RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Monday, November 12

the decline of American "civilization"

So more than anything I would like to be doing what I was doing this weekend, which is carving one-off haiku into wild harvested railroad spikes. Thing is I burned through all my burrs, and am having a hard ass time finding more. No place, online or in real life, has more than a couple, which is a manufacturing issue I've seen at work as well. It seems we don't have actual manufactured shit in stock any more. I mean you can buy all the presswood shelves and rinky-dink handy homeowner cheap ass tools you want, but for actual tough-as-fuck gonna-last more than three uses manufactured shit, it's gone.
But whatever. Let this festering pyramid scheme colored with freedom crash in on itself. I feel it's very fitting to carve haiku into spikes, to have my written word in a form where I can actually stab people with it, literally, and for it to involve sparks and vise grips and toxic dust and make my back hurt and scare children and be loud and nasty. That is my ultimate work here, to turn the toxic into something beautiful. It is what I have done in my own personal life (two years sober this past Halloween) and it is what I do with my work. I do not call myself a writer any more because I have sat amongst those people and they are not my people. They are pussies, for lack of a better term. (I actually hate that term, because the yoni is a powerful thing, and I am in awe of the nature of the mother, but I haven't thought of a better term yet that would make someone reading my words understand my meaning.) Weak people with weak stories. Even the alleged bourbon-drinking gritty noir guys are just charlatans and Martha Stewart stereotypes but with cuss words. Fuck all these people.
So yeah, America is fucked, and shit will get realer before it gets all champagne bubbly and American dreamed out again. But as chaos unfolds, look along the tracks you hike between hidden clusters of civilization... maybe one of my haiku will be on that railroad spike you find. Actually in the process of working on these over the weekend I realized how many haiku I've written in the past decade. Lately, I've been doing at least five a day, and being my beerbox haiku project was a definite 1000 I wrote, and there's four or five other notebooks from other projects full of haiku, not to mention when I decided on this site to write gamblerakus that were 7-7-7 syllable structure because I felt stifled by the rhythm of 5-7-5, I've easily written thousands upon thousands of these things. Not collected, not even organized. There are stacks of notecards with haiku in my house that we use for scrap paper so my children will doodle drawings or phone numbers of my youngest has learned to write her name and it will be on the back of an index card with a haiku on it. You cannot collect everything you do - internet or otherwise - and you most likely, if you are born from the bloodlines I am born from, not going to find it easy to monetize the things you do either. No one gives a fuck about what I say unless I turn my southside Virginia memories into gritty sell-out rural noir that makes all my beautiful people look like bastards and scumfucks. Screw that, because of all the bastards and scumfucks I have known in my life, they all are better than these people I walk amongst now - these of the brick facade faces who if they have known struggle have plastered over the scars with their better credit scores or stocks or I don't know. I seriously don't know how people get to where they have gotten, or become successful. It's not part of my frame of reference. Grinding shit into steel, that I can understand. It's a shame this ain't a country of people like me no more, just a bunch of scam asses trying to cash in quick.

No comments: