TH3 P4TH W3 C0LL3CT1V3LY...

the path we collectively 
walk never ends with one; we 
build a future together 

R1D TH3 S4M3 R04D F0R N34RLY...

rid the same road for nearly 
two decades, but Earth shifted - 
signaling time to move on 

SONG OF THE DAY: 100 Years Ago (Piano Demo)

Over a century ago, the house I live in was some sort of supervisor’s house for the soapstone quarry down the hill. The old road is my driveway, and I can walk the dog down paths back there still that go down to some abandoned and gutted buildings, plus a lot of debris. This was one of the first places with electricity in America, apparently, and the smokestacks from two defunct power plants are visible a couple stones throws away, both of which got washed out in hurricane floods in 1969. The area itself got washed out economically by the Great Depression though, long before that. This quarry operation used to employ thousands of people, had a local narrow gauge train line that ran between quarries, and ran to connect to north-south mainline a few miles west of here, and the east-west mainline a few miles south of here. There’s an old stone church a half mile away, which used to be Episcopal but is not occupied by Mennonites, though not Old Order because there’s cars parked there on Sundays, not buggies. Houses everywhere are old company houses, strings of them identical looking still, even though a hundred years old, in varying states of care or disrepair. And there’s soapstone slag everywhere, giant rocks piled here or there that got blasted and cut but wasn’t up to snuff to be used back when it was used. It’s all a really neat and beautiful place, but one that was literally built and blasted by business, left to rot for the most part, and has gradually become one with the Earth again, though full of litter. I find old bottles all the time on my walks through woods and along the river, and have been writing poems on the more appropriate bottles.
The river right below my house, where the bridge and one of the power plants got washed out in 1969, still flows like always, diverted by the dam that’s still there but not powering anything now. I wonder what the river’s decline in this area was before the dam, how steep was it originally? Seems like the land slanted hard there, so I imagine there was a natural waterfall at one point that caused them to put a dam there. A hundred years seems like such a solid slice of time, but it’s similar to flying to Chicago, in my opinion. The years are still relatively arbitrary chunks of time, although the days represent one cycle of sun and night, and the year is meant to mark a full circle around the sun in our little corner of infinite space. But all the minutes and seconds get lost, and you just end up a hundred years away, like landing at O’Hare, missing all the little pieces and parts that got you there, from point A to point B. Chances are I won’t know “one hundred years” personally, at least not as this collection of molecules as their currently arranged into a dirtgod raven mack. Humans chase “knowing” more than their fair share of space on the timeline through reciting history and writing shit down like mad, but when I get lost in the tiny steps of walking along the river and through the woods, not keeping track of them nor wanting to, it seems like I might be happier as a human if I let that shit go entirely – all the minutes and hours and days and years, stop fretting over age or wasted time or grey hairs signifying failures of fulfilling mechanistic checklists of being a “productive” member of society. I ain’t got to do shit really. Time is a goddamn chain, tying me up in the yard of my life, leaving me stuck there, barking at the river down the hill that I want to go run to and dip my bare feet in, because I’m trapped. My oldest kid has a concept they always drive home called Time Destroyers United, and I’ve come to love that concept – just destroying time, not in some big revolutionary explosion of cataclysmic change, but just little pokes and stabs and monkey wrenches, sabotaging our concepts of time wherever we can. So I hope you destroyed some time today, and also enjoyed yourself, free from clocks, or phones, or clock phones, or phone clocks, or anything.

R04DS 1 VS3D T0 W4ND3R D41LY...

roads I used to ride daily

become distant memories

as I wander through this life

SONG OF THE DAY: Standing at the Crossroads

People always talking about being at a crossroads, but roads are built along master planned grids. That's why intersect they at 90 degree angles. Ain't no 90 degree angles with rivers and creeks and shit. On top of this, crossroads mythologies always got this angel/devil dichotomy, good and bad battling it out, which direction will you go. It all feels very limited, in that both roads got built by somebody trying to make me follow that path, good or bad. Even the bad road probably was the good choice to whoever built it, and the good one is bad. Binaries. If you don't do one, then you gotta do the other.

Fuck a crossroads, I'm walking diagonally into the woods. And not even a straight diagonal but a cattywampus diagonal with chaos in every third step (so as to balance between right and left footed chaos steps).

But nooooo, the assholes put all the food stores and Goodwills right along the stupid fucking roads, at the crossroads, so I'll have to come back out and get some food and look for work clothes with the red tag because that's the tag this week. One day I'm just gonna wear poplar bark to work, fuck it. If they fire me it'd probably be a blessing. But the same people who built all the roads to intersect at imperfect 90 degree angles are the same one who build meticulous bureaucracy into everything else, so I wouldn't even get fired right away. They'd write up notes, and get filed with other people, and then official types would talk to me or make me do a training video and I'd have to send a screenshot of having completed the training video, and then sign a statement that says something official and legal sounding that is essentially a translation of "RAVEN, DON'T WEAR FUCKING POPLAR BARK TO WORK AGAIN" and fuck man, all of this is so pointless, isn't it?

TH3 3N3RG13S 0F T4R B0N3S...

the energies of tar bones

vibrating overhead, to

weave net of self-destruction

SKY 0V3R R04D 1 L1V3 0N...

sky over road I live on

has given variations

on blue and white theme galore

FVK4S3 D0CVM3NT3D...

Fukase documented

the same solitude I see;

most folks blinded by purpose

RVR4L 4M3R1C4N PL4C3...

rural American place

with mostly paste faces which

don't tolerate much strange shit

Jillstein Judyrock Krupert November 2017 number ten "boyz-n-tha-hood (remix)"

[had been all set to talk about how Eazy-E was problematic, and even more so how Kilo G was very problematic in this song, but instead life did its thing where it throws something else at you because I had this old truck in my yard for a long time and even before I get to that I guess I should explain we spent too much money on Thanksgiving gluttony HOW DO PEOPLE EVEN BLACK FRIDAY MUCH LESS SMALL BIZNESS SATURDAY AND ALSO CYBER MONDAY MUCH LESS GIVING TUESDAY WTF EARTH AMERICANS? so we were short for a credit card bill due this yesterday but there was the aforementioned truck sitting in the yard for a long time because the clutch went out in it and I started driving our second minivan when it went from first to second after I tore out all the seats to make room for hay and wood and stuffs like that but a guy down the road named Frosty THAT’S WHAT HE SAID OKAY THIS IS ALSO THE COUNTRY SO NOBODY’S NAME IS THEIR REAL NAME EVER REAL NAMES ARE FOR ASSHOLES stopped by to ask about the truck for himself or his grandson or somebody or another and I told him I’d take $500 or best offer and once he saw the windshield was cracked he came back on black Friday lol this was his black Friday shopping and he offered me $300 cash and best believe I took it because that meant yesterday I could go by the Lowes to pay the credit card bill that I wasn’t gonna be able to pay and yes it was Lowes because nobody any longer actually builds and fixes stuff we just use shoddy materials from box hardware stores to do shoddy DIY projects all of which will crumble back into the Earth before our children are grown since this is America where we have cheap wooden houses that cost exorbitant prices because this is the end of our dying empire but anyways I rode to the Lowes after work and paid the credit card bill even paid an extra $60 on it because lol I had Frosty’s hundred dollar bills in my pocket and fuck it let’s pay this credit down as quick as possible so I can finally move to Istanbul as was written in the ancient prophecies of the wild bird that returned to conference with his eastern brethren and realize the dreams of the ancestors THAT IS FUTURE MYTHOLOGY SORRY FOR THE TANGENT and after paying the bill I realized there was money leftover still to finally go get some new floodlights to replace the burned out ones on the back of the house that have been burned out for months maybe even a year who knows and of course I got green despite all the stupid SUPPORT OUR VETERANS attempts to co-opt chill green floodlights on the back yard and I bought the floodlight bulbs and as I walked there was a dude standing a chill looking dude dressed in the khakis and mid-level dress shirt of a man who is attempting to be professional from a perhaps toxic masculine background, and when I say chill I hope you understand what I mean because I don’t want to explicitly say he was african-american and force you to think through that filter mostly because I don’t want to say it myself as that shouldn’t have to be clarified as outside the norm but then again if I don’t say it you will think through normal filters and once I tell you the last part you will assume he was a white dude and you won’t think he was chill you will think he was a stupid fratbro gone into hipster construction which he may still be even though not white but anyways the hat he was wearing with this construction professional outfit and his chill smile and trustable eyes THE TRUSTABLE EYES WERE WHAT MADE ME THINK HE WAS CHILL YOU CANNOT LIE WITH YOUR EYEBALLS REGARDLESS OF ETHNICITY THERE IS NO SCIENCE THAT PROVES THIS BUT I BELIEVE IT was an Olde English 800 baseball hat not weird and hipster-y looking but like he was a fucking distributor or some shit but who would be a distributor of alcohol and wear an OE hat it doesn’t make sense but it happened as I walked out from paying the Lowes bill after selling the junk truck in the yard and the whole reason it happened was because I was gonna write a dumb blurb about how Eazy-E was problematic and Kilo G from this song was even more problematic but I was gonna then say that people who do rapgenius notations are more problematic than that which is a pretty big jump because Kilo G and Eazy-E were both sociopaths and perhaps rapgenius clarifiers are sociopaths of a different variety in fact that’s likely true but ultimately none of it matter because life is chill and one can sell old trucks and go pay bills and see chill dudes in for some bizarre reason an OE hat and that is In Real Life and it always makes all the problematic shit seem small in comparison because In Real Life shall always impress]

Junebug Junior Krupert November 2017 number five "master of sparks"

yesteday saw cop (like a copperhead) sitting at end of our road

rural road nothing but farms & trump signs mostly

so odd to see cop ever

much less the state troop that was the one I saw

so I actually stopped for first time ever (sitting right there)

dirty eyed their presence, and went on

BUT OF COURSE

one of the kids forgot something & had to come back 5 mins later

no cop (copperhead) any more

slithered off to entrap someone else

just like a snake my thinking went

wondering where they went off too

perhaps down this road now

perhaps at my house

sorting thru stuff while knowing I’m out

bc social media is serious bizness to somebody on the other end of the data mines

why the fuck sitting on my road, or any road really?

the former family farm they sat at is now agri-farm

put biosolids (human shit) on the land couple times over

transco pipeline which essentially is the 1950s atlantic coast pipeline

runs thru same field they was sitting at too

they did all types of discreet building/repair shit this past year

why? and what? I couldn’t find out shit from nobody

but that cop, that shitty ass state troop was sitting there

making sure I didn’t have a cracked windshield

or stopped enough not a rolling stop like what makes sense

if no one is coming

which mostly no one is

BC IT’S THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE

but they gotta write tickets

generate revenue

even though tax bills trying to get made which make revenue worse

so more cracked windshields gonna get written up

more “didn’t come to a complete stop” conversations gonna happen

more interactions between struggling ass ppl barely holding their financial world together

& shitty fucking piece of shit cops

who look down on us from first word

who got guns & not afraid to use them (obv)

a disparity is obvious

a metaphysical boot has been pushing down for 30-plus years, likely since the beginning

but definitely been in downward stompjectory since Reagan Era

& just bc some only noticed the boot since last Nov

that fuckin boot been stomping the whole time y’all

trying to squash spirits (the irony of using “squash” an important plant in pre-gridlock culture)

they just not trying to hide it now

or not as good at pretending (definitely not as good at pretending)

(if you think of souls as a spectrum, T Kaine not too far from D Trump on that spectrum, though the American political system is designed to highlight and expand this one dark edge of the spectrum & declare the differences between a T Kaine and D Trump to be enormously obvious)

(from other end of spectrum where life is real & ppl actually exist, not so obv)

they trying to stamp out all potential fires before they happen

but guess what?

such errant stamping is the master of sparks

and y’all can’t stomp everywhere

and sparks bounce

and you’ve made a lot of cultural detritus with your always new psychology

and sparks land

and sparks spark

and you can’t stomp it all out

you’re barely holding it together now

the seams will strain as you try to choke us all at once

& wait until we’re sitting at the end of your road

& you’re trying to creep past without us noticing

just wait

TH3 S4DN3SS 0F 3NSL4V3D C0RN...

the sadness of enslaved corn,

forced into robotic rows,

spliced of all feral spirit

C0NF3D3R4T3 FL4G SP0T-L1T...

confederate flag spot-lit

sits across the street; "it's about

states rights" the kid once told me

IO-SP33D1NG SL0WLY VP 4ND...

10-speeding slowly up and

down Blue Ridge foothill country

roads, hoping trucks don't hit me

MY D4D W0VLD S4Y 1F TH3 S1GN...

my dad would say "if the sign

says 'curve 15 mph',

that's a good place to wreck at"

SVST3N4NC3 FR0M D3TR1TVS...

sustenance from detritus -

the vulture's meditation

as psychic survival plan

Red Pitchfork Green Fields

(A thing I wrote about May Day, related to the ONGOING GOFUNDME BIRD TRIBE GOT regarding acquiring the land that surrounds our current compound. PLEASE GIVE if you are able to. PLEASE SHARE with others who might be able to give if you can. And PLEASE PUT GOOD THOUGHTS into the world for us to achieve this goal.)

Today is May Day, which has both a green and red tradition. The green branch is the earth fertility rituals associated with spring rebirth of the plant world after seemingly dormant winter period, and the red branch is the worker’s rights holidays significant to more communal/socialist societies. Interesting enough, culturally we associate the red flag of communism with the Soviet Union, or perhaps China at this point, but the original place on Earth the red flag was ever flown in honor of the workers was western Wales during the Merthyr Uprising in 1831. Coal miners took to the streets in protest against unemployment and low wages and generally poor quality of life in the region, and the protestors flew a red flag to symbolize the blood of the workers. The original philosophical basis of socialism is really not all the different than the original philosophical basis of what we call in the United States democracy, as both – in their pure origins – were envisioned as guaranteeing everyone had equal provision and opportunity. Of course, once ideals are put into practice they become corrupted by human greed, and both socialism and democracy have been perverted as their histories unfolded. As civilization has gone unchecked at the global level, both the people (red branch) and Earth (green branch) have been collaterally damaged by unchecked greed. And this is seen in our local environments.

The road we live on takes its name from a defunct family dairy farm. The front two-storey portion of our rambling home was built in 1905, and was one of the original houses in this area. When we moved here in 2000, the far end of the road, headed to town, was a cattle farm owned by local family. Once the elders passed on, including the aging farm caretaker, there was no one from the next generation to take up farming, as most of the next generation had made their livings in logging locally (and continue to do so). The cattle farm at the end of the road has since been sub-let by a factory farming operation from the next county over that leases any acreage it can in the area. We’ve seen a steady cycle of factory corn and soybeans be cycled through that acreage at the end of the road the past few years.

Additionally, the Trans-Atlantic pipeline runs less than two miles from our home. A compression station is situated within two miles of us as well. This pipeline was built back in the 1950s, and has largely been overlooked as energy industry corporations attempt to build new pipelines through our region now, to export natural gas overseas, though the promise of local jobs and local benefit is always used to entice local areas to get on board with corporate profiteering. Where this cattle farm used to exist at the end of our road has seen some extensive pipeline work in the past six months, in what I’m assuming is repairs, but honestly we have no idea, because the entities in charge of such things don’t have to let the people know. They do what they feel is best to the Earth, without giving the People any awareness of what is happening.

This tends to be the modus operandi right now. But for us at our Bird Tribe home, which includes both Suzanna’s Owlcraft Healing Way herbal school and practice, as well as Raven’s Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts shineface resistance factory, both the Earth (green branch) and the People (red branch) are important. We do not believe in the Man vs. Nature dichotomy, because humankind and the natural world are actually intertwined in a far more complex relationship than simple conflict. The land has healing power for the people, and the people have tending capabilities for the land. This is how we’ve always viewed the land we live on – we let it lead the way to an extent, but we also have to take care of it to help maintain balance. This is not all that different than the indigenous philosophy towards the land which used to be the modus operandi here up until a few centuries ago.

A modern update of the red flag of the people that has been used in Wales in recent years is a simple homemade design of a red pitchfork on a green field. The green field was added to represent the land, and how it is what gives us life. The red pitchfork symbolizes the people, specifically those who work the land, or tend to it so that it provides for us. We love this flag for what it symbolizes.

Even out in the middle of nowhere where we live, plots of land have been “developed” into micro-suburbs, little parcels of the United States dream manufactured and marketed to those with the proper credit to be approved to pretend they’ve moved to the country, without actually having to tend to the land, or have it tend you. Manicured lawns with marine cuts maintained at worst weekly, plus impersonal houses with fresh vinyl siding and complementary shutters screwed beyond functionality that become obsolete before a single 30-year mortgage is ever paid off. Those mortgages are rarely paid off entirely too, as most of the houses built within a few miles of us have been sold and re-sold, or foreclosed and auctioned, and never does anybody fully own any of these houses, so much as maintain the payment to the bank.

The land next to us is a 10-acre plot that may or may not suffer that same fate, but as it stands now it is just Earth, without a single human structure. We really hope to add it to our 4.5 acres, and let it be land alone, with maybe a few simple off-the-electric-grid structures at most. We want it to be an extension of the work we’re already doing, and help us create a plant Sanctuary as well as a natural workshop space for various creative arts. We’re working towards that goal, slowly but surely, but are much further away than we need to be to make it happen. Anything folks can give (who are in a position to do so) helps us resist what is happening all around us, both locally as well as globally. Our campaign here is not to “buy” this land but just to get the down payment. We will finish the deal after that, on our own, just as we struggle to finish our current mortgage payment on a place that is valued, by the banks, at less than we owe. Ultimately that doesn’t matter to us, because we’re not re-selling this place, and we won’t be re-selling the land next to us, when we get it. We want to unify these plots because we are already unified with this place. Our roots have taken hold, regardless of assessed values or current market or any of that other devilish tomfoolery.

Sadly, that was also the case with our neighbors who are forced to leave this land behind now. They held this little chunk of land together for 20 years, but the devil math came back and reclaimed it as resource and collateral and ignored the larger truths of the Earth and the People. It is our turn though, and we hope to be able to fly our own homemade red pitchfork on a green field flag on this little plot of resistance against business as usual, against “development”, against all that overlooks the simple complex relationship of human and land, and tries to unnecessarily over-complicate it behind the abstraction of wealth. We do not want this land to get any more abstract than it already is, because it is already a really beautiful place, and we’d like to help leave it that way.

C0MP0VND CLVTT3R 0BST4CL3S...

compound clutter obstacles

never deter loyal dog

born just barely down the road

whosoever shall rent this...

whosoever shall rent this

property shall have shitty

broken down Honda Civic

back roads barn bigger than house,

where the mad sciences of

rural survival conjure