Forever ago, my friend

You

are June.

Crimson-stained hills

and a stretch of sun-burnt walks.

(We are prying for loose change in the cracks)

The world is a quilt and we are its center piece

a square of velvet, we are blue and soft eyes

You and I

we are masters together

natives of the dreamland

heroes in second-hand accessories.

Ours is an Empire-

built on lucky coins and sidewalk chalk,

we dust our palms and gold escapes our fingertips.

Wind chimes keep time and we

flaunt backyard sunsets and mom’s

rose

lipstick, lost,

we are staring up at meteor-showered skies

Transfixed, as if

they are a bathtub-full of June poppies

we've spilled across California.

dated: 1 Septembre 2016

(thoughts from my first area)

We are four girls in a room
there are four big walls.
and a terrace with flower pots being eaten by worms.
I am sitting in a chair on the terrace.
Chewing my finger. chewing my thoughts.
Thinking on meetings with strangers. thinking
on encounters with a book &
FIRE-eyes--
always trying to turn on my
FIRE-eyes--
when I talk about that book.
I try to speak in other languages-- the language that brings out their fire-hearts, that makes them cry.
we want them to cry, because we want to speak with their heart.

Hello Heart.
Hello Heart.
open please?
giving you something that tastes good, that feels good. It will grow into a tall beautiful flower.

I try to speak with fire-eyes, in that other language that is heard deeper, farther down.
And in French. Always in French.

Beautiful things listen to us--little babies, always.
People on trains stare at us. tall people look down at us, short people look sideways at us. Questions...

we are two and two with name tags.

rain and jam

Why do I keep?
There is a tingle in my right leg that makes my big toe into a bale of hay.
My eyes are closing up for the night, sweeping out the last of the customers
They are wanting to stay
And we want our legs back

things are leaping onto outside

Leaps into reflections of a roof

And I stand up to close the door.

My ship crashes through waves pushes my legs back to be stumbling,

Balance comes slowly more slowly than the couple below joined beneath an umbrella beneath falling marbles explosions at their feet.

Cold bones

I am keeping 

Warmth in the taste of words

A new book of old poetry

Freshly bought, tightly squeezed, making orange juice from Cummings and Elliot in my lips

They taste like rain and jam, thunder and a quilt, rain dropping and I feel you here too

Sometimes

Warming my cold fingers with words and fingerprints pressed against mine--

but I am alone in paper and Paris

thanksgiving, three years later

when i have no words to write I'm thankful for the sky,
who wouldn't read them anyway.

Sometime we could remember,
Remember for years until we forget ourselves and wake up groggy-eyed in heaven.

Let's remember magnesium-green cliffs and the drunk man Greg who must have been a priest,
he bowed his head to his guitar and prayed while his hand painted nylon strings into the blues.
His church was the hostel at his back and its pews the single white plastic chair
where he slouched at midnight.

We were only in Moab.

But sometimes I'm afraid of running out of light, like last night on the cliffs. I'm thankful that God put stars above my head, and a half moon.
I'm thankful that he tightened my grip on the rope and gave me leather gloves and friends with cheez-its who caught me at the bottom.
He put red walls around us for a day and put us together in a car thinking about home and russia and our next trip... Me? I'm trying to remember how to write.

Grow a little, y'all. don't be scared.
When we get taller we'll just buy new clothes and graduate from primary and
see the world from a few inches higher and
buy ourselves new bikes.

Someone's with you to catch you when you fall and cradle your head til the tears stop.
I'm no tree but I've felt hollow,
sometimes when life is a little much I think thanks and look into fish tanks and remember how
God loves me more.

..................................

& big thoughts like those
make me grow,

tall and thankful

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