RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Saturday, June 25

windowpanes become broken,
but the emptiness inside
remains, waiting for fire’s grace
property lines go nowhere
except on papers buried
in courthouse cabinetry

Friday, June 24

45s on 33 – #74: “En Una Cajita de Oro”

I guess up to this point, I had assumed hearing the music from the jukebox in my field was a localized incident, specific to me having placed an old likely enchanted jukebox and poking the cord into some red maple base dirt. Thus, I also assumed what got called Space Espanol was also localized in the same ways. As me and Rey-Rey and Railroad Time and the runaways were chilling in the tunnel though, suddenly the echoed screwed sounds of fresh Space Espanol started to fill the upper areas of dark caverns like a giant speaker cabinet. And it grew louder, but not overbearing, a consuming sound which somehow didn’t steal your ear focus, like sunspots or solar flares for your hearing.

Before Rey-Rey or I could really mention it, as it took us by surprise, we not being acclimated to daily life inside the time tunnels, Railroad Time hollered, “Hey Woodie, how we doin’ on stores? We lookin’ good?”

Woodie yelled from the inkiness, “Yeah, we prolly good for ‘nother month. We don’t need to make no run right now.”

“Good,” Railroad Time yelled back through the cough syrupped sounds. Then at normal voice level so that only Rey-Rey and me and a couple of closest (physically speaking, not emotionally) runaways could hear, “I ain’t feel like goin’ out right now, anyways.”

I had wondered about how they survived in the tunnels all this time (albeit technically not “time” in the way we know time, but they still had to eat and shit, right?), so I asked, “Where do y’all get food?”

Railroad Time monologued, “From town outside one of the tunnels, in Dillwyn from some point, probably ahead of your time from the looks of you. That’s why I had asked Woodie, because we go when the Space Espanol plays.”

“Wait, you call it Space Espanol? You know about that?”

“Well yeah. That’s when we can go outside the tunnels without hassle because time is recalibrating itself. Everything’s movin’ kinda sideways, so the people in the town don’t got time to really figure out what we’re up to or who we are because time’s skippin’ in that moment anyways.”

I was confused as fuck, by lots of what had been going on yes, but also by multiple points of that last statement by Railroad Time. “’Time is recalibrating’? What does that mean?”
“Well, you know all these tunnels goes out to different places in time? All the shit people do out there in those times gotta connect to all the other times sometimes, or else you get too many glitches in all the different times. That’s when all the shit that don’t match up across times matches itself back up, recalibrates, fixes as much broken shit as it needs to to keep running along.”

“Doesn’t it break things too? I mean all those exits are tied to set times?”

“Well yeah, some shit gets broke, but some shit gonna get broke either way. Shit breaks. Don’t matter which time you go out into, some shit gonna break. That’s life.”

I still didn’t understand why they went out during these moments. “Why does it recalibrating matter for you going out? And what does the Space Espanol playing have to do with it?”

“We learned way back,” (note that he didn’t say ‘a long time ago’ – I found that intriguing), “that when the Space Espanol rocked, that’s when time outside the tunnels was fixin’ itself. Then we learned that was the best time to go get all the things we needed, usually just Woodie, a couple extra hands from his crew, and I’d wolf it up to put the fear in all them people outside.”

“’Wolf it up’?” Rey-Rey asked. (Finally, fucking Rey-Rey asked a question. He’s always just sitting around zoning out. I have to admit, even in other realms where space-time continuum is unfamiliar to me, stoners sometimes suck.)

“Yeah man, I’d wolf it up, meaning I’d shift into wolf form. I thought I told y’all I could do that? We go out into town, it being a future town of some kind, with three or four old scary ass looking runaways slaves and a motherfuckin’ wolf, all while time is skippin’ a beat sideways? Them folks ain’t got a chance to even think about stoppin’ us before we done loaded up a wagon full of goods. It’s like a gold box outside the tunnels when the Space Espanol plays… just turn into a wolf real quick-like, hit out real quick-like, and by the time the music done stopped, we already back in the tunnels, sittin’ fed and proper for the next couple months.”

I waited, hoping Rey-Rey would ask another question, because I really wanted to know more about Railroad Time shape-shifting into a wolf, but all that came out of the darkness from Rey-Rey’s side was his stoner voice going, “Wow. That’s fuckin crazy, man.”

what looks simple in passing
actually helps shelter
five complex souls for safe growth

Thursday, June 23

wire and rebar grow rusted
together as time's syrup
oxidization takes hold

45s on 33 – #75: “Ha Ha (Laughing Song)”

[The following is Railroad Time’s accounting of how he came to be in these time tunnels of central Virginia. It should be noted that the entire time he relayed these details, he laughed heartily throughout – a literally “heartily” where the laughter was without thought and deep and real. There was a rhythm to his speech that I doubt my recounting here – again, I’m no journalist – will properly reflect, like the clacks of a train running alongside a skinny thick river rustling through rural country. And though Willie Strunk, Jr. may disapprove, for sake of sanctity, I’m gonna abandon quotation marks for his account.]

I won’t no slave by law, ‘cause it was after that time, but ain’t nobody ever thought slaves was right, in a real sense. Devil men find a way to make it happen though, make different laws that take the wrong and launder it through their laws until it can seem like it’s right. That was me, ‘cause I was in jail. But then they let me loose to slice sap out the pines for the turpentine people. And if they gonna tell you, you can stay in jail or you can be free, you gonna be free, always. Ain’t no sensible man alive, or dead, who gonna choose to stay in jail, unless he done been made a slave all the way down to his heart and don’t know how to think right no more.

So I was cutting them pines and pulling the turpentine, and ain’t never been a single man with as much energy as me, so I was rolling through them pines. That’s when they started calling me Railroad Time at first. I got more sap for them turpentine people than anybody. But at the same time, I know right and wrong and that ain’t always the same as allowed and against the law. So I had to move, and I guess that name Railroad Time stuck to me, even though to me I was just ol’ Mo, country boy from ‘bama, natural born bama. So I moved with the tracks, mostly where I was ‘cause I could. But then a sheriff came one time, trying to force the law on me, wrong as ever, and that man was a fool, done went and shot hisself while trying to get at me. You know the law ain’t gonna admit the law was wrong though, so the papers was saying I killed that sheriff. So I had to move a little wider a circle than before, stayed to the tracks though. Took what I need if I needed it, and shared what I had if somebody else needed it too. If it got too cold, I went south; too warm, went north. If it got too crowded, I went west; and if I got to feeling too alone, went east. Just went as things told me too. Along the way I learned how to be a wolf if I needed to be, couldn’t do it for too long, but I could wolf myself away for a day or two if I needed to really get away from some devil ass people.

Anyways, I ain’t one for maps and knowing about this state or that state, but I seen the desert, and I seen cities full of buildings that touched the clouds, and I been places where ain’t nobody speak my language, a couple times been like that. But I was just riding, and the train was by a river and I thought I seen some little men, like little dudes out on an island. The train stopped a couple miles down, so I jumped off to go back and see what them little dudes was all about, because like I said, I been all over the place, and I ain’t seen nothing like that before.

I ain’t find them little people, though heard tell of them plenty of times. I ended up living out in some tunnels for a while, just to be safe and still for a little while, and I ran into these runaway people Woodie was with. Been wandering these tunnels ever since. I loved the trains, following them tracks all over the place. These tunnels like that too though, they go all over the place but different places. Not just like north, south, east, west though but like that got multiplied by math ain’t nobody ever showed me how to do. But I think I got it figured out a little bit by now.

[Railroad Time laughed at that. By my own calculations, I’m guessing he maybe saw the elven people at Seven Islands, and jumped off the train either at Shores or Bremo Bluff, which is directly across the river from where the slate quarries still exist. Railroad Time made me feel practical safe. Knowing things is helpful in attempting to feel safe, in calculating your observable world for solutions. But some folks – Railroad Time type folks – know in a different, deeper, non-brain way, which gives you a deep sense of safety that cognizant knowing just never really fully accomplishes.]

material possessions
second to keeping juggle
of regular bills up right

45s on 33 – #76: “I Promise To Remember”

Rey-Rey and Railroad Time stormed in at some point, well that’s what I assume happened at least, but honestly most of my attention and intention and all my mental and heart might was being applied to speed growing lifesaving rat tail from my skull. The grounding nature of my own hairs making tendril connection to dirty earth, warmed by inner lave core, allowed me to fend off incantation of snake blood, but at some point I heard Rey-Rey ask if I was alright and Railroad Time was spin kicking the top boy from these other fuckers with serious force. As the racialists ran off, the top boy dude was yelling, “FUCK YOU RAILROAD TIME! I AM THE MASTER OF ALL TIMES, AND HE WAS GONNA BE MY BOY. I PROMISE TO REMEMBER THIS, AND RECLAIM ALL MY PROPERTY!”

The cold got out my blood, and I started to feel somewhat normal again, all time tunnel supernatural racially tinged fucked-upness considered. Rey-Rey laughed and said, “Oh man, nice rat tail, bro.”

One of the pack of runaways from earlier was there too. “What’s a ‘rat tail’?” he asked.

“His hair, the one long strip down the back. They call that a ‘rat tail’.” He looked at us funny.

Railroad Time turned and said, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, Woodie. That’s some future boy shit. C’mere though. This one of them stones?” He was talking about the large table they had been holding me down on while doing their strange chanting.

Woodie (I guess that’s his name now) went over and felt the stone. “Yass. That’s one of them slate tables they had us bring down here. That’s what him does his white magic on, crazy ass devil magic.”

Look, let me just fill you in on the flesh of these details, as Railroad Time explained to my groggy question-asking self over the course of the next twenty minutes or so (regular time, not sure if it even was time down there). That crazy crew that was chanting over me were led by the slave owner of these runaway slaves, who apparently worked the slate quarries back in the day, which were located at some of the entrances to these tunnels, near Arvonia. He had them carry large smooth stones down into these tunnels for his ceremonies, as he explained it to Woodie. But being a pack of slaves had been shown the tunnels, and knew about them, they knew they could hide out there instead of being chased by dogs through the pines. (And nobody trusted the river back then, according to Woodie, because many slaves couldn’t swim, and also there were stories of crazy elf people on the river. I had to laugh at that, thinking about Chief Blackberry Blossoms.)

“So that’s how the runaways got down here, running away from slavery?”

“Yeah,” said Railroad Time, “except they got lost down here, and come out one time in one of y’all’s future worlds, which got them so worked up they just lived down here.”


Woodie spoke up, “It was either go back to that damn devil master and workin’ the stones, or go into whatever the hell confounded mess it was out the other end. We stayed, lived in the dark, eyes got used to it, like bat owls.”


Railroad Time looked to be an old-timey dude too, of African-American origin. “How’d you get down here?” I asked him.

“Well, just before we had to come find your almost possessed ass, I was gonna tell Rey-Rey that very history. Let’s us go back to the safe spaces of the tunnels, and I’ll tell you both all about how ol’ Mo Slater became Railroad Time, confounder of bull-headed masters from here to Bama.” And we started walking deeper into the expansive darkness of lost time.

Wednesday, June 22

parallel universes
exist outside planned gridlock,
yet somehow still parallel

Tuesday, June 21

colorful chaos of lounge
points open mind into all
directions necessary

45s on 33 – #77: “Rattlesnake!”

These dudes stood over top of me, repeating their black-red dark prayer, over and over, and I started to realize the main guy’s vague resemblance to the future me, thus an even vaguer resemblance to myself. “Take it off him and put it on me, the master of all creation.”


The refusal to allow body natural fetal reaction to this amplified anxiety attack against innate character had caused my heart to turn into a stone fist. The next step was I could feel the rattlesnake blood begin coursing through my body, like a shot of morphine starting at the chest cavity, except no dopamine opioid effects – just straight cold chill of snake blood beginning its infiltration of physical existence.


I do not mean to disparage nature snakes with the rattlesnake metaphor. Nature snakes, though freakily alien to us hominids, are not inherently bad. But when it is applied to snake humans, where the worst of both species somehow transmogrifies into horrible aberrations of inhumane (and unsnake) behavior, it seems to be inherently bad (if good and bad morality actually exists, which is also questionable, to be scientifically honest).

I could feel the snake blood mixing with my born fire blood, and wondered if this was an equivalent to the congealing of spirit that Ellabell had spoken of earlier. There was no time to analyze it too deeply though, as the cold reptilian invasion coursed sneakily up and down my spine. The entire time I attempted to struggle free, but the hands holding me in place against the stone table were unrelenting. All I could feel with all my five known and two or three unconfirmed senses was uncaring coldness, of the great stone slab and the strong ignorant grips, but worst of all that cold, creepy rattlesnake blood inside my own body.

My only hope was my beard, those hairy tendrils of supernatural wisdom, but no sooner had I thought this than the changing men, these assassins masked in black-red darkness, took a blade to my beard, and hacked it off into an untidy clump. Years of acquired existential thought gone in one disgusting stab.

Instead of thinking externally, I kept it internal, shielded from the outside world, and I remembered young naïve country Raven, he of the rebel flag t-shirts and broken bones and barely unbroken home. Not sure why I thought of that other than associating these men with that rebel flag, and still being shook by their open use of [n-word], and being retrospectively shook by the casual nature of that flag in my youth, and how the meaning had been charged so differently in the past decade.

The snake blood was starting to meander into my appendages – arm, leg, leg, arm, and head beginning to feel surges of cold, surges of no longer caring (far different than not giving a fuck, in fact the moral opposite, again, if morality actually exists), and I thought back to that young Raven.

Or perhaps I was not thinking of him but he was there… it is hard to be sure what is reality and what is not in those time tunnels. But in terms of reality, I had a strong realization of why that young Raven appeared, and the purpose he brought. So I focused all my thought like laser beams, internally never externally, so that these men couldn’t hijack my actions with their own cognizance of my intentions, and realized hair was my only hope, specifically the rattail young Raven wore.

Through power of thought, I shot memories into hair at the back of my head, growing a rattail out my crown at exponential rate, yet impervious in the black-red darkness to these demon humanoids. Hair is grown from accumulation of experiences, which is why learned elders of any species always have long greying hair, which is why my beard was such an affront to these men. But it was not that great a logical trick to instead grow this rattail from memories of experiences. The rattail trailed off the edge of the stone table, and grew downward like a vine to the floor of the tunnel, where it touched raw earth, true dirt still warmed by the heat of the inner-core of Earth. That warmth was literally grounding.

That Earth fire came up through the rattail, dirtgod blessings, and entered my individual physical biosphere, and I could feel the cold blood stop spreading, beginning at my head, then my arms and legs from furthest point out inward, and finally there at my torso. The leader of these men was chanting louder, more frantically, “Take it off of him!” but I could hear fear in his voice now. My body started to burn with the fever of organic being fighting off outside infection, and their grips started to slip. My life, as I knew it, was being saved by natural rattail. Snake blood invasion was being fought off.

nuclear ice skeletons 
litter elven people's edge 
boundaries as fair warning

45s on 33 – #78: “Take It Off Him and Put It On Me”

As I sat at seemingly safe space picnic table outside chill country store in rural my world, the unexpected happened. A portal to the time tunnels opened, which I immediately recognized because they looked just like the other time tunnels, also that red-green glow as seen with Railroad Time previously was aglow, so I (wrongly) figured, “Oh, Rey-Rey heard my ‘Meet up!’ thoughts and got Railroad Time to open a portal.” But I was wrong on this account.

Portal closed behind me upon entering, which distressed me, yes, but once you’ve entered bizarre supernatural tunnel through questionable opening, not much you can do once it closes except move forward, so I swallowed my stress and expelled in seven deep heart-cleansing breaths, and stepped deeper into the unknown. I didn’t really know which direction to go, didn’t have any dollar store glow sticks with me, so all I could do is chill, let my eyes adjust, and try to follow what seemed like the path towards Railroad Time’s aura in the distance.

Sense of direction is a valuable tool in any world, and one I have utilized extensively, being blessed with a good sense of it in my real physical world. However, in the dark, this tool is dulled, and combine the space-time question marks with this dark realm I was inside of, it’s likely even more dullard. But I tried to move opposite the portal, which I assumed was at Ali’s country store rough location in a parallel universe aboveground from where the time tunnels existed underground deeper in Buckingham. This is assuming a lot on my part, but what else could I do?

While slowly navigating this darkness though, lights came up behind me, a dark red-black color, which seems weird to say a blackness within the blackness but it was literally a black darker than the full blackness I was already in. So much of these other realms are hard to explain because they are similar to what we know, but magnified or multiplied beyond known levels that are easy to translate.

This color closed in on me pretty quick, and it wasn’t Railroad Time color at all, which I soon learned why. A pack of shineface men in old-timey clothes carrying torches which gave off that red-black color surrounded me, holding these torches out towards me. A babble of voices judged at me…

“He ain’t no runaway.” “He looks like one of them future boys though, probably helping them hide.” “Yeah, he looks like a future boy, alright. We should hang him, save us all the trouble.” “Them future boys always lyin’, always talkin’ bullshit.” “He’s probably with them [n-words].”
(Editorial note: for purposes of this thing, I have redacted all the n-words, even though these men spoke the unredacted n-word. Seems weird any one word would be redacted over any other, but the fact of space-time presence matter is more than anything, I’d feel uncomfortable about using the n-word, even under the guise of relaying what these dudes were saying. Ultimately, this feels correcting known stupid with probable stupid, but insert shrug emojis because that’s the world I live in every day. What can you do?)

Eventually one of these guys, who must’ve been the leader of this pack, stepped forward, looking down at me. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked. I told him my name. “What kinda name is Raven, boy? Where you from?” I asked who they were instead of answering, and that was all they needed to swarm on me like a pack. Before I knew what had happened, I found myself strapped to a stone table, smooth stone but it smelled of animal carcass and vulture decay, and the men were chanting over top me, their torches lighting the area, and they were chanting, in creepy stereotypical Illuminati ways, “Remove his power from his time and his body, take it off him and put it on me, the master of all times, the master of all races against all clocks, the enforcer of grid beyond the three known axes, into the other realms. Remove all this simple man’s creations, take it off on him and put it on me, the master of all creation.”

No doubt, it was a highly stressful situation, and I tried to maintain calmness with more deep heart cleansing breaths, but my heart started clenching like twenty-three anxiety attacks hitting at once, and my arms and legs were being held down by this wretched pack’s fist-like hands, and any normal person’s normal reaction to such a strong anxious moment would be to curl into protective fetal position, physical body mimicking the internal safe pose, but my arm, leg, leg, arm, and head were held outright, spread vulture, and susceptible. I felt like I was gonna die.

Monday, June 20

TOP TEN OBSERVATIONS IN WOODS UNDERNEATH CROW SHADOWS












#1: where I live (house) feels/stifling so I disappear/into the open
#2: studying mushroom/technologies & crow call/linguistic patterns
#3: I scatter like seed/cheap Chinese golden Buddhas/- protects from desires
#4: "chop senseless cravings"/meditations remind me/solitude my sword
#5: 4-wheel-drive pick-up/roars in distance - always man/making always noise
#6: walking barefoot to/minimize my own sounds, though/snakes do be lurking
#7: nature snakes okay/but man snakes (pigs) have been seen/stalking weed acres
#8: I sensed their presence/but needed confirmation/to trust my knowing
#9: where I live (country)/feels stifling; I disappear/into the shadows
#10: even in shadows/organized devils try to/apply their gridlock

TOP TEN SYMPTOMS OF DIGITAL FRAUD SYNDROME











#1: f33l1ng fr4VdVl3nt/4s fVck 4s 1f 4ll 1s l0st/w4st3 0f fVck1ng l1f3
#2: n0 s4t1sf4ct10n/t0 th1s tr34d w4t3r w0rk l1f3/(th4nkfVl n0t dr0wn1ng)
#3: d0m3st1c4t3d/frVstr4t3d plVs p4r4lYz3d/bY l34rn3d s3lf-h4tr3d
#4: wh0 th3 fVck's f33l1ng/g00d 4b0Vt th1s cr00k3d w0rld?/sh3lt3r3d sh1n3f4c3s
#5: th3 strVggl3 1s r34l/- strVggl3 n0t t0 h0ll0w p01nt/s3lf-l0b0t0mY
#6: 4nd 1 h4v3 1t g00d/- "1t c0Vld b3 w0rs3!" f4ls3 s0l4c3/4s pr3c10Vs l1f3 w4st3s
#7: s0m3 d4ys sV1c1d3/b0mb1ng c1v1l1z4t10n/m4k3s 4 l0t 0f s3ns3
#8: sl0wlY k1ll1ng s3lf/w1th th1s c4rc1n0g3n1c/mVnd4n3 3x1st3nc3
#9: s0Vl st3r1l1z3d 0Vt/p4ss10n p4st3Vr1z3d 4w4y/f0g l0b0t0m1z3d
#10: m0nk3Ywr3nch mY m1nd/1nj3ct m1cr0fl0r4 h0p3/1nt0 mY j4d3 h34rt

TOP TEN FALLACIES OF NEVER ENOUGH TIME











#1: "never enough time"/accept time's arbitrary/3rd dimension chain
#2: chrono-logical/thinking limited at best/no continuum
#3: "never enough time"/nor ever enough presence/in eternal now
#4: all you got is now/entire universes are/embedded in now
#5: "never enough time"/to kill all multiverse "me"s/the "I"s still have it
#6: dirtgod string theories/weave all loose threads into laced/fractal crazy quilt
#7: "never enough time"/mechanized echo chamber/inside thinks "do more"
#8: I ain't doing shit/not now, not tomorrow, not/yesterday, not now
#9: "never enough time"/each now unseparated/from forever's now
#10: motherfucker, what/I'm trying to say is damn -/embrace each moment

45s on 33 – #79: “I’m The One”

Texted Rey-Rey that we needed to get back up and go back into the tunnels to do work but I doubt he received the text as service is spotty in central Virginia, and non-existent in time tunnels underneath the earth of Buckingham County. Probably for the best though, as the greatest places on this wondrous planet remain out of gridlock’s service area. But me and Rey-Rey had a standing meeting point during moments of quest conflict like this, where we would think really hard into the aether “MEET UP! MEET UP!” and we’d connect at Ali’s.

Ali’s is a country store that has been owned by like five other people since the actual Ali owned it, but it was Ali’s for so long that it remains “Ali’s” in local country colloquial lore. Ali’s was famous for its fried chicken, which at one point I ranked as top in all the world (with my world being rural Virginia mostly, but assorted other travels expand that realm of self-knowledge from time-to-time). Various other owners have not held up that same Ali’s standard of fried country store food though, including some owners a couple back who very obviously did not care to switch out their grease often enough, and the fried chicken tasted of fried fish. Now don’t get me wrong, fried fish good as fuck too, but if I’m digging into an all-thigh 3-piece, I ain’t trying to taste no catfish.

So I went to Ali’s, got myself a cheap shitty coffee in styrofoam cup, heavy with the hazelnut creamer. There is something pure and beautiful about shitty country store (and also shitty gas station or truck stop) coffee. Coffee bean is definitely a sufferer of the ill effects of slave plant status, and there remains a capitalist mythos around coffee, so that hipster start-up venture idealists will create these allegedly sustainable third world farm to first world mouthhole fables about superior coffee experiences. Unfortunately, these also have elite first world price tags, and I am – despite my elevated financial status at this point in my life, as compared to the rest of my life as well as the rest of the world – still solid in my principle that I’m not paying more for a single cup of coffee than a five pound bag of brown rice costs. Like seriously, if you cooked up the whole five pound bag of rice and put it in a giant serving dish with a nice wooden spoon on a table next to a single cup of superior handcrafted artisanal coffee, how could you justify such an expense?

But I got me a shitty cup of coffee, avoided the siren smell artery devil allure of the fried chicken, and sat outside at one of the picnic tables. Picnic tables are made from white trash wood mostly, so are fairly cheap as well, thus it is not hard to accumulate picnic tables over the years, committing new ones to the overall compound, whether commercial or private, as older ones get retired to the burnpile because they are too rotten to be safe. Each table is made from roughly 16 pieces of wood, bolted together, which means it could come from as many as 16 different trees. Each of these trees had its own history before being harvested senselessly by mad monkeyhead machines and murdered into shapes better for building things like picnic tables and unaffordable housing and extended decks for overlooking earth privilege.

I practice energetics work with picnic tables though, trying to feel out the history of the plants used, as well as how much old lounger energy has been added. Old loungers congregate at places like Ali’s, talking about all sorts of old country lounger bullshit. Thus, pinewood tree base plus additional lounger energies congeal together in that aether-style other realm, like an aura but for an object, to where when I’m practicing these energetics, you walk by one picnic table and it’ll feel strong a little bit, or one will feel really new, even if it doesn’t look it. (This is common with pine, because it’s harvested so young; it barely ever has a change to achieve elder status in the wild, which is never really wild but on tree farms.) But you’ll find the right one that old fuckers have talked about their magical little corners of the world in great detail, and the wood from the table will have come from trees properly saturated with feral earth energies, perhaps wandering coyotes or better yet mythical tomewolves, which still exist even though they are regarded by science as false. (Perhaps science itself is false, who is to say?) You will pass this picnic table, and it will say “I’m the one” in that non-verbal way that the truest of things all use. I passed one outside of Ali’s which did this, and being I had thought the psychic “MEET UP!” thoughts in abundance towards Rey-Rey’s general direction in the multiple universe, I sat down and sipped on my coffee at the picnic table. Hundreds of other lives meandered past in even that first few minutes, and when you thought about maybe all those lives had infinite versions of their own selves going on all around the multiple universes as well, I guess it could overwhelm an overly scientific mind, but to me it felt like we were all covered by this beautiful crazy quilt of infinite threads of life, all woven together in unexplainable by human words ways. I found it very comforting in its immensity.

my Uncle Ricky got his 
face kicked in by Navy Seals 
in dive bar parking lot once

Sunday, June 19

true, living chivo gargoyles 
pockmark rural property 
with poverty illusion
reflections of perception 
in stored memories, altered 
by twisted mass emotion

Saturday, June 18

45s on 33 – #80: “Good & Evil”

Ellabell regulated in pretty short order, capslock yelling at me despite her fairy sprite other realm aura, which one (meaning me, as I am the one telling this) would assume from previous mythology educations means she is chill and sweet and magical. But she was straight up yelling at me:

“WHY ARE YOU BACK HERE, RAVEN? WHERE IS REY-REY?”


“I don’t know,” I shrugged offishnessed her, “Some Heart Stars zipped me back here. Thought I’d sit around and write some sonnets or something.”

“DON’T YOU SEE THE HEART STARS POPPING? ARE YOU THICK IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING, YOU FOOL?”


“I don’t know.” Ellabell was being a bitch right now, all magic powers and unexplainable supernatural events aside.

“THESE HEART STARS ARE POPPING BECAUSE OF THAT FUTURE YOU THAT YOU AND REY-REY WERE GOING TO FIND. HE IS GOING TO DESTROY YOUR WORLD. THESE INSPIRATIONS DISSIPATING INTO NOTHING IS JUST THE FIRST STEP.”


I deferred and accepted my own innate weakness, or apologized and placated, or whatever, but I got Ellabell to chill out and eventually she explained it without yelling.


“All beings are good and evil, this is known. Every atom has good and evil charge to it, but also every atom gets charged by environmental immersion a little heavier good or heavier bad. Ultimately, it all balances out, mostly. But there are points where too much charge accumulates too hard in one being, and shit can get wonky. This is what has happened with the future version of you and Rey-Rey that I was gently nudging you two towards battling. He is a heavy accumulation of evil.”

“How so?”

Ellabell “ugh”ed at my denseness (and here I had been claiming I was the cerebral one between me and Rey-Rey), and snapped her little fingers. From the snapping came a visual orb, like a crystal ball but not crystal and more oblong than straight up ballin’, and it I could see myself, a little older and little greyer. I seemed to be sitting at a computer monitor, poking the keyboard in front of me. Looked like the same crappy keyboard I have now actually.

“That’s me?”

“Yes,” said Ellabell.

“What am I doing?”

“You’re a successful writer, cranking out another of your successful books, this one commissioned by a movie studio to do a one-off pulp book about their superhero characters.”


“Cool. So I’m making money off my writing. Wow.”


“Look closer,” and she flickered her fingers which zoomed us in visually. The words I was typing were boring as fuck, like just horrible horrible writing, kind of like this but even worse. But a lot of the words as they appeared on the screen vibrated with an industrial buzz – they were literal buzzwords.

“Well, the story looks stupid, but at least I’m successful, right?”

Ellabell tiddlywinked her thumbs twice and the view spun around and I could see my own eyes – blank, completely without fire, no life at all left inside. And yet somehow, my face shined more than I’d ever been able to scrub it in this life. I looked to have become some sort of shineface.

“What the fuck’s wrong with me?” I asked.

“You became a dullard. And that’s how you became successful, financially, because utilizing your dullard nature, you also were able to ignore your own innate morality and begin to produce stories that exploited the painful memories of your own exploitations.”


“But my eyes… what the fuck?”


“You take 800mg of Obedience a day. The future you developed Obedience. It helps keep your fire from burning up progress.”


“But wait, if he developed the drug, how am I using it?”

“That future you is overwhelmed with evil charge, an imbalance of good and evil to the ugliest extreme, and he is turning all his various hims, meaning you, and Rey-Rey, and infinite others, into industrial ‘creators’ for his benefit. So you have become successful in terms of economic recognition and public fame, but there is not much of what makes you You left in there.”


Good and evil, future version of me who are doing nefarious shit across multiple tendrils of time. This was some complicated shit.


“Yes,” Ellabell interjected (EVEN THOUGH THAT WAS INTERNAL DIALOGUE… WHAT THE FUCK ELLABELL?). “But you and Rey-Rey are both positively charged enough, together, that you can restore balance. But not alone.”


“Oh shit, Rey-Rey!” I thunk, then “Damn, I really am kinda thick, huh?”