halal wild style futurist

converted airstream food truck

powered by rose quartz crystals

45s on 33 – #63: “Linda Mujer”

It was always fun gawking at gone people on these Greyhound bus rides through the 1970s. One time passing through Lynchburg though, it got familiar in multiple directions. It must’ve been school shopping time back then or something, because I caught a glimpse of what I’m pretty sure was my mom and me in this shitty old brown Honda Civic hatchback we had back in the day. It certainly looked like a little blonde ass kid like me sitting there, and my mom’s face focused forward at the stoplight. She looked stressed but not mad, and I was looking out the window, passenger side, just like the other more current me (well, not current in that scene I guess) was on the bus passing the dirt brown Civic. It seemed like it could’ve been us, but I wasn’t entirely sure, because I don’t remember going to Lynchburg to go school shopping specifically that time. I know we did sometimes, trips to the nearest city (not even a city by most city folks standards) where they had a giant mall – an hour from my actual home, but hopefully cheaper clothes by having so many clothes option packed tightly together in a thicker concrete cluster of American civilization.

As a kid, school shopping was like a fake Christmas, because you’d hope you’d get all these wonderful things, but mostly what you got was practical shit. Once I got old enough to have peers and pressure, brand consciousness became a thing, which in a poor rural school was less complicated because there were no higher class systems involved (all those kids went to the private school in our area) but kids were jocking Nikes once they became prominent. All I ever wore was bobos though, the cheaper more generic department store knock-offs of the famous shit. No “My Adidas” for me, instead “My Kangaroos”, with fat laces that didn’t even color coordinate completely because fat lace selection was thin. But whatever, I was clothed, without holes, and knew to change into young dirtgod play clothes right after getting home from school, to maintain the integrity of my good shit.

My mom got pregnant with me at 16, and married to my dad – also 16 – before I was born. In the wedding picture, she is visibly ripe with me growing inside her belly. Both turned 17 before I was born, and my dad didn’t really get too much further than 17 in terms of maturing, but my mom held it together. She did well enough that I did well enough – here I am now, a grown ass man with my own kids, college degree (first in my family), with kids expected to go to college. (Not that I associate college with progress, but it allows access to shit my line didn’t have access to in that 1970s real world. So even if my kids fuck up, they have a wider range of opportunity to achieve or fuck up. I guess that feels important – to not limit your offspring.)

A lot of shit was missing from childhood that you’d want in an ideal world (which mostly doesn’t exist), namely emotional stability. Young parents do young things, and party was a well-used verb in the biosphere I was cultured from. But somehow, I got to where I am. Knowing all the various possibilities that exist, not only in terms of my one narrowly defined real world existence, as well as all the infinite chances of multiverse chaos, I realize how blessed I am. It wasn’t perfect, but it could’ve been a lot worse. It still isn’t perfect, but it still could be a lot worse. And as that shitty old dirtgod brown Honda Civic hatchback turned right at the light and I caught a quick glimpse of the blonde face looking out the passenger side window (definitely me), it struck me (now me, the one who went back to ride the old bus) how that’s what’s important, how that’s the bettering of the world I do. I don’t make the whole universe better necessarily, at least not in any discernible way, but in that little one drop of universal essence that this real life is, I make that one drop more pure, more clear, less toxic. That’s all I can fucking do. It’s not easy (never is), but I fucking do it, and I can be okay with that. You’d hope everybody would do that, each variation of each one of us, but that’s the work that needs to be done, to let existence continue. I can’t take pride in it, because it’s work that needs to be done, but I’ve got to feel pretty damn okay that at least I’m doing it, no matter how hard.

what makes America great

exceptional progressive

weaponry electric drone

45s on 33 – #64: “Sugar On Sunday”

After Chief Blackberry Blossoms walking lesson, I kinda disappeared for a minute. (Minute is slang for period, because actually I was gone a few weeks, decades even when factoring in what I was doing.) I wouldn’t say I was depressed necessarily, but the realities of my real world (the one I know) as well as the whole universe (all real worlds combined) left me feeling heavily introspective, lost in thought deep inside the rib cage, far removed from the brain. At one point during Rey-Rey and me exploring the time tunnels, we found an exit that was in the late ‘70s, so I took during this period to weekend round trip bus rides through the 1970s rural south. At first this was mostly contained to Virginia – back and forth to Roanoke or Richmond or Norfolk, but it expanded to all the other cities I remember from Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling as a kid: Greensboro, Asheville, Charleston West Virginia, Charleston South Carolina, and then went beyond that down to Atlanta, Birmingham, Biloxi, New Orleans. I didn’t do shit but ride the bus and talk to people. A lot of the areas were mostly shutdown on Sundays, so it was slow, and stops would be next to closed stores, but you could see all the people coming and going from church – black folks and white folks, and the deeper the South the brighter the church clothes it seemed.

It got complicated getting old money to use to buy bus tickets, but older stores were far less secure than ones nowadays, so I cashed out a few grocery store registers from time to time, just enough to have plenty of old money to not raise eyebrows by buying 1970s bus tickets entirely in quarters. (Old change is far easier to come by than old dollar bills. Dollar bills cycle out of existence pretty fast it seems, once you become attuned to noticing the date on them.) But I kept it handled.

What was far less easy to handle was my place in my own real world. Having access to this multiverse escapism made it too convenient to self-medicate in a way off into another world not my own, not attached to my realities and responsibilities and hard ugly truths. Real worlds are all about ugly truths – you do not ever stereotypically hear of the extremely wealthy having real talk Come To Prophet moments about “the real world”, unless they are attempting to scare an offspring into more corrected behavior.

I don’t have it bad as a human – I am entirely unfulfilled by my work for pay, but the pay is enough to keep my family fed and two-thirds of our bills paid before final notice. We are able to juggle credit and hustling to cover the rest. But after the Chief Blackberry Blossoms lesson, when I realize I am metaphorically treading water in literally toxic water, how am I making the world or collective of worlds known as the universe a better place? Ultimately, how am I improving the health of the whole? Or am I just slowing down my own individual part in the metastasis of humane death, in a way to pretend I’m not part of the problem because I’m not as glaringly wretched as other more obvious examples?

That’s what I was thinking on looking out the passenger side window of Greyhounds, about halfway back on the bus (the far back of the long trip bus has always been a hellish sketchy place at times, thus not good for introspection, as you may be thrown into someone else’s fire), staring at past towns passing by, sipping on throwback Pepsis, which weren’t throwback but mainstream then.

roads go on forever in

all unsorts of directions,

easy to slip off nowhere

backyard imagination

league posterizing slam dunk

over four-head aliens

writing you can stab people

with railroad spikes overspray

osprey god sacrifices

viking jihad monuments

stab up into chemtrail skies,

channeling intuition

freestyle sonnet #052: WORKING THE SPIRIT FORMULA

Thursdays was grocery shopping day - dad got paid
so mom caught him after work with cashed check before
he could wander off after own demons, waylaid
on way to liquor store or friendly house for more

self-medication. I rode the schoolbus hour-plus
to deep back roads abode, did my chores, fucked around,
younger sisters at grandmother's trailer - no fuss
or fight for few hours, peaceful solitude found

in the center of nowhere. Around 7, full
family arrived, bags of food to put away
for coming week, plus parents taking turns to pull
shots from the fifth; we talked shit. The peace of Thursday

before weekend arrived - cupboards filled well enough,
and stable structure not lost behind other stuff.

goats whispering poetry

about mountain paradise

with allahu akbar bleats

obnoxious colors come in

manufactured abundance,

thus my shit remains garish

naked green dirtgod ways sheathed

in goodwill thrift store dress clothes,

playing face mid-carder’s part

oxycodone consciousness

sees quick but is syrup slow

to process through woke slumber

the river elves been leaving

driftwood trinkets laying round

the Bremo yard railroad tracks

freestyle sonnet #051: WORKING THE SPIRIT FORMULA

We stayed in the back bedroom playing, all us young
folks, knowing to stay out the kitchen where grown-ups
scattered a round table, sharing what they'd all brung -
Spades played, High Life bottles galore, shared chaser cups

and shotglasses, bowls and powders passed; we stayed gone,
playing in the back bedroom, sneaking peeks when we
ran to the bathroom, out of sight sometimes 'til dawn;
the wild laughter would burst from where we couldn't see -

or were expected not supposed to; now and then
a most serious-faced mom of one or other
of us would come in, "y'all stay in here" warnings when
us knowing to stay gone won't enough - another

weekend growing up one hidden night at a time -
bunch of kids learning to laugh through dark paradigm.

resistance rises for real

in neglected detritus

devils can’t cee developed

center of the universe -

ten-direction R-arrows -

southern gothic futurist

experience whirlwind blur

of impermanence, soaking

up/in supreme solar facts

the fool attaching his "I"s

to words images odds ends

which channel outward through him

"keep it between the ditches" -

southside Virginia mantra,

where “Freebird” funeral’s real

freestyle sonnet #050: FOURTEEN WEEKS UNTIL THE OMG OMG PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2016

So many shineface (white) avatars demanding
my vote align with their interests, using fear
of apocalypse to cause misunderstanding
of my own well-known homegrown intuition, clear

and not fogged by digital manipulation.
These shineface avatars, often corporate but
in quirky offbeat style post-gentrification
of internet, quick to stab conscience with "BUT WHAT

OF THE POORS LACKING YOUR PRIVILEGE?" - like y'all know
me. You are no saviour, not of the non-you poors,
or browns, or black-and-white binaries - you are show,
you are neon sign brand posturing which implores

passersby to be branded for your benefit;
"lesser of two evils" me - I don't give a shit.

gentrification's pastels

promise progressive bizness

as usual, for “good ones”

rust barrel blackbird stencil

back where we used to keep pigs;

swore off swine meat forever

blackberry blossoms born from

fringe mycelium fill my

fat buddha belly with force