SONG OF THE DAY: Rollin' On

My grass is blue, and it’s not artificial turf. It’s also tall, and it got tall enough some nosy ass neighbor rode up on his riding mower and asked if I needed help, so now I can’t cut it even longer, out of stubbornness. You know that fucker runs a leaf blower? Use of a leaf blower at home is class treason if you consider yourself a redneck, in my opinion. Leaf blowers are the polo shirt of yard equipment, meaning the shitty collared shirt small business bossmen types and “friendly” sales dudes wear, not Polo brand shirts, which is pretty much exclusively worn by people who listened to hip hop a lot from 1985 through 1996 and have been poor at some point in their life, so like to feel like they’re fresh, even though let’s be honest, we’re probably not. I mean, my raggedy ass is out there sitting in knee-high blue grass, wearing a Polo rugby long sleeve with the skull and crossbones patch that I got for cheap off a antique store booth, in one of those blessed places where the antique store emporium is still a lot of junk and the vintage reseller vibes haven’t poisoned it with, “Well, now I can’t afford this shit no more”ness. Anyways, fuck leaf blowers, fuck vintage as a means of making dope shit impossible for ballin’ on a budget types to get. But thank god for shoplifters, and vandals, and mandolin players who are 6 years sober but still crazier than fuck, and thank god for all the goat-headed resistors to proper order and curation of all of society. If we can’t have nothing nice, then neither can y’all.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cool Me Off

Still see grown ass dudes who seem to be trying to share social circles with me who say “FTW” as “for the win”, which just boggles my goddamn mind. Then I remember it’s a blessing, because what if I accidentally trusted one of these types and said some real life shit to them? It’d be immediately compromised by their unreal nature. And then I am also reminded more of the world is plastic than not, which is exactly why the traditional meaning of FTW is what it is.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cable Access Funk

Do you know about the slinky synth funk movement of XL Middleton? If you don’t, you should. It’s that inspirational type of funk that makes you feel better about existing, regardless of how fucked up the world might feel.

SONG OF THE DAY: Watermelon Hangin' On The Vine

Been thinking a lot lately on how the term “survivor’s guilt” ain’t exactly right, because it’s not guilt you suffer from. It’s just all the shit you’ve seen up close that exploded those around you, and threatened to injure you – either directly or from their psychic shrapnel – it builds up and builds up, and becomes heavy. There’s a heaviness to your existence because you saw all that and are still here, and maybe even relatively unscathed if you’ve been blessed by the universe to navigate it as such. Guilt’s the wrong term because it suggests shame, or something was done wrong, and you’re not really even a survivor because you still got that heaviness on your soul, and it tinges how you think, hopefully for the better so that you try to lighten the psychic load of those closest to you. And you have to lighten it for them, or else you run the risk of accidentally laying down more of those obstacles, and perpetuating them cycles of needing to survive things that got nothing to do with breathing air or eating food or getting sleep. The older I get, the less I believe in complicated answers to things, and in fact it seems we way over-complicate everything we get to thinking too hard about (as individuals or as collective species), and that leaves so many extra steps for all psychic obstacles to get laid by bad spirits. I know I’ve got a heaviness because of the path I’ve walked in life, but that motivates me to help others feel lighter. And that helps this heaviness of mine feel easier to carry as well. Ain’t a fuckin’ ounce of guilt to that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ojuelegba

Not gonna lie, I will listen the fuck out of some Wizkid. I have always wanted there to be a website which had people from all over the Earth drop the hottest hip hop shit from their corner, like Ozone scene reports back in the day. Without local guides though, all someone like me can do is randomly download tracks from various West African music blogs, and see what sticks. Wizkid is a superstar there, and relatively unknown here. Being known is overrated though. Anonymity will always be five-stars.

H0P3 T0 W4LK TH3 HVNDR3D-PLVS...

hope to walk the hundred-plus

miles to mouth of Chesapeake,

to undo some western steps

SEVEN 'POSSUMS HAIKU JOURNAL

Over the past decade, at first inside my own heart, but then as it has spiraled out into a larger community, both at in real life physical events as well as online communities, I've enjoyed the expanding ripples of people embracing the haiku form. It's been such a constant and positive influence on my life, both as a personal practice as well as what others create and share with me and these communities.

I've contemplated in recent years launching a literary journal of some sort, based in the James River basin of Virginia, as that's the part of Earth where I've lived most all my life, so it the land and river there has had a profound influence on me, but also because it's where what we consider our current western American culture first laid its tendrils down four centuries ago. There's a lot about that I've seen many people I care about work hard to undo some of the bad parts, while holding up the good.

Poetry, and writing, or language, or however you want to describe it, has always been an important of life for me. It's a meditative practice that helps us be safe, and then okay. It can help us survive storms, and then hopefully heal and thrive when the emotional weather is calmer. And that has always been my creative philosophy. But the language of the land I've lived on most all my life - the Monacan - is mostly lost to that aforementioned history. There's a story of Thomas Jefferson collecting a dictionary of indigenous words at one point, and robber barons stole the trunk with that particular hand-written compendium, but saw it was just a book of writing with no value, and tossed the trunk into the river. I don't know how true that story is or not, but I often think how sad it is to have a language lost, but also how appropriate it would be that somebody saw no monetary value in it so it sunk back into the bottom of the river, literally.

We do, however have a few Powhatan words still with us, from further down the James at the mouth. One of those words is opossum, commonly known as 'possum (though I have re-inserted the colloquial apostrophe). Recently in thinking about what Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrism means to me in a philosophical sense, some mythology about seven 'possums of Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrism came to me. (This will be in issue six of my zine, which you get when you are a supporter of my patreon, or you can buy at haiku slams.) I chatted about all this with my brilliant painter/artist/philosopher friend Dave Moore about this recently, and asked him to maybe conjure up some 'possum imagery to be used for this. And he sent me this picture.

Thus, it is with great pride, but also apprehension at taking on another thing, I announce the launch of a print-version Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrist haiku journal, called Seven 'Possums. This art will be the cover of the first issue, which has no deadline. If interested in submitting, contact me at sovtherngothiccfvtvrist@gmail.com, as we'll be setting up submission guidelines in the coming weeks.

SONG OF THE DAY: Everybody's Hero

World geopolitics got me feeling stressed, but also not really. The constant immediacy of the impending end in the age of the internet causes metaphysical adrenal fatigue eventually. But what’s certain is it seems in many places around the world, the assholes are determined to keep their power by pointing at some other assholes and getting all the people worked up about how they should be afraid of those other assholes. And you can’t get at these assholes, to shut them down the old-fashioned way. Like both in the United States and Iran, right wing assholes who want to blow shit up are using each other to rally people to let them blow shit up. It’s bizarre – it’s like a funhouse mirror of two dogmatic hypocritical bomb-happy cartel of shitheads looking at each other, pretending they’re entirely different. And it’s not like poor people will unify and rise up to overthrow all these oppressors globally because lolol poor people are fucking poor. They’re trying to keep their head above metaphorical economic water if they’re middle class (which is actually generally speaking not middle class, but that whole scale is warped by the extreme upper class anyways), or they’re literally just trying to fucking eat and survive the week if they’re for real poor. How the fuck do you organize that shit? You got a bunch of people out here barely holding their shit together? Some random spark organizes those situations, full of human tinder built from frustration and lack. Anyways, fuck the news, fuck presidents, fuck supreme leaders, fuck senators, fuck candidates, fuck mythologies of the exceptional character of any individual nation-state, whether here or there. Fuck it all. (Which is not a nihilistic “fuck it all” but one that is full of hopes and wishes that humans weren’t so horribly flawed at such grandiose levels all the time.)

F1ND MYS3LF 4LL T00 0FT3N...

find myself all too often

staring up at the sky while

wondering, "what the fuck, yo?"

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Spinnin'

World still spinning slow, at same pace as ever through same space as ever, despite the malcontent machinery manufacturing mad anxiety that we’re gonna walk into a giant blank wall marked END TIMES GAME OVER any year now. Is the cataclysmic change of climate true? Sure. But lolol you ain’t dismantled the device in your hands have you? Any time shit falls apart, part of it grows back together – that’s the natural way of things. Scars get left, sometimes things get wiped out, but people ain’t gonna stop scrabbling across the surface of this Earth any time soon, albeit the herd may get thinned. Mushroom spores will scatter, the poison clouds will eventually dissipate, and sure it takes many half-lives for some of our poison to decay, many of us are already living half-lives ourselves, so maybe shit needs to fall apart and get pieced back together anyways. Unfortunately, people tend to be complacent, and it takes trauma to wake us up at times. Nonetheless, it’s Friday, it’s chill outside (at least where I am), so walk around outside (if you are able) and scatter some metaphysical spores amongst the industrial detritus of our these days American lives.

SONG OF THE DAY: Build

Build or destroy in an age of destruction, where even the “good” people who claim to have forsaken the judgment and overstep of “bad” people display destructive tendencies. It’s a very simple question – are you building or destroying? It can be applied to systems as well as the community you build. When you’re on the bus, do your interactions build or destroy relationships? If you are of the class of people buying or selling a home, is it building or destroying that community, in a sense beyond yourself? The food you ate for dinner last night, is it building or destroying your health? Build/destroy comes on the 8 because that’s a numerical infinity slipped sideways, and building or destroying is just supreme math mythology which matches the  yin/yang or the ourobouros or any number of other mythological concepts throughout existence which have guided people on how to live a more balanced life. Why is it this western culture is so obsessed with perverted unsustainable forever growth models though? Why is so much of what our culture is built on not realize all that we build (I use “we” in a cultural sense, not individual sense, though we are all implicated in this shit if we are living here) is also destroying just as much, and unsustainable builds will always lead to a balancing destruction?

Anyways, that Jay Electronica line stays in my mind, where my DJ Heart will just all of a sudden scratch out a “you either build *jiwwy* build *jiwwy* build or destroy, where you come from *scrtcc* come from *skeh skeh scrtcchhh* come from” while walking through my day, and I’ll remain conscious of how each step I’m taking is actually being took, and even though there ain’t no visible water, ripples always bouncing out, from every action.

S0M3H0W S3LF-3V1D3NT TRVTHS...

somehow self-evident truths

became justification

for a lot of fucked-up shit

SONG OF THE DAY: Wait a Minute

Love too listen to the old school soul on the slow weekend where attempts to regain breath in relentless bullshit world have brief windows to happen. Love too cut on the red light at night and fill the air with passionate stank. Love too wake up Sunday morning, hook up the turkey sausage and over lounger eggs, and keep it slow as lincoln continental plate tectonic drift for as long as possible, before the bullshit world starts bloop blooping at you first thing in the morning once again. Fuck work fuck cops fuck politics fuck walls fuck borders salaam.

4G3 H4S N0T SM00TH3D MY 3DG3S...

age has not smoothed my edges -

still as wild-eyed and anti

all this bullshit as ever

twitter renga #0818

[twitter renga done one tanka at a time, 

at my @_raven_mack_ twit acct] 

one year after "bad 
people on both sides" comments, 
bad energies rise 

life in America feels 
more fascist than not most days 

I sit at bus stop 
right where people were beaten 
most days of the week 

walk through that intersection 
multiple times every week 

information shared 
through digital means is not 
real information 

educating yourself by 
clicking links is false knowledge 

then again, nothing's 
real; all's a conspiracy; 
life has no meaning 

grasping for explanations 
like drowning fingers at air 

already declared 
state of emergency for 
downtown Charlottesville 

one thousand geared-up cops shall 
arrive, but for what purpose? 

community on 
edge pushed closer to edge, with 
no explanation 

we're left to dwell on hearsay, 
rumors, and filtered info 

the past week felt more 
like a month to be honest - 
your boy's exhausted

proud of my community 
though, surviving together 

psychic exhaustion 
hard to sleep off - can't unsee 
stealth panopticon 

"sharing openly" online 
means self-snitching - DON'T FORGET 

community cares 
for themselves when/wherever 
institutions fail 

the quality of this care 
is also vastly improved 

world continuing 
to cave inward, withdrawing 
to only safe space 

withdrawn, and lacking support, 
navigating the darkness 

why are so many 
others' needs tethered to me? 
what about raven? 

how the fuck do I escape 
this heartless plough horse feeling? 

"it will get better" 
people assure, but nothing 
suggests this is true 

the tethers become further 
tangled, more complicated 

anxiety and 
anger, anxiety and 
anger... on repeat 

remind myself to breathe deep; 
one day I'll breathe red clay 

my inheritance 
is addiction, depression, 
and self-destruction 

the privilege to destroy 
self in unobserved margins 

how much of whiteness 
is feudal servitude to 
lords, and not brothers? 

I'd rather slit golden throats 
than bemoan broken borders 

el jefe es un 
bastardo, this has always 
been true, from day one 

his father is greed, thus none 
of us seen as his equal 

patriarchal hymns 
and western civ progresses 
sown into young minds 

those who take pride in settling 
are denying themselves growth 

a universe grows 
in ways antithetical 
to economics 

hoarding resources with armed 
fist is not actual growth 

fearmongerers might 
control the digital fog 
machines, but not me 

tear down all the fences and 
your "both sides" argument dies 

SONG OF THE DAY: tr0gl0dYt3

caveman molecules activated

southern humidity acclimated

most days in goodwill button-up and goddamn I hate it

was born to barefoot in woods or walking 7 miles through alien neighborhoods

full of cousins I ain’t met yet so of course it’s all ways all good

all this progress all the technological advance

and yet hearts are more clogged than ever

too much manufactured saturated facts

fractured from what’s real

fuck it

I remedy with each step I take each day I’m still breathing

purify the enculturated poisons with a mushroom’s persistence

pushing my head through the muck

unfuck it

create

grow

be good

which is never as hard

as it is made out to be

caveman molecules wasn’t ignorant

same molecular structure

same energies negative and positive spinning around

in the same chaotic spirals

as the beginning of time

each day I’m just trying

to find

peace