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.

Wednesday, June 30

Tuesday, June 29

SONG OF THE DAY: Wallet Won't Fold

My wallet won’t fold… too full of grocery store IMPORTANT CUSTOMER cards. Not to brag but they send me individually selected special deals JUST FOR ME every fuckin’ week, right in my inbox, which is a digital mailbox of sorts. Took my time machine back and tried to explain this shit to my great grandma but she was just like “what the fuck?” except some other word because they weren’t allowed to have fuck as a word back then yet. She asked me if I could get her some cornmeal because they just don’t get good quality cornmeal at the store there, and I told her sure but told her it cost like $4 and she was like, “what the fuck?” again but with that other word, “Four dollars? I’m not trying to go to Europe for it.” She’s funny. I always steal something when I visit to come back and sell at the vintage store, that’s how I can afford organic vegetables at the grocery store.

MY F0VND4T10N 1S CR00K3D...


my foundation is crooked, 
but not rotten; never held 
fresh coats of paint all that long 

Monday, June 28

SONG OF THE DAY: la pinche cumbia de la escuela eleconica monterreyLa Pinche Cumbia de la Escuela Electronica Monterrey


I am looking for a strip mall, somewhere in the south, probably North Carolina, but maybe Alabama or South Carolina, where there is a wrestling school/arena that has lucha infused activities, due to immigration pattterns of the past 30 years. Also because of this, I expect there should be a pupuseria in that strip mall, maybe just a truck, but maybe a corner restaurant. I really don't care if it's a truck, even if it's unpainted and unfinished looking. Only white people expect food trucks to be painted nicely. I would hope there's some sort of tire shop in this strip mall too, specializing in custom rim/wheel packages. Hopefully somebody rents one of the bays out to do detailing too, or does it in the parking lot. I guess building off that ideally there'd be a car wash nearby, not one where you pay people or one of those rip-off drive through ones with the LED lights, but the multiple bay cinderblock or brick jams where folks control their own cleaning destiny, by how many quarters they're willing to invest in freshness, both in spraying down the car and vaccuuming it on the far side of the car wash. It seems impossible to me that such a place doesn't exist at this point. I want to go there, and vibe, because in this imaginary rundown strip mall of the declining American empire, there's a lot of powerful vibes that are currently missing from my life. No curtido, no chrome, no shiny masks (or at least not enough), no pupusa lorocco and hurricanrana and 22-inch Rucci forgeds. Just the same stupid shit, everywhere.

S0M3H0W, 34CH TR1P 4R0VND SVN...


somehow, each trip around sun 
unlocks opportunities 
to blossom even brighter 

Sunday, June 27

SONG OF THE DAY: Life Keeps Happening


Life does keep happening, if you're lucky. Not much else to say about that because I was practicing cartomancy on my back but never finished laying out the spread - it's just a jack of diamonds by itself, hanging there, waiting to be paired or combined with other meaning. This has left me in a constant state of high potential but imbalance ever since. I need to fix that shit, but I'm stuck right now just being. At least I thought so, but the human body is connected to the universe in ways the mind won't ever understand, so since my right side has that jack of diamonds and my left side is still blank, awaiting further fate, my left ear died on me the end of last week, like an old car. It'll turn over, but it lacks power, missing a few cylinders. Went to the earhole specialists and they did a millions tests and said, "shrug, come back in two weeks, let's try it again." Universe telling me, finish the spread, don't stand pat when the cards ain't been finished dealing. And that's how life keeps happening, trying to teach you lessons, but you always think you're too fucking smart to listen.

1NT3RC0NN3CT3D W1TH D00M...


interconnected with doom 
at deep level ever since 
Valentine’s, ’73 

Saturday, June 26

SONG OF THE DAY: A Wonderful One


A beautiful Saturday which I have hopefully spent at a car show in Carolina. Or in a secluded railroad yard scribbling dirtgods. Or just laying around as if I lived on clouds. I think one of the great abominations of modern human language is calling the unseen places we store all our digital data a "cloud". In fact, they're on giant energy-sucking server farms, not up in the sky, so it's false in that sense. But it's also just fucking disrespectful to actual clouds. Man is such a narcissist.
This song is a from a Marvin Gaye/Pink Floyd mash-up, where there was a write-up about how they actually performed a live sound check to record this in London or some shit back in the day. It was a wacky made up story, and I'm all about mythology, but basically just some white dude did a mash-up of Marvin Gaye and Pink Floyd, and created the story. That's not necessarily outside the realm of dirtgod industries, but it also feels a little hollow heavy-handed to me. But what do I know? I'm just a dumbass country boy from Meherrin, Virginia.

PR4Y1NG T0 WH4T3V3R G0DS M1GHT...


praying to whatever gods might 
pay attention to my dumb 
self-destructive ass down here 

Friday, June 25

SONG OF THE DAY: A Dan Den

 

If you seen a fucked up looking dude in overalls with no shirt riding around in a Toyota Corolla anywhere between Delaware and South Carolina, blasting this while eating fried chicken thighs, all the windows down, looking sexy and greasy as hell, that was me. You shoulda hollered.

1 KN0W B4CK R04DS 4ND S1D3 STR33TS...


I know back roads and side streets 
far better than the mainstream’s 
deluded psychology 

Thursday, June 24

SONG OF THE DAY: Waiting For a Train

Humans aren’t currently built for time travel because we’re too hung up on controlling time, expecting schedules to be met and people to be precise as machines. Imagine that shit, expecting me to show up somewhere at an exact hour that I sort of agreed to because we were talking and you seemed to expect it. In the grand scheme of space-time continuum, expecting me to be where you wanted at exactly 6 pm is like scheduling a meeting to the millisecond – it’s pointless, and fruitless, and irrelevant, and frankly a waste of time. We weren’t meant to be productive, or hold schedules that tightly. It’s hilarious to imagine some uptight scientist military dudes trying to nail down time travel talking all that, “at 1400” shit. Y’all already lost it. We were way closer to time travel as humans when we didn’t have all this distracting egotistic technology, and just built pyramids out of rocks. Ain’t nobody building no fucking pyramids any more. I mean, the biggest one of the past half century got turned into a Bass Pro Shop in Memphis, which is like doubly fucked up. If there is a Creator, and there is time travel, you know they put a big ass x-mark next to humans when that shit happened.
Anyways, I like waiting for trains, to take pictures, or watch, or really just to sit there and not do shit. Sometimes it’s a disappointment once the train actually comes because then I lose my excuse to do nothing and chill.

S0M3 F0LKS' SP1R1T T4K3S S0L4C3...


some folks’ spirit takes solace 
in ancient texts; I dabble 
in babbling soul gibberish 

Tuesday, June 22

SONG OF THE DAY: Sweet Home Alabama (45s on 33)

Had to explain to another white person that the confederate flag is, in fact, racist to have flying from your pick-up truck at the grocery store parking lot. Even if you grew up in the South, and love the country, and don’t know any better. Not knowing any better doesn’t make something right, unless you’re a frog. Frogs are always right, in everything they do. You should listen to them more. They’re smart enough not to have a website like this. I SHOULD LISTEN TO THEM MORE.

34CH D4Y'S 0PP0RTVN1TY...


each day’s opportunity 
for accomplishing fresh shit 
is real - alhamdulillah 

Monday, June 21

Sunday, June 20

Saturday, June 19

F1N4NC14L 0BL1G4T10NS...


financial obligations 
start to coil around your guts, 
squeezing like a constrictor 

Friday, June 18

Z1PP1NG B4CK 4ND F0RTH THR0VGH W33KS...


zipping back and forth through weeks 
defined by work, for decades 
now… the “right” thing ain’t easy 

Thursday, June 17

Wednesday, June 16

PR0DVCT1V1TY MYTHS C0M3...


productivity myths come 
calling like clockwork; I’ve learned 
to tell the boss inside “no” 

Tuesday, June 15

SONG OF THE DAY: Twenty Skinny

Working from home, I let the cats spend most of the day outside, but always try to get them in before we leave, or do anything down in the front of the yard, trying to train them to treat the back and woods behind the place as well as the sides and just out front as their full domain (which is a really FULL domain for two cats), and to stay the fuck away from the road. But if we’re going to go somewhere or be gone, I’ll call them in, and generally they’re out there long enough they come running if I call, occasionally even happily leaping into the house as I hold the screen door open.
I should mention how our two cats are. We have a grey tabby named Stella who is like a baby leopard in stomach markings and spirit. She is goofy as fuck, and would stalk bugs and butterflies for seven centuries if I let her. She’s also the one that comes in the last, barely needing inside time, and in fact I often let her sleep on the back porch because she likes it better than all the way inside. Ponyo is a black cat, and has one of the strangest auras of any cat I’ve ever been around. She skip flies onto an 8-foot bookcase in the living room to sleep on top of it, and will strangely show up meowing at me when I’m thinking sad thoughts. I really don’t know how to explain her other than she is something else entirely, like even in the realm of cats being strange, she is STRANGE, but not bad strange, just special strange.
The other day, me and the kids were gonna head out on some errands and goofing off, and I went to call the cats in. It had been hot and they’d been out there for a long ass time, so I knew they’d come running. I opened the screen and did my goofy cadence “KITTY KITTY KITTY” that I learned by osmosis from my younger sister growing up, a weird mountain yodel call to the cats that sounds ridiculous I’m sure if you look over and see this bearded dude jabbering it out the screen door at the world at large. But it works.
The other day, I do this, and immediately here comes Stella bounding from behind the graffiti shed, full baby leopard leaping mode the whole way across 50 feet of yard, through the screen door and porch, into the house. While Stella is coming, about halfway, I see Ponyo peripherally coming from the left, around the house, also leaping in full run. She is about two seconds behind Stella’s pace, and as she rounds the flower garden on that side of the porch, with an old metal goat sculpture, no shit, a spider leaps behind her from the garden. Stella jumps over the steps from the left side and goes through the screen door into the house, AND THE SPIDER LEAPS ONTO THE STEPS THEN SLIDES INTO THE PORCH AS WELL, right past the screen door, behind a recycling bin. It was the weirdest thing – the spider seriously leapt just like the cats, and followed them in the house.
In West African Ashanti culture, Anansi was a spider-trickster that had all the knowledge of the world. Similarly, in Lakota mythology, there was Iktomi, a spider-trickster spirit as well. There are tricksters of various forms in all indigenous cultures not yet bleached by economic colonialism, regardless of continent. There is no way that spider is not some sort of trickster spirit flying up into our house, and yet also this does not scare me, because the way it bounced, there was nothing but joy in its movement. It’s been two days, and I keep waiting for that spider to make itself known again, in some way, but so far as I can tell thus far, nothing beyond the regular extraordinary has happened. It does feel good to know we’ve already cultivated a home environment where silly spider spirits feel excited about coming in and joining us.

CL0S3 T0 H4LF 4 C3NTVRY...


close to half a century 
of poking around the Earth’s 
surface, yet still feel damn good 

Monday, June 14

Sunday, June 13

Saturday, June 12

SONG OF THE DAY: El Tren (rebajada)


Walking slowly through the yard when the veil between day and night is thinnest, with kudzu creeping in from one side and gentrification from the other. Hadn't gotten to the point the worrisome gentrifiers call the cops on footsteps in the yard, but they don't like making eye contact from their side of the wrought iron fence, pretending I don't exist, a rough-edged blackberry bearded man wandering through the last remnants of industrial revolution's detritus at the fringes of late capitalism imaginary empire of eternity. Their ways are far less sustainable than mine, even as my beard turns grey this remains true.
I mark my various prayers on the steel carcasses, already well-tattooed with the prayers of others like me, from across this old mycelium network of rails. Some of these vandalous saints of the yards have practiced their devotion, and developed full-color master peaces, and others like myself are esoteric minimalists with a more primordial traditions, scribbling our hopes into unmarked corners. All of it is just cries against the foolishness of being a productive member of an industrial society, and also yet somehow more attuned to that than the blossoming townhouses and pastel-colored homes renovated beyond affordability or practicality for regular folk. They have their full-color murals on that side of the fence too, but it's not done by saints of the late American yards, instead professional artists are imported from affluent families to bedazzle these neighborhoods with giant visuals hearkening back to a past that has been stomped on by poverty and bleached from actual representation in the neighborhood itself.
Thinking about this, I write "just another mark" on a CSX hopper, tucked in between two pieces by Moms Worthless Sons crew members. We are all just marks here at the dying American carnival of the 21st century... it's just some of us have deeper pockets to pretend the kayfabed mythologies are real. Others of us have always known it's all a fucking lie, no matter how often they switch the barkers around between booths. Fuck America, I am a god of destruction.

TH3 M1NVT3S CR4WL 4R0VND TH3...

the minutes crawl around the 
clock when you’re doing shit you 
got no love in your heart for 

Friday, June 11

SONG OF THE DAY: Sonnet 33 and 55 / Friendship Dance

Haven’t felt all that artistically inspired or challenged lately, which stems from in real life. I could definitely use a circle of more ridiculous and possessed artists, at least at times like this, when I’m feeling rundown or stuck in some ruts. Where I live is overly saturated with boring and mundane artists doing boring and mundane work which is idolized by boring and mundane people. I see people posting shit in their social media that’s supposed to be deep and brilliant, and it feels so forced and egotistic and pathetic. But people lap it up. I ain’t trying to be a hater, but damn, don’t we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that? Does the artistic urge dry up? Do people stop feeling compelled to create shit and then just sit back and barely work on a project while they fondly reminisce about their glory days 15 years ago? That shit feels wack to me, and irrelevant. Then again, maybe I’m wack and irrelevant. That’s how I feel, to be honest, which is fine, because feeling like that forces me to try and find inspiration in some other fucked up shit, switch up my own bullshit patterns. Art should not be boring, ever. What the fuck? That’s like having shitty sex, why the fuck bother? Creation never sleeps, if you are tapped into the universe the way you can be.

L1V1NG L1F3 0N 4 D41LY...


living life on a daily 
basis, trying to ignore 
calendar boxes flipping 

Thursday, June 10

Wednesday, June 9

SONG OF THE DAY: Kiss The World Goodbye


It is currently about 3069 degrees, and I refuse to have conditioned air because how will I survive the weather apocalypse if I don’t condition myself more than the air blowing into my house? I have a minor arsenal of box fans – some old box jams, some the new fangled bubble vortex fans – positioned around the house hoping to overwhelm the humidity like one of those stupid io games where you just have all your little singularly colored people flying in at the other color people. It doesn’t seem to be working; maybe I need to watch some ads in order to get some free fans. But a storm is rolling in, and that will bring that sweet cool relief ever so briefly.

BV1LD1NG MY S4NCTV4RY...


building my sanctuary 
against endless suffering, 
one nonsense thought at a time 

Tuesday, June 8

W3 ST4CK3D BR1CKS PR3TTY D4MN H1GH...


we stacked bricks pretty damn high, 
drunk off our human ego 
and thinking this is progress 

Monday, June 7

SONG OF THE DAY: Ramadan

 

I honestly never remember any song me and Brown have done a few months after the fact. They come on my ipod, and I’m like “When the fuck did I write these words? How the fuck did I write these words?” That’s actually true of most of what I “create” – I don’t really do shit except let it happen without dwelling on that shit. Half the time, three months later, it’s as much a surprise to me as anybody else.
To be honest, I'm thankful music has remained a lifelong hobby for me and Brown. I couldn't imagine taking all the joy out of it, thinking about shit like marketing and trying to trick algorithms into floating it to the top of people's robot streams.

4NY0N3 WH0'S PR0M1S1NG...


anyone who’s promising 
salvation while still tethered 
to existence is lying 

Sunday, June 6

SONG OF THE DAY: Mukadzi Wangu Ndomuda

My girlfriend got a whole bunch of chicks two months back, and raised them in her bathroom. I've always just gotten pullets because I don't like dealing with chick death, but she handled the ups and downs of that shit pretty well. Now all of them are pullet-sized and in the pen with her grown hens from last year, plus two goats, and two frilly geese. I was supposed to get some of them, but I don't have a coop, and there's a couple foxes living right behind the house, and fuckin' wood is expensive as fuck, so building the type of coop I'd like to build ain't feasible right now. And if I can't build that type of coop, I'd rather not expensively feed a fox that seems just as happy with my compost pit for a whole lot cheaper.
Nonetheless, there's great joy in taking a small soup pot full of scratch and feed and scattering it in the pen, and watching the chickens all wandering around, tussling, avoiding goat heads and angry geese. I remember reading that watching fish tanks were supposed to be a great meditative act, but I gotta believe watching a bunch of chickens just wander around a pen is some of the same. Back in the day, my favorite shit at the old Bird Tribe Compound was just sitting there watching the flock politics of a bunch of chickens. And now my girlfriend's compound pen has like twenty of those fuckers, bobbing around, each one with their own weird personalities. Pure country shit, sitting there sipping on something, meditating about watching chickens, both you and the chickens (and goats and geese) all clamoring for shade, because the world is hot as fuck, and does not care.

P13C1NG 1T 4LL T0G3TH3R...


piecing it all together 
as best we can - all of us, 
across the whole goddamned Earth 

Saturday, June 5

SONG OF THE DAY: Teach Me

I'll admit, I'm hard headed. That's the whole post - there's no "but..." with a long-winded clever exploration into some sort of self-realization. I'm just a hard headed dude sometimes. A lot of times actually.

V4P0R W4V1NG G00DBY3 T0...


vapor waving goodbye to 
another day spent chasing 
after bad money, no good 

Friday, June 4

M0ST D4YS, TH3 M0RN1NG M1RR0R...


most days, the morning mirror 
reflects a reluctant gaze, 
resigned to chasing carrots 

Thursday, June 3

SONG OF THE DAY: Caravans in the Desert


glitch in the fabric of the universe 
gotta keep moving or else we fall into 
black holes designed like land mines 
digital vines wrapping all around 
unseen and wireless 
gotta keep moving 
keep deleting accounts 
answer data phishing with lies all the time 
post confusing messages to clog 
the algorithm's security guards 
they can't keep up with it all 
techno logic has its limitations 
glitching as much shit as we can 
throwing rocks at the cameras 
pointed inside of ourselves 

C0NSVM1NG MYTH0L0G13S...


consuming mythologies 
which we wish to represent 
us, in deeply settled state 

Wednesday, June 2

SONG OF THE DAY: A Change Is Going To Come

Too much thought paralyzes action, as does perfecting the types of thoughts you have. Thoughts are meant to be fucked up sometimes, so nobody has perfectly formulated philosophies. I mean, we can learn how to filter our wild thoughts into publicly acceptable behavior, that doesn’t fuck up other people’s lives, although at the same time there’s plenty of dumbass “free thinkers” who believe they should never filter shit, that First Amendment means you assault rifle all your thoughts out like a mass shooter and if anybody gets hit by something they don’t like, well fuck it, that’s the price of this American brand of freedom. I don’t really feel that way.
I said “feel” instead of “think” because it’s always seemed to me that brain thinks differently than heart. And then as I got older and learned about fermentation and probiotic gut flora and shit like that, gut thinks even differently. They had some study a couple years back where your gut had an idea it sent to your brain before your brain thought it, suggesting free will is not a scientific reality necessarily. Then again, that’s likely not true because we attach will to the brain, not believing the gut or heart has shit to do with it. So I guess it’s not so much too much thought itself paralyzes action but too much brain thought does, or too much disparity between the various places a person thinks in their human body. Your brain says, “let’s do this!” but your gut intuition is like “hold up, bro,” and meanwhile your heart is screaming at you that you’re fucking up. I think with the way we’re living right now, if you’re heart’s not screaming at you a whole lot of the time, then you might’ve been ignoring your heart way too much. I’m actually ignoring mine right now. I always joke that when I die, my heart’s going to be clogged with fried chicken thighs, but it’s more likely going to get seized up by the denial of thought energies flowing outward, that congeal in my chest cavity like soul grease that clogs me to frustrated death.

4ND Y3T, TH3 D1ST4NT FVCKIN'...


and yet, the distant fuckin’ 
places we come from still lay claim 
to muddied identity 

Tuesday, June 1

SONG OF THE DAY: I Am Born To Preach The Gospel

Sometimes I don't feel like writing an internet blurb for whatever's next on the song of the day list. And then other times - like yesterday - I have full heart experiences so deep that it'd be a disservice to how the universe strung all them thoughts into my brain to just throw it into the internet. I usually chop those up and put them in zines instead, which of course reaches far less people, but a much more concentrated level. Never forget, this internet shit is some devilry conjured up by Dr. Yakub.

N0T SVR3 1 B3L13V3 TH3R3'S SVCH...


not sure I believe there’s such 
a thing as good flag; ego 
and/or profit makes politics