January I

Those normal ghosts of disillusionment have paraded into my brain again. Why believe? Why trust in fate? Why continue to pursue the EMF dazzle dance with carpal tunnel jazz hands, pretending it is building something, rather than destroying?

Basic tenet of most religions was expressed in that NGE-inspired Jay Electronica line, "You either build or destroy, where you come from?" Tricked into thinking we build, only destroying ourselves and our peace. This civilization is a trickier beast than ever before, and those at the top have robot fetishes at least in terms of letting robots heard the domesticated animals into the proper fences. Don't believe for a second the same rules apply top-to-bottom. The meritocracy delusion should be gone from your head by now.

This is me - an online blur of darkness, out of focus on purpose (my purpose - or their's?), showing bright brilliant flashes but never able to pull it together. By civilization standards, I am a failure, and perhaps even a squandered talent. But on the build or destroy standard, I am a success, just without the "I". It is a success that what gets done under the name attached to me has been done in the ways it has been done. It is beyond me; I have had little control over it my entire life. Now is no different. Though sometimes it would be nice to lottery ticket imagine if I was a successful by civilization's standards writer, working in a back yard studio with electricity, paying my electric bill the month I get it instead of right at the cut-off date and usually even then calling to get an extension until my next paycheck, but that isn't the way it goes. The things that would have to be done to be that type of civilized success, they are not in me. And if they were in me, I wouldn't do this the way that I do it. Word is bond.

freestyle sonnet #1

Cyber-syllable sonnets dribble from the dome

Through the electrosmognetic haze thick like thigh

Muscles, and causing similar sex thoughts to roam

Through the dullard corridors of internal sky.

Keep telling my children the universal stars

Seen in dead winter dark through loose windows rattling

Is mirrored within, confined loose in skull-like jars

Where caveman molecules built by fire are battling

With cybertron special effects, buzzing, sealing

The perimeter of lime green auras, free born,

But the mental illness ain’t ailment – you’re feeling

what’s real in the rhythm of caveman children torn
From uncarved block party wild style universe birth;

If you can’t hold it in your head, then what’s it worth?

River Dip #1

Almost didn't because I felt lazy or fighting off cold or something or other, but did end up dip dip diving into the dirty James River this afternoon. The ol' lady laid out, fighting off the ironic anemias, but my eldest kid did the soul baptism to start a new year as well. Water was cold (naturally) but air was nice, heart muscles clenched up for a brief minute and I wasn't sure if I was bound to die a Polish immigrant death or not, but my body settled and lungs started working. It was good.
I turn 40 this year so am hoping for 40 dips in the river (at least), spaced appropriately, so as to utilize winter water to keep the Viking Blood pulling to the top. I already notice a difference in my ability to enjoy cold, which will be beneficial should I have to sleep outside in the coming years I guess (even with global warming, temp. extremes will occur).
I set some goals for the year, and since most were attached to quantities, which I am trying to replace with quality attitudes in my life, there's no need to recap those goals specifically. But in a nutshell, it is like so:
#1) distribute my paper words more AS SEEN HERE, which is a relatively new thing kickstarted by the fine people of Earth this past month. I had planned on writing like 10 of these in my week off from work, but holidaze got in the way, and honestly I've been writing more poetry than anything else the past few weeks, which is odd. Still though, this will be my first means of expression, because I am disillusioned with the power of the internet (or betrayed is probably more appropriate, lying fuckers, always trying to squeeze dollars out of a motherfucker). And related to this is...
#2) do more readings. I am hoping to start a series in the Charlottesville area in the coming month, and hopefully can line up a similar less regular thing in Richmond. Additionally, there are a number of areas people have said, "Hey, we can do that here," or "I've got a place, let's do this," but you know how people are - when you actually want to do something you find out they are all ideas without many actions. Real shit is hard to find. But I plan on riding buses regularly for weekend tours to do readings. If you know a place or set up readings, or whatever, let me know. Looking to do Friday/Saturdays within bus trip of each other, and hopefully the cheap ass budget buses go wherever the fuck you are at.
#3) slang these haiku spikes AS SEEN HERE, which the more I have them around the more amazing they are. These motherfuckers got power, ain't no doubt about it. I hope to eventually be spending all non-bus-riding weekends carving these things in the back yard and tearing up power tools. (There's photographies on that store too, so scope that shit. Taught myself how to cut mats freehand and everything. Country livin' bitch, you either learn to do it or you don't get it done.)
#4) writing more sonnets. I've laid out a number of crowns of sonnets, that I'd like to get started on because I fear like the Beerbox Haiku project from previous, this will probably be a three to five year process to do what I'm thinking of doing. That being said, I've definitely shifted into sonnet mode for whatever reason, settling with the three rhymed quatrains, then rhyming couplet to close out, all lines 12-syllables (Alexandrine) rather than standardly popular 10-syllables (aka Shakespearan style), because honestly, fuck ten syllables. Twelve has a much better rhythm to me, you can split it into sixes if you want to do internal rhymes as well like a decent battle rapper would, and even split those sixes into threes if you want to go buckwild and do internal linguistic patterns within the rhyme scheme. I don't necessarily do that, but I also don't necessarily don't. In fact, lately when I am bored, I write a "freestyle" sonnet, which means I just sit down and do that shit. I can do 'em in roughly 20 minutes. They ain't time-loved classics, but they have proper syllable/rhyme schemes, follow a story, play with words, and that's probably not normal "casual" behavior for people. Hopefully, I amass a fat stack of these things this year, somewhere in the triple digits. Knowing me, I might get close to 100, or I might write 450. Hard to fucking say.
#5) make music again. Have not made music in a long minute, mostly because I lost the partnerships to do so, one to distance and the other to severing the ties that bind. Amping myself up to post a song a day in February, when I actually do turn 40, which will cover the shit I've done in my life musically (which isn't much), but will hopefully trigger me making some new shit in the next few weeks. I dug out all the broken parts of my haphazard recording system, and everything seems to still be there, other than needing a new pair of dollar store pantyhose for the twisted coathanger spit guard I clip onto my cheap ass mic. Lo-fi til I die, y'all.

A new year really ain't nothing but flipping an old set of calendar boxes for a new set, but still, I hope it brings to you hope for new beginnings and burning out old clutter and cutting those ties that bind. We had a fire today in the yard and burned up all the Christmas greenery we had used for decorating the holidays - cedar twigs and holly and all that shit - and it flamed up white and bright and wild like evergreens do, and it felt pretty crazy. Definitely some letting go of the old bullshit involved, and moving into the new real. I've felt large strides of personal growth the past two years, as has my ol' lady, and our paths are definitely intertwined beyond just being the Bird Tribe family together. Our ultimate purposes have not fully presented themselves, but I'm willing to keep pushing at it, and excited to see it unfold.
If you are a regular follower of this site or my bullshit over the years, I hope we get to connect face-to-face this year. Let's build. And let's destroy. Unfuck the World.

December V

If you think your boxcutter blade might be dull, you should change it because it is. Mind is the same: if you think things are feeling dull, sit down and read for 20 minutes - a one thing that takes 20 minutes, not a bunch of little electronic shits that isn't really reading so much as robot scanning. A dull mind does not cut through long days that easily.

[then I got bored and wrote a sonnet in 14 minutes inside the facebooks of boredom dumb shit]

waning moon hovers over the end of lost year
boring further dullness into my life's routine,
I gave up self-destructing, gave up drinking beer,
sometimes gave up dreaming in this world rinsed too clean.
my natural born grime shows through my scars, my skin
scuffed, marked with homemade ink stains, bright brain going dark
because all the shinefaces buzz by, born to win.
marked by birth to live lemmy lyrics on a lark;
one step astray, ten years hard work to straighten out,
running what I brung with my supersport ass soul,
but no matter the holeshots, still sit idle, shout
at random passersby, wondering how this whole
facade got built with insanity and magic;
so ends this sonnet written melodramatic.

and then I was gonna complain about how full of shit everybody is, not really just online but in the town I live in, which seems content to pretend to be this little vibrant community without actually building anything artistic or unique about itself, as well as the small city/college I live near and work around, which also seems pretty content to continue to pretend it's some sort of great savior of thinking minds when in actuality it's a country club for the liberal-minded. but you know what? fuck it. 2013 will have me thick up in it, and you motherfuckers can either get down or get ground.

December IV

We are at the end of the line for this collection of boxes called a calendar year.

This World is going up in flames, as Charles Bradley sang. Did you know you can pretend to put the World in flames by supporting my arts in the forms of words as well as objects?

I will always agree with this graffiti, so long as it is speaking of the slang pigs and not real pigs. Real pigs are chill as fuck. Perhaps this was some chill as fuck pigs writing "Fuck you pigs" as in "fuck you rest of civilization specifically human civilization, sincerely signed us pigs."

December III

Fuck man don't even know what I do on this site any more. I really hate the internet and mostly want to be outside, away from the bzzzbots.

Fire cleanses. One day there will be a huge fire that burns up our entire electrical gridlock. The air will have that weird plastic chemical fire smell for half a generation, but ultimately it will be worth it.

Our scraps and shards become artifacts down the road. How will digital shards and scraps exist? If I blew up this site tomorrow, what would the wayback machine salvage? What ends up being our legacy once we go offline? The fuck if I know.

December II

don't really have shit to say, but my man Ben LeRoy of Tyrus Books did tell me, "Hey I recorded this thing called '19 Cycles' you did last year," and I was like, "What the fuck is that?" so he uploaded it. It's actually pretty chill. I think I was writing some sort of epic Chinese poet reincarnated as rural stream of conscious rapper thing at one point when I was transitioning from my Ancient Hobo style into something else. But honestly I don't fucking know. It's pretty cool though, and got me hyped start doing readings on the regular in 2013.

Christmas week so I'm off all week like any good bureaucrat. This is the ghost band that marches through my brain. Been trying to write more but haven't felt good inside so mostly write by burning fires outside at night and writing haiku in offline notebooks, plus started fucking around with sonnets again. I've got this epic thing I started outlining in an Excel spreadsheet, as when I realized a 15 sonnet crown had the 15th sonnet comprised of the last line of the other 14, I figured, "Why hasn't anybody written a crown of crowns?" where there are fourteen crowns and then a final super-crown sonnet comprised from the 14 crowning sonnets. So I started outlining it. Honestly, sometimes it pisses me off how fuckers think America is great, because for the price of one fucking death missile, the government could subsidize me for like five years to work on shit like this. Our legacy will not be long for the history books or strong for the legend, that is for sure.

Still though, Christmas, time with the family, enjoying my kids and Bird Tribe compound. I found blue jay feathers in the woods today and built a couple rock statues and practiced catching chickens and wrestled with goats and wrote some haiku and made chili and chilled the fuck out. This is a good life. Be clear though, nothing enables good in your life but yourself. No government, no gun, no god, no nothing makes your life good except you. Even if there were no governments or guns or gods and we lived in chaos, good still comes from inside your goddamned brain. Remember that shit.

December I

A hermit wrote this drippy writing on a dumpster. It is drippy from the calm sadness of hermitic solitude, which is not so much sadness at being alone but sadness at what man's false claims of civilization have become.

I followed the drips which led back to this scrap tin shack near the abandoned power plant along the Rivanna River. This was the roof, or a close-up of the roof. If you look closely in the rain-slick reflection on the tin roofing, you can see the mirror image of dystopia.

The hermit, when confronted, shrunk himself tiny and crawled into my brain through my left earhole. I tried to shake him out doing that comedic Curly from The Three Stooges thing where you lean your head over and bang on the other ear, but the little hermit didn't come out. For years, he didn't come out. Then I bought this O-scale freight car at the antique store in my small town which is actually a pretty shitty antique store to be honest with you, and also while I'm being honest I'm not sure it's even an O-scale car, I just said that because I know it's not the normal tiny scale people use this time of year around their Christmas trees. But when I brought this toy freight car home, the little hermit started coming out at night and leaving graffiti on the toy freight car. I leave him different color Sharpies out at night. Sometimes he uses them, sometimes he don't.

new goings ons in cyberlands

Hi regular purveyor of fine literary gobbledy-gook, as well as random casual wander-thru-er. I have added a pair of links at the sidebar there that are places you can now purchase the One Thousand Feather zines as well as wacky railroad spikes & junkyard photographies. Perhaps you will consider these things as worthwhile additions to your various lifestyles. Perhaps you won't. Ultimately it is your choice. Ultimately all things are your choice, although not really when you consider the neuroscience triggers often set off by popular advertising as well as the overall numbing effect of electromagnetic pollution. But you still kind of have a little choice in things, and these items I offer upon you are all ideally suited to further help you have more choice amidst the buzzing robot world trying to destroy our dirty animal minds.
So hey, say something in the comments... It helps me waste time when I am watching the minute hands crawl around the same clockface during the daytime.

One Thousand Feathers winding down, explaining my madness

So the ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS KICKSTARTER, which has been wildly more successful than I ever thought, is winding down today. To be clear, I'm using each $100 to support one issue of this thing, so all the extra money is just supporting more of this craziness, not just lining my coffers with gold. Anyways, I showed my junkyard photographies and railroad spike haikus this weekend at a show, and response was strong. I wrote up an explanation of my different projects to have as a one-sheet explanation for folks at that show, and it seems like a pretty good explanation of what the fuck I am doing in my various ways so I am putting it up here for you to peruse and maybe support my kickstarter today. Thanks. Let's unfuck some shit down.

ROJONEKKU WORD FIGHTING ARTS

Rojonekku is a style of word fighting arts taught by me, Raven McMillian (aka Raven Mack) to various demographics of the Universal Underclass as a means of empowerment. A general socio-economic condition of the Universal Underclass is local legislations usually make illegal normal underclass means of survival, thus creating outlaws through normal living. The goal of Rojonekku is to channel these natural Universal Underclass psychologies and genetics into word fighting styles that are generally overlooked by local legislative bodies, who prefer to use the Freedom Charade Technique to keep the masses placated. Thus, word fighting can be disseminated throughout, in traditional means as well as through the use of newer developing social media technologies, without literally causing imprisonment.

I was born from trash psychologies and genetics, and it has taken me hard uphill work for most of my nearly 40 years to recycle myself into a positive enough force to not self-destruct, much less help others who come from similar backgrounds gain power over their lives, even if nowhere else other than the realm of the human word clusters that live inside our heads. When the world around you is a prison, sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical, it’s probably a good idea to unlock the inner-worlds which go as forever as outer space. Big picture of the forest, that’s the goal of Rojonekku.

Inside that forest though, each tree cannot be a grandiose utopian dream. For the Universal Underclasses, life is hard work. So the trees of Rojonekku – the lessons I use with my students, the forms of writing we share with each other, the forms of expression you see here before you – they are all  work. There is dirt and grime and struggle in all of it, because that is what we come from. And instead of feeling ashamed of this dirt and grime and struggle etched into our bloodlines and scarring our insides, we need to embrace it, get the good out of it, and discard the bad. This is what I was born into, so beyond my choice, that is what my life’s work must be.

BEERBOX HAIKU PROJECT

I had for years kept this box full of scraps of magazines cut to the same size, for so long I can’t even remember why. I think it used to be to glue into a writing trigger notebook, but then it became its own thing. At some other point, while deeply immersed in the rewarding life of being an hourly housepainter, I fell in love with haiku again and decided, “I shall write a thousand.” So I did, each one on its own notecard. As they started to pile up, I wanted to highlight my favorites, but all I had laying around was the box full of magazine pictures, as well as empty 12-pack boxes from my family’s recycling bin. So in the haphazard way, I started making Beerbox Haiku Plates.

Eventually, the plates piled up themselves, so I decided to put them together as wall-hangings in groups of three plates. All told, 1000 haiku (only 900 of which were used on boxes), 225 empty 12-pack boxes (most of which, unfortunately, I probably drank on my own, which in itself is 2700 beers), 75 total wall-hangings, not to mention the thousands of magazines pilfered for images over the years. I am glad to say that at this point in my life I no longer self-medicate with factory alcohol products, but piling these haiku up in such a literal sense around me in my life was an important step in moving beyond the self-medication/destruction tornado many Universal Underclass people like myself get stuck inside of.

JUNKYARD PHOTOGRAPHIES

Haiku, being quick observational flashes, indirectly led me to starting to take pictures of random roadside detritus along my life’s meandering path. At first this was with a Polaroid, where I just took pictures of old cars. But then Polaroid stopped making Polaroid film, and this became a hot commodity amongst artsy types, thus pricing me out of that realm. It was sort of cutting it close before they stopped making it, but I enjoyed the dirty effect of Polaroids enough to justify it to myself. Once prices went black market, I couldn’t.

We had multiple family digital cameras, so I took the older one, which has always had a nice feel to it to me. It’s been dropped a number of times so has a cracked bottom where the batteries/card are held in, and has to be duct-taped together to keep the connection working. Thus it looks like a homemade bomb. I bought a new digital Polaroid camera one time, thinking it would continue the Polaroid lineage, but it failed to match the simple megapixel beauty of the older digital camera. In fact, over time I have tried two other newer, better digital cameras, one even suggested by an actual protographer friend, but none of them gave me the happiness of the old ones weird settings. These pictures started going up on my website one a day, and I would write a gambleraku poem to go with them, and then they just started being their own thing. It’s a very meditative experience for me, to just wander around the back sides of the American Façade and take pictures of beautiful blight.

GAMBLERAKU GRAFFITI SCROLLS

Gambleraku is a three-line form of poetry with 7-syllables in each line I started writing because I was feeling confined by the 5-7-5 standard westernized haiku structure, but do not support free form poetry, as it is not workmanlike. Free form poetry is vacation from constraints, and my life is all about constraints for the most part. My constraints have constraints. But I started tinkering with the 7-7-7 structure and enjoyed the flow of it, to use with my pictures I put on online. Somewhere along the way I stopped putting them online, but then I found a roll of receipt paper for a gas pump, and thought, “Wow, it would be fun to turn this into a graffiti scroll.” So I am, little by little.

HAIKU RAILROAD SPIKES

Carving haiku into railroad spikes came to me as a great modern recreation of the work of my favorite rapper – T’ang era Chinese rapper Hanshan, who was a mountain hermit and scribbled poems into cliffs and caves. Where I wander, there are no cliffs and few caves, but there are tons of railroad spikes. These spikes are wild harvested from throughout Virginia, wiped down with vinegar, and then a haiku I’ve written is painfully carved into them, using an industrial back yard method that is loud and physical and really great. These haiku are only used for the spike they are carved on, then gone, so not only are no two alike, but that haiku is unique to that spike.

Additionally, railroad spikes are considered powerful objects in southern hoodoo magic, often used to bless or protect properties. The spikes are infused with the energy of labor, and for me also the spirit of the railroad which has always plucked an outlaw nerve in American history. With this southern hoodoo magic tradition in mind, where the spikes were placed at the corners of a house or property with the pointed edge of the top pointed inwards, I carve the haiku in such that the side with the pointed top edge is blank, and can thus be pointed in the direction you need the haiku to shoot. Conceivably, these haiku spikes could be driven into the ground with the point properly directed, and the energy and spirit of the haiku would shoot in that direction. There are aspects to Wilhelm Reich’s theory on orgone energy involved here as well, and honestly I am afraid to really explain all that these haiku spikes mean for fear of weakening their magic.

I am available for railroad spikes commission work for individuals or properties on a larger scale. This can mean either special requests, or a visit to your land or home, learning its history and your history with it, getting a personal sense of the place, and composing and carving original haiku in relation to the place. These are powerful objects, either for marking a space, or for helping heal a place from past activities.

ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS

One Thousand Feathers is a pamphlet project I’ve recently started that will involve the creation and dissemination of one thousand small literature tracts over the course of the rest of my life. Having a father and a father’s father who both died in their mid-40s, mostly from being caught in that self-medication/destruction tornado that afflicts the Universal Underclass, this project is a means for me to envision and shape the second half of my life beyond the age of 40. This is a portion of my life that I honestly did not believe would exist until recently, and I am excited to see how it unfolds. You can learn more about how to make it unfold, literally inside your hands, as it progresses, online.

CONTACT

Further information about all of these projects, or questions, request, or commissions can be done at www.ravenmillian.com (web), ravenmack@gmail.com (email), PO Box 270 Scottsville VA 24590 (mail), @SSVa_Raven (twitter), Rojonekku (google), or along the back roads of Virginia (life). Thanks for your interest and support.

an interview with RVA Mag

Hey, I did done an Interview with RVA Magazine and perhaps you will find amusing things or insight into my personal nonsense or maybe you'll just find things to mock, who knows? That is the nature of the cybernet. I know this though - you won't make any hilarious animated gifs from it.

tis the season

remember when america had gas stations that sold american gas and it cost less than a dime and plus you could buy a loaf of bread for a nickel? shit ain't been right ever since old Ma Joad died.

remember when ghost goats used to fly into the brains of our enemies and drive them to madness? ever since these fucking smart phones de-ionized the paranormal planes of earth, we can't use our ghost goats like we used to did.

these are the rock structures I build all over the rural south, a thousand a day, usually only in one state at a time. they counteract the detrimental effect of the de-ionization of our auraspheres. whenever you take a picture of them, it ends up looking blurry and rainy like this, kind of like that The Ring movie except for real and not from japan first. this shit is american. southern american. raven southern american. motherfucker.

simple things in life

expensive but busted up american girl dolls

outlaw jack of diamonds, which is a hard card to play

hiding behind the chaos pole, spying on my house

while I'm at work to see if the DHSes

come in like I suspect they do,

those motherfuckers

a series of skies

Railroad tracks behind the Goco where they have the second best fried chicken around. The best is at E.W. Thomas, US 15 just south of Palmyra. I just got a ticket from a state troop there the other week. Fuckin' pigs.

Just an old raggedy hotel sign across from the gay thrift store in Richmond. Gay thrift stores are cool and all, but kind of expensive. Usually a gay thrift store is an early sign of coming gentrification.

Protector oak hovering over my house. As you can see this chimney got shot up by my enemies. That's like mountain folks version of crossing through a gang tag. Haha, not really, but I read that in a Chris Offutt story one time, where a dude shot another dude's chimney as a warning, like that was a thing in the hills of Kentucky. Where I grew up, if you wanted to shoot a dude, you shot him. Fuck the bullshit.

a muthafuckin family style blogpost

muthafuckin baby dolls piled up in the bathroom

a muthafuckin owlcraft emblem on our muthafuckin minivan

my muthafuckin kid is unimpressed by these punk ass pumpkins

it is raining on my camper dreams

I guess for the time being this is the new style of posting here, where I put a few of my pictures up that I tooked with my old ass digital camera that looks like a homemade bomb of some sort, and then I rimble ramble in between them.

I am okay with that. This site has existed in about 19 different incarnations, and my eldest offspring has started a siteblog herself, and I've tried to sell her on the fact all your crazy shit collected in one place over time is a good thing. But ain't nobody believing that on the interwebs. We spread it out like mayonnaise.

I want to live in this thing. No joke. Or at least write inside it. I can tell it's got spirit.

parade of things

I can has a haikus that says "creosote footsteps" from this day crossing some raggedy creosote tye bridge somewhere in Buckingham. I made weird WorkingMan logos with found spikes all over the place and got high with a lost old Buddha black man in a literal cave. (Note: caves are actually cool as fuck. Don't believe the haters.)

The more mellow Motorhead version of "Ironhorse/Born to Lose" is pretty much the shit. The community my bird tribe wanders is cool I guess (not much) but not enough chicks rock tank tops with frilly edges and expose themselves during drunkenness. Hippie chicks expose themselves sure enough, but there's something beautiful about the recklessness of the redneck biker chick that I find more alluring. (lolol I guess redneck recklessness is a more organic nakedness to me.)

My child River is tapped into some things beyond this earth. First time I took her to Raven's Roost (a personal power spot, obviously) she did this pose very seriously along the ledge, and called it her "Thanksgiving statue". Then she flew off to the moon and came back with her hair more golden than before. It was a chill day.

bzzzzbots in the 3rd dimension

I WEAR BARBED WIRE BRACELETS IN BATTLES WITH DEMONS BEYOND THE REALMS OF REALITY VISION, THOUGH ALL THINGS SEEN THRU THE PRISM OF THE MIND ARE REAL AS FUCK, YOU BEST BELIEVE THAT BRUTHA

SUN SHINES MADLY FROM OVER THE SHOULDER OF BZZZZZBOT OVERLORDS LURKING UPON THE RIDGELINE, STARING DOWN WITH THEIR INVISIBLE FOG MACHINES THAT CLOUD MY DAYS/YEARS/LIVES INTO REGRET AND COULD'VE BEENS

AT THE END OF THE DAY I WILL BE NOTHING BUT TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEMORIES TACKED UPON THE DILAPIDATED WALLS OF THOSE I LEFT BEHIND, SUCH A SAD FATE FOR A THREE-DIMENSIONAL BEING WITH FOURTH- AND EVEN SOME FIFTH-DIMENSIONAL ASPIRATIONS, THOUGH TRIPS INTO THOSE REALMS ARE DIFFICULT TO NAVIGATE, WHAT WITH ME BEING LIMITED BY MY X- AND Y- AND Z-AXIS LIMITATIONS. (WHY DID WE MAKE THOSE THE THREE, AS IF ZETA-AXIS WAS THE BE-ALL END-ALL? HOW SELF-INDULGENT OF US. I SHALL HEREFORTH MAKE MY HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN GEOMETRICALLY REFER TO THEM AS THE A-AXIS, BE-AXIS, AND SEE-AXIS.)

Monday morning coming down

I shall never come unhinged, too viking for these bitches

sun shines down on my grimy soul, cleanfaces can't see me

Sunday night dissatisfaction

I have not written much inside the robot box lately because I think like the Big Chief used to say, they've turned up the fog to high.

The train is still on the tracks but it sits idle. America is on freedom duct tape life support. Yall bitches better learn how to scavenge.

You can climb your way up the socioeconomic ladder and see that you've really gotten nowhere, as the ladder is dilapidated and rusty and fucked up. That's because it's not a ladder at all but just some piles of shit you play around on and try to convince yourself you're getting somewhere when the whole time you're going nowhere. Our collective journey to nowhere. Word to Maharidge & Williamson.

Refractions on a Broken Window

This my Kickstarter bitches - ONE THOUSAND FEATHERS - so git on up with the git down, brother. (By the way, I call people "brother" all the time now, but am very careful to say "brother" like a middle-aged black dude and not like an "I only eat organic" white dude. Those guys are very in-organic. Brother.)

One Thousand Feathers zine support

Yo, I set up a Kickstarter thing because I am starting a new phase to whatever it is I do called One Thousand Feathers. First off, here is the kickstarter link - One Thousand Feathers first firecracker - and that explains what is going on in their detail. But let me lay it on you like this here on my interweb homebase - my plan at this point is to do 1000 of these zines, which are only a single 11x17 sheet, double-sided, with traditional Raven Mack microfont, so that each issue will probably be somewhere from 4000 to 7000 words. But fuck a word count. Each issue will be thick with content that'll get your mind pregnant with thought. In fact, repeat that with me: EACH ISSUE WILL BE THICK WITH CONTENT THAT'LL GET YOUR MIND PREGNANT WITH THOUGHT. That's my promise.
As you'll see on the Kickstarter page, there are multiple levels of support, and with the first level you get the zines. Really at this point I don't want to guarantee a way for someone to get every possible issue, meaning there probably will be no subscriptions. There will be a Big Cartel page for ordering the zines as they come out, so I guess you could get them that way. But with that first level of support, you will get the first six issues guaranteed. With second level of support, you get that plus a gambleraku graffiti scroll (as seen by picture link in the sidebar). And with the third high level of support, which are limited as fuck, you'll get a spyku, which is my railroad spike haiku I've been doing lately. Here are some pictures.

Each is a one-of-a-kind haiku straight off the free dome of the wildbird lounger (aka me), ground the fuck into a wild harvested railroad spike. I'm doing these bamas for an art show next month, and basically would like my life to be just hanging around in my back yard grinding on metal all day long every day.
Now the plan for the zine is hopefully I will do one to fourteen a month. The first five will be funded by your support. The next ten will be supported by selling off those first five. Then next twenty after that will be supported by selling off those ten. And like a string of firecrackers, they light each other up to enable me to spread my nonsense in physical form that can be left inside somebody's car or beside their toilet or at the Greyhound station. That is important to me.
If you are tied to the robot world, no sweat. Eventually, down the road, I'm sure I'll compile some of this shit into e-books. I mean I guess I will. Seems like robots have more money than real people nowadays, so I don't want to cut myself off to robot wealth because the electric company accepts that shit just as quick as my gunnysack full of dimes, in fact quicker, because the electric company lady - god bless her heart - she hates that I don't wrap my dimes up. But I'll never wrap my dimes up, takes all the feeling out of it.
So there you have it. You can get on board now or catch up later. I have felt a powerful shift in my world in the past two months, and shit is happening. The hawks fly over my head as if on schedule, the red fox waits for my truck to dance in the ditch alongside the back road home, and the magic has become strong. Shit is real. The struggle is real, and always will be, but I've found a lot of beauty in that struggle because it shows us our true strength. I love real, more than anything. And these One Thousand Feathers will be real as fuck.

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.

Dear Blogsitewebinard

Let this be the reset with us. I do not know what that means other
than I need space, which obviously I've taken. I'm not sure if our
relationship really fulfills me like it once did. And I'm not sure if
that fulfillment back then was real or me just falling in love with my
own reflection in your eyes. I mean, I really appreciate how you let
everybody know what I'm up to all the time, as that can be helpful.
But I'm not sure if anybody really listens to you and shit, because
you're always talking, a thousand things at once, kinda chickenheady.
Anyways, I can't spend the time like I once did with you, though I
enjoy your company and love looking back on our time together. I think
I'm just gonna send you these notes from now on time to time, maybe
come back and add a picture later. I don't know really. I'm trying to
be in love with something I do again and it's hard because most of
what I do is not what I love. Job is a job - not bad but not
fulfilling and just kind of eats up the hours of my life, on the large
scale but also on the daily scale so that when I come home and want to
carve haiku into railroad spikes, it's already dark and cold outside.
So I try to write some bullshit inside but the house is a clutter of
large personalities that billow out in five directions - all members
of the Bird Tribe have large psychic wingspans. Ultimately the house
doesn't work until everybody is down to sleep. And yet I'm getting to
be an older man than I once was, and I am very often down to sleep
before everybody and sometimes anybody.
I don't know. What I'm saying is obviously there's bullshit with me
going on. I'm tired, and don't have the fuckin' energy any more. And I
look back on all the time I spent with our relationship and can't help
but think maybe I should've spent it with someone who gave something
back a little more substantially, a little more fulfilling. I know
that's not your fault necessarily - you're just a fucking thing.
Shit, I don't know what I know or what I don't know. I'll get at you.
And give me back my fuckin' grey hoodie with the fuzzy lining if you
think about it.

Love,
Raven