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.
It’s been about a month since I released my new book of haiku, called Just Another Mark. These are selections culled from writing five haiku a day over the course of an entire year. It’s a pretty great collection, of haiku written from both a natural and chaotic perspective, along the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains. There are three ways you can get it: NUMBER ONE – Go to MY WEB SHOP and get a signed copy directly from me. I’ve got other books there, as well as art and zines and all sorts of stuff. NUMBER TWO – Go to your favorite local independent bookstore, and get them to order it. It is set up through proper distribution channels so that indy stores can acquire it directly for you. You can also use bookshop.org. NUMBER THREE – Go to Amazon, the evil place, and get it there.
I have a pretty good ability to sense metaphysical fences. It’s both a blessing and a curse. The worst side of it is how easy to see throughout my life where I’m not welcome even though nobody outright says it. That shit weighs heavy on you, because outwardly identifying open-minded types that have hearts full of hate will be hating on you, and those metaphysical fences are up big time, but they’re not physical so they’ll deny them even if you try to point it out. So you gotta just abide what you know to be true, and accept they’ve kept plausible deniability in the physical realm. America’s full of that shit, metaphysical fences behind neighborhoods where you’re just walking along, saying what’s up to random people you pass by, when all of a sudden you realize you’re about a block and a half into territory some sort of security force is gonna show up and ask you what you’re up to. Fuck it. I cut holes through metaphysical fences with haiku spikes regularly. Just drive them in the ground right at a weakened edge, deep enough into the ground the grass covers the head and nobody realizes it’s there, and a hole gets ripped in the invisible walls, and next thing you know the neighborhood is ruined. It’s like reverse gentrification. I practice it a lot actually. By the way, this is a Blue Globe Beats song my boy Boogie Brown put together off an EP full of songs where he had computer voice read blurbs from this very blog. So this song’s words are already on here somewhere or another. If there’s a track Brown hasn’t put up on Youtube that I’m supposed to write about, I usually whip up a video just like I do with the kudzu’d 45s. For this one, I found video of hedge laying back in the day, which is the old school method of cutting hawthorn to build natural walls. Video lines up pretty amazingly a few times. I consider this art, even if it’s just me throwing a bunch of various shit together. It’s a digital mosaic, and only like 19 people will ever see it. Thank you for being one of them.
This is the song I named my last book of haiku after, but slowed down. That’s a pretty great book. Feel free to buy a copy if you randomly show up here and aren’t a robot.
I released a new book a few weeks back called Lookin' For A Home, which is a selection of haiku I wrote over the course of 4-5 years on my patreon. These are the best of that patreon process, so it's an insight into my life from right after moving out of the house I'd had as a part of marriage for two decades, up through finding the house I'm currently blessed with in Schuyler, Virginia. Upon being accepted by this house, I realized it was the first time in my life I'd ever actually felt at home, in my entire life. That was a strange realization, but a good one to be on the positive end of it. I'm very proud of this book, as it's great insight into Southern Gothicc Futurism, life in the rural south, during the digital age, and growing older while trying to fight the doom settling into your bones as the failure demons circle.
You can buy it at Amazon, or from me in person at haiku slams or other Southern Gothicc Futurist events.
Keeping it moving, slowly but surely, even as the world wants you to congeal into fear. I been trying to keep it moving literally, one foot in front of the other, couple miles down the tracks as often as possible, scattering the negative impulses by grounding my soles onto the metal tracks when ain’t nothing coming. This world we got is one built with ego as a cornerstone, so it’s easy to get lost looking at what others might seem to have got, but that just poisons your outlook with hating. People get hung up on thinking about what other folks “deserve” way too much, without ever thinking about who’s gonna serve it all. The work’s always got to be done, and there’s always someone doing it without calling attention to themselves, because that just slows down getting the work done. I been trying to remove “deserve” from my vocabulary completely, and just keep it moving. If I’m meant to get somewhere, I’ll eventually meander my way there. And if I ain’t, I won’t. I trust the Universe to know what the fuck it’s doing.
The journey to lounge always has obstacles, sometimes even coming from inside your own mind. I know I was my own worst enemy to establishing quality lounge as young adult man-child with unresolved or unaddressed shit. Some folks never even bother, just keep ignoring the mold on the walls and act like “This is fine,” ploughing through a life with no regard for how they fuck up those around them with their chaotic bad ripples. I’m still chaotic as fuck, but I’d like to believe I’m chaotic good, and I definitely feel I’ve achieved a level of lounge in my life better than ever before. It’s at least more sustainable, like I don’t have to escape the whole fuckin’ world in a self-medicated stupor to find peace. It’s already here. But I still gotta get my mind right and avoid getting stuck in the mud of others who got nothing better to do with their lives than scatter negative influences in every direction. In fact, the journey to lounge begins inside your own mind. You can’t be at peace or encourage peace and healing in others if you’re a fuckin’ shit storm of unresolved bullshit. And even if all those traumas wasn’t your fault, at some point, you gotta take responsibility for not bothering to get your shit together. There should be like a second adulthood age, because 18/21 is too young. 36 maybe? I don’t know, but at some point, you should’ve at least tried to have enough knowledge of self to stop being a negatively charged ionic treatise upon your environment. This world is fucking us all up, and we can either try to do better, or shrug our shoulders and say fuck it and replicate the patterns that made us fucked in the first place. That doesn’t feel like solid work or a good plan on the journey to collective lounge.
Another Boogie Brown banger from his Blue Globe Beats bandcamp, but about three releases back, because my "song of the day" process is a slow burner that even the most high quality vibes of songs don't get on the list until after a month or two, and then it takes me a month to get around to writing about it. I don't respect immediate reactionary newness philosophy... that contributes to our own downfall. Take your time and enjoy shit. But also recognize the fact there's people out here doing amazing shit on a pretty regular basis that you might be overlooking entirely because you're too caught up in the new shit purposely paraded past your gaze.
Ain’t no qualified Working Class Whisperers because our concept of what’s working class has been distorted. Labor Day weekend is perfect example, because the notion of a three-day weekend is alien to a vast expanse of wage laborers working in the sprawling and rootless suburbs that all look the same no matter which city they’ve show up as freedom tumors upon. We got two political parties deemed feasible in American life, and both of them speak to fake working classes that have middle class wealth – one not necessarily with college education and living off the actual land and coin wealth of their earlier generations, and the other often depending upon a college education but still lifted beyond the crushing struggles of actual daily poverty. It’s all so performative, and these dueling middle classes – both of whom manipulated to the benefit of the actual hyper-wealthy, spit and jeer at each other, and it’s become a dueling vision for America’s late empire fascist state. And I want to be clear – I’m not “both sides”ing this thing, because the right gives zero fucks about destroying us all who don’t fit their vision of a pure American future. But the liberal left, despite (in my mind) being the lesser of the two evils, is still a very evil and entirely unsupportable entity as well. The Dark Biden memes gave way to him living the gimmick, standing in front of red and black background with Marines flanking him this past week, looking like the bad guys from V for Vendetta. Riding actual roads (not interstates), walking actual streets (not cul-de-sacs), and talking to other people is the only thing that will ever break through this. And I’m not even sure that’s as possible as it was even 6 years ago. I remember reading a dude who engineered some Latin American elections through use of digital means how the Clinton/Trump Presidential campaign was, to him, very clearly two propaganda machines working double time to defeat each other. Neither was benevolent, or resting on their own good; they both were manipulating human consciousness as best they could, with the digital tools at their disposal. That has only worsened in the ensuing six years, and people’s brains are heavily poisoned at this point, to where they don’t even see the strychnine in their thought processes. I still think actually talking to folks long enough to break through the politics can help, but also folks are so heavily poisoned, that there’s fewer and fewer folks willing to entertain your conversation from the beginning, because they look at you and decide who you are by the stereotypes the poisoning has implanted in their thinking, and they might not even be listening to you even if they let you talk. Shit is fucked. But like always, when there is too much chaotic undergrowth, some sort of cultural fire will come along and clear it out, open the landscape back up, and folks will see more clearly again. That fire might be destructive, and painful, but at this point, ain’t no way around it. Too much shit has been allowed to digitally grow, creating a tinder of kindling for some sort of cataclysm that’s always just around the corner right now. We can’t escape it; just gotta keep an eye out for the smoke and make sure you keep yourself from getting consumed in the actual fire when it inevitably happens.
At one point on my patreon, I was chopping and kudzu'ing old country songs fairly regularly. I got a twelve-pack of them together, which I released on my bandcamp, and then began doing southern rock ones for the second twelve-pack. But I got stuck somewhere along the way. I tried a number of songs, and some were okay, but none were slamming. I'm too much of a perfectionist in some ways, in that unless something is hitting me in that moment, I can't let it go. Which is strange, because in my other creative endeavors, I literally do whatever without thinking, or thinking as little as possible. Not sure why fucking with remixing old songs is different. Anyways, the first twelve-pack is nothing but bangers, including this track. I always forget to hype my patreon or bandcamp on here, or the haiku spikes I do, or the fact I've been writing poems on bottles I find in the woods. It's kinda hard to catalog what I do, because I'm chaotic good in human form. The point of all this is to say there is no point. I'm not a store. I'm not perfect. I'm not even consistent. I just am.
NEVER BEEN TOOKEN OUT holographic bumper sticker on a 2069 Toyota Spaceship body but with a retrofitted 2034 Rivian big block, brung back to Earth (where all us forgotten marginalized types still live), sitting in my back yard because I’m saving up for rims, 42” 240-spoke gold Daytons. I found some on Meta Marketplace but the guy only had four and I really need all six plus probably a seventh for the spare. That’s when you really do shit up, when you have that extra wheel for the spare… pure fuckin’ class.
People
are always like, “robots and technology make our lives better!” but I have
literally never in my life ever heard of a robot even once going, “You know
what? It’s a beautiful fuckin’ day, let’s go to the river.” How can you trust
that shit? I mean, what’s the best example of robots talking in our ear right
now? Google maps or GPS shit, which is always so methodical. I mean you can
select options and avoid tolls and highways, which makes it a little better,
but even then, it doesn’t have important on-the-ground information like, “Oh
shit, there’s that awesome abandoned hotel with all the graffiti!” Google maps
don’t know that shit. Fucked up thing is, even if it collected that data from
you for future suggestions (like it does with actual google or youtube and
shit), it’d still have it wrong, going, “And turn left on 460 West, remember
the abandoned hotel on your right 2.3 miles with all the graffiti,” and I’d go,
“Man, fuck that, my boy Cody almost got stabbed there the other weekend, what
the fuck google maps.” Artificial intelligence is always artificial. And shit,
even in humans, intelligence is stupid as fuck half the time. Anyways, fuck
robots.
You might not be as woke as you think you are. Just
woke enough to call everybody else toxic and retreat to your turtle shell of
digital identity, while the real world continues to spin on a wobbly axis
outside. At some point, real shit has to get done. People have to eat, and not
be stuck out in the cold rain or snow. Some folks care more about cats than
humans, but put forth this revolutionary persona. When shit starts falling
apart (lol start… it’s already falling apart), you’re gonna have to be able to
do shit you don’t wanna do with people you don’t wanna do it with. And you’re
gonna have to know how to navigate that bullshit. I worry about how many
dysfunctional people are culture has created, shit, perhaps including me.
I climbed the highest mountain within seven crow
flights, seeking answers to questions that hadn’t even yet formed coherently in
my soul, trudging to the top through blackberry bush thickets as wide as a
European football field, carefully treading across slick granite stones larger
than my family’s entire existence, having to remove my worn boots at times to
utilize the extra precise grip of bare foot against raw stone, finally getting
to the top, where the old wizened figure sat in pentagram position, in
rhinestone overalls and large flowing grey beard wisping off like smoke into
the clouds. I contemplated upon my timid approach how to frame my question
which had been fermenting in my heart since birth, though the words have never
been clear, a basic innate searching or yearning that has existed inside me
perhaps even pre-dating English words, I don’t know, maybe that’s why I can’t
figure out how to ask it. I made my final approach, and the old person – I guessed
a man because of the beard but they were entirely effeminate as well, so I can’t
say for certain about any gender specifics, as there seemed to be some pretty
dope breasts trying to peek out from around those glittering overalls – the old
person said, “There is a question eating at you, but my statement will only
poke that question with deeper questions that will be easier for you to answer.”
I said, “cool” like a fucking dumbass because I was simultaneously in spiritual
awe but also wondering what the old figure’s nipples were like, and whether
they had cursive tattoos on their chest. The old sage, still smooth in the face
as if river waters had rippled over it for centuries, said, “Guns don’t kill
people; people kill people.” This confused me. I was trying to escape the
manufactured discourse, the engineered divisions which push us all to the brink
of violence against each other on a daily basis. This is not what I expected.
“Does that mean… should I get some guns then?” Was
it time to prepare for the darkest futures, the delusions the most evil amongst
us have been wishing for decades? Uncivil wars among each other, for the scraps
of the American empire’s diminishing returns?
The old sage opened their eyes, and looked at me.
Their eyes were the color of rose quartz, with a comforting gaze, like staring
into your father’s mother’s eyes and your mother’s father’s eyes at the same
time, as a baby, adrift into this Earthen existence but with the protective
gaze of elders who knew more about the maelstrom you’d been launched into than
your own folks did. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Think about
it.”
I thought about it, but I hadn’t expected a pop quiz, and was struggling with
the anxiety of being impressive to weirdly sensual old spiritual figures at the
top of unrealistic mountain ranges. “I don’t get it. Why guns? Should I start
having guns again? Because my uncle killed himself a long time back, and it’s
always kinda made me not want to have guns because of my own depressive
episodes. Plus, my kids…”
“Settle down,” said the old spirit. “This has
nothing to do with guns. People kill people, so beware people. People with guns
kill people more efficiently than ungunned people. They have combined the mad
philosophies of human beings with the mechanical actions of industry. Get the
fuck away from those people. Wherever there’s a bunch of them, get the fuck
away. Even if you have to jump over fences, both physical and unseen, some even
mandated by constitutions. Get the fuck away.”
So I’ve been trying ever since. But it’s only been
a few minutes. I think.
Everything I thought to write about love seemed corny as fuck so I ain’t write anything. Except this. Shout out to Boogie Brown, as always dropping the Blue Globe Beats flavors, with prolific abundance.
