragedy of people with hearts so Weighted down they're leaving footprints deeper than their souls

and i hate the fact that blaming her too-many-tears-to-cry on you changes nothing

so i guess i'm just asking
questions.
too many.

because Somehow the sky is still lovely
and my best friend still exists
but so do the heavy hearts.

And laughter is real,
just like saxophones and snowflakes

and somehow,

SHE GOT A HAPPY ENDING.

maybe this is just me
thinking things out
thinking about how things aren't perfect and they never will be
but
that little boy has a friend who loves him, and
that little girl learned how to draw.
and maybe we've got it better than we think because
I know a widow who started taking walks and
a Shell who picked up a pen,
it may suck but
orphans find God all the time
the depressed found a piano and lemonade
& the broken tend to pick up books

its not easy but survival isn't the issue
it never was
we're just looking for

hope.