MY P00R 3X-W1F3, T0RM3NT3D...

my poor ex-wife, tormented

by creative detritus

of true and living dirtgod

SONG OF THE DAY: Kanjay

dreams of playing dominos in Indonesia with Tupac

dreams of wandering North Africa on a dirtbike

dreams of walking Montevideo for years, then taking the ferry and doing the same in Buenos Aires

dreams of running a video market in Lubumbashi

dreams of making friends, meeting new cousins all over

dreams of riding boats down rivers for months

dreams of riding trains which haven’t had windows for decades

dreams of writing poetry in languages other than this one

dreams of not necessarily disappearing

but escaping this overwhelming sense of being lost

in this American fog they say is some kind of freedom

TH3 C0NST4NT 4LT3R4T10N...

the constant alteration

of industrial margins

through illegitimate arts

T1NY P13C3 0F GR4FF1T1...

tiny piece of graffiti

on Keysville siding freight car,

up close and much loved by me

N3V3R G0T TH4T SVP3RSP0RT...

never got that supersport,

never got caprice classic

on one hundred spoke daytons

SONG OF THE DAY: Beautiful Pussy

I consider this the most beautiful love song of the past 25 years.

TEMPORARY RAILROAD HAIKU SPIKE SALE

HEY! Guess what? I made a new batch of ten haiku spikes this week, BUT MY DIRTGOD ARTZ SHOPPE IS OVERFILLED WITH SPIKES ALREADY!!! WE HAVE TO MAKE ROOM FOR THE NEW MODELS BY SELLING OFF THE OLD ONES!!! What does that mean to you? INCREDIBLE BARGAINS ON RAILROAD HAIKU SPIKES!

Hahaha, no seriously, I've got a bunch of them laying around that don't sell and they're pissing me off, so I wanted to offer them on a cheap basis temporarily. But then I didn't want to just post it on social media because ultimately I want people who actually still visit my site to see it, but not all the lazy ass people clicking like buttons from afar on social media autolinks. SO WHAT THAT MEANS IS IF YOU GO TO MY DIRTGOD ARTS SHOPPE HAIKU SPIKES PAGE (HERE), anything there is available for $69 right now (US only). Ideally, I dream of being a successful artist getting $150 per spike for these ridiculous and unique creations, but guess what? The world ain't ideal. Capitalism is killing us all (literally in many cases), and America is declining slowly but rapidly at the same time. Shit, I'd be surprised if most of y'all who actually read this site in the actual site and not through the social media channels we've been re-trained to view the internet through probably ain't even got $69. WHERE ALL THE RICH PPL AT? WHERE'S ALL THE WEALTH-ADJACENT OLD ASS WHITE WOMEN WHO LOVE POETRY AND CUDDLY YET HALF-ALPHA RURAL BEARDED WEIRDO MEN?

Hit me up via message through various social media portals unto small corridors of hell, or by email at ravenmack at gmail.com to tell me which one you buying. Buy them all. If you do I'm gonna get a tattoo of a giant pack of crows on a dead tree. Haha, not really, I'm probably gonna pay off more medical debt. USA! USA! USA!

M0N1K3RS B0RN FR0M 0BSCVR3...

monikers born from obscure

pilgrimages conducted

by monastic-minded fools

41N'T N0TH1NG PVFFY 0R S0FT...

ain't nothing puffy or soft

about how it is down here

on this crooked Earth surface

SONG OF THE DAY: Hussle and Motivate

I don't rest well. I also don't market myself well. I can hustle and motivate all day long (and in fact usually do) to chip away at a thousand projects, all at the same time, maintaining an abnormal level of prolificity, but I've always struggled with money, born in that struggle, which has become entirely internalized. I also tend to empathize heavily with how these systems exploit and stomp on so many, which makes me not believe in the theories of economic liberation, so I only half-heartedly try to ever market myself. I have great respect for people who actually still hustle and motivate, and build not only for themselves but for others. I'm gonna get there one day.

SVNR1S3 0V3R 4N0TH3R...

sunrise over another

morning in America,

decline so slow you don't care

SONG OF THE DAY: Cutting Down the Country

Did that momentary disappearance down to the 69th mile marker along the James again, to scribble out some prayers, and stumbled upon a cookout full of kinfolk with different bloodlines, at least as far back as we know. When I first moved to Fluvanna in Scottsville, it didn't feel like country how I know country - yards too military cut, too many cops living nearby… felt more like that fake country shit I so detest because it doesn't feel comfortable at all, and yet somehow between sterilized right wing rural Americans or shineface left wing urban American playing country, it remains a constant. We were a blight in our community - too weird and loud and goats and chickens everywhere, yard going wild with plants we ain't want to kill, even when I disappeared along the paths I made in the woods, I was always afraid somebody might shoot me on land that my name was on the loan payments at the county tax house building (I put it that way because I know I can't own that land). But back in the day when I was riding all the roads in the county, trying to find corners that felt comfortable, I was drawn to the end of this one road, and in fact not too far from the end was an immense compound of pure Power of Lounge - cars, campers, animals, sprawling two story house growing how it needed to grow… that professional lounger class compound.

Turned out, years later, found out some folks we became tight with, the man of that clan was child of the compound I speak of. That was his folks' place, and where he grew up, so they knew all about the 69th mile marker by the Shores Yard on Rivanna sub-division. And as I wandered for a momentary meditation along the river, they had a cookout popping, so I stopped in. Shit like that's always weird at times, because I'm sober, and it's hard to handle how you supposed to hold yourself, but won't no judgement, and I'm a talkative ass dude anyways, so it was fine. But mostly, sitting there listening to the patriarch of the compound see the back porch light was out, and they was trying to dissect if the breaker blew out, following all the things plugged into the right or wrong socket, hoping the AC in the pop-up camper running from an extension cord out the window hadn't messed up the balance of electrical currents - that shit reminded me big-time of how I grew up.

The failures of family has had me wrestling with the full context of how I grew up, because there's a lot about it that shaped me into who I am in good ways. Specifically I think of one dude from back home who died - Jesse - who always was a positive voice of creativity and keeping everything chill, big looming figure, one of them dudes who I saw as 8 feet tall because of his aura (does everybody do that? I just see some folks as huge because of how they carry themselves metaphysically; I've always assumed everybody has that ability but I don't know), and the combo of Jesse's passing and sitting on the back porch watching an old lounger try to figure out why the yellow bug light on the back porch wasn't working - it was the universe reminding me it ain't all bad. A lot of shit could've been better, and some of it absolutely should have been better - adults have to step the fuck up sometimes and do the hard work they're supposed to do, and not hide in self-medication or avoiding real work on their own insides. It's like termite damage actually - if you don't treat that shit, the traumas and bullshit that you went through, it starts to rot your own foundation, and then you fucking up other people's lives who are dependent on you. And just because you might be sharing a partnership with someone potentially more fucked up than you don't give you an out to not do that work, ever.

But at the same time, running around compounds as a kid, all the wild shit we was doing, batch of kids playing around junk cars while the grown folks was all sitting inside at the kitchen table playing cards and drinking and carrying on, I loved the freedom and the creativity it created in me. I wouldn't be who I am without all that shit. So it ain't all bad - it never is, and it feels like we lose sight of that a lot in today's digital environment of algorithms focusing our brain's microscope on the negativity. If you chill the fuck out, pan that focus back out, to where it's the heart seeing a little more than the brain (which often is a poisoned well to a certain extent anyways, regardless of your political leanings), the Universe provides. It always does. It's just a matter of letting the Universe do what it does, and stop trying to force order and answers on every goddamned thing.

4SS0RT3D 1NDVSTR14L...

assorted industrial

spaces for developing

the illegitimate arts

0LD C0MM3RC14L BV1LD1NGS L3FT...

old commercial buildings left

abandoned 'til demolished,

then they re-prime with newness

TH3 4B4ND0N3D D3TR1TVS...

the abandoned detritus

of industrial progress

no longer applicable

PL4Y1NG SCR3W3D 4ND CH0PP3D 0LD13S...

playing screwed and chopped oldies

in the park, with styrofoam

clamshell full of chicken thighs

TH4T S4M3 C4RN1V4L SP4RKL3...

that same carnival sparkle

should be applied to public

transit - candyflake greyhounds

D1V1S1V3 Y3LL0W L1N3S...

divisive yellow lines all

around, making binaries

where none was even needed

T4K3 1T SL0W PH1L0S0PHY...

"take it slow" philosophy

stomped on at every turn

by normal people's drama

4N0TH3R DY1NG S0VTHS1D3...

another dying Southside

Virginia town, red clay bricks

crumbling back into the Earth

SONG OF THE DAY: #neverusetheinternetagain

Algorithms continue to feed us fast food pseudo-information, as manipulated by mechanisms beyond our ability to see, buried deep into the terms of service. These methods have allowed for maximizing marketing potential, to engineer our tastes and desires and even overall philosophies and identities, which is all built off the foundation that free market capitalism is good, and that marketing is a psychological mechanism for which all humans have the will power to deny if so desired, and that by taking part in all this culture we share under social conditions, we have given complete and continuing consent to this process. Only problem is most of what we think of as psychological is most likely neurological, which throws out the whole concept of will power, as well as whether this is ethically truly informed consent. But also, informed consent is a legal term, not a moral term, and legality and morality are not equal. Most of our culture is built off legal liability, not moral responsibility, so getting channeled by algorithms into depression, despair, debt, and all the other things – despite not really being all that moral – is entirely legal, and nobody is liable except for you (or me).

Since way back in the day, I’ve always thought of and described the internet as being this tiny little portal wherever you are, right up into the middle of the largest most sprawling cities on Earth, which on one hand is great because you have access to all these people and cultural items you never would be able to see otherwise. But it also gives you access to every dark horrible thing potential within human nature as well, and that access goes both ways. So it’s not necessarily better, or worse, but it’s huge, and imposing, and that may be too much for a single heart to handle in a lot of situations. I often think of giving it all up, going back to scribbling in notebooks beside the river on a bench, and I’d certainly be happier if I did that. But I’d also be disconnected, and miss out on a lot of good things and people I am precariously associated to through digital methods. Not sure if the overall effect is good or bad – I tend to lean towards negative, despite all the wonderful people I care about who I have zero idea of what they actually look like in real physical life. What a time to be alive! Who knew the dystopia would be so bright and engaging? All those ‘80s movies always made it seem much darker and utilitarian.

D0LL4R ST0R3 LVCH4D0R 1N...

dollar store luchador in

lime green light - an artistic

photograph by raven mack

H4ZY M3M0R13S 0F B4CK...

hazy memories of back

in the day wanderlust road

trips which never got nowhere

SONG OF THE DAY: Toumast

Doom and dysphoria high right now. So much digital fentanyl fog that we ain't even thinking about seeing clear no more, just wanna see our favorite fog, get wrapped up in it and let the hours scroll away. No red pill blue pill binaries, just lost, not even in between the accepted binaries but on a different spectrum entirely, not even acknowledged as real, so that everything feels unreal. Got me feeling that urge to walk to the ocean, make a pilgrimage of returning to the simplicity in most simplistic manner - on my own damn feet, slowly, ragged step by ragged step, and throw rocks into the ocean, stone the devil away, unfuck the world if I can in my own little rippling way while still on this crooked Earth.

The tracks run along the James from here to Richmond (and beyond), just walk checking off the mile markers, passing #69 where they'll scatter my ashes, pass the power plants in Bremo, pass the fork of the Rivanna where Rassawek once was, pass the state-controlled prison industrial complex, on through the western end suburban metastasis sprawl of Richmond, cross the river by Oregon Hill where my firstborn was first born, travel the southern end from there, along route 10, through the more neglected bank of western civilization, the south side always neglected for some abstract potentially related to cartography reasons, maybe cross back over on the ferry at Jamestown but maybe not because you can't walk across the tunnels to the ocean from that tip. Imagine that - building a conduit for travel across an immense body of untravelable Earth, but saying, "there can be no pilgrims here, only larger mechanized vehicles… humans are secondary" because progress is not necessarily ever about humanity so much as strange perversions in the minds of certain men. I'd hope that if I spent a couple weeks walking from here to the ocean, many of my own perversions and delusions and these feelings of doom and dysphoria and of being lost in the dystopian fog might lift a little, the manufactured veil pulled back just enough to baptize myself in the salt water and look out over the immensity contemplating my miniscule yet perfect existence - a single atom in the endless universe - and chill the fuck out, finally.

R3S0RT SKYL1N3 FR0M D1ST4NC3...

resort skyline from distance -

wide variety of same -

American leisure dreams

1GN0R3 PR1V4T3 PR0P3RTY...

ignore private property

and no trespassing signs on

general lack of principal

W4LK1NG B3H1ND TH3 BV1LD1NG...

walking behind the building,

another day doing for

others, staring at the clouds

P1LGR1M4G3 4L0NG TH3 J4M3S...

pilgrimage along the James,

tracks laid along canal path

which was built by slave labor

T4K1NG R41N-S04K3D C4M3R4...

taking rain-soaked camera

into tropical greenhouse

experiment with settings

R34D1NG 4LL TH3 S1GNS TH4T S4Y...

reading all the signs that say

counter clocks, try to travel

close to the crow's direction

PR1C3 P41D T0 4CH13V3 PVBL1C...

price paid to achieve public

glories rarely worth what's lost -

victims of our own ego

PVTT1NG MY M0N1K3R 0N...

putting my moniker on

top of chemical cars, where

nobody will ever see

SONG OF THE DAY: Pocket Full of Stones

Had a chance to wander the woods near where I lived for the previous 20 but not the past year recently, and made me sad I missed the early spring popping of all the quartz pushed out the ground by cold frozen weather – a fresh crop of sharp powerful stones, same stuff used back in the days in these parts for tools and arrowheads. One time where the goat pen was on the land I used to live, they’d dug up an arrowhead. Got kinda afflicted with rockhound thoughts over the years wandering those woods on a quartz vein, where this one or that one would call me, want to come with, get stacked somewhere else. Sometimes I’d reach down and they wouldn’t let go of the ground and I’d be like “aight stone, you can stay where you want to be” and I’d let it go. I’ve got little piles of quartz everywhere where I used to live, everywhere where I walk now, in my apartment, trunk of my car, secret corners here or there – any time I go in the woods, whether cargo shorts or track pants, my pocket gets full up with stones that wanna go for a trip to somewhere else, and I put them together in little congresses, stacks of white trash quartz making noise in a pile, unified voices looming larger than individually libertied ones not wanting to be tread upon.

But whenever my silly tromping ass gets out in the woods (never lost – no grid out there to be lost from, just keep wandering, you’ll hit a creek or river or ugh development at some point) and I end up having all these rocks calling out to me, hitchhiking to a different location, circulating the power of lounge as charged by universal magnetics, getting weighted down slowly, even used to have a rucksack just for these purposes, I’d inevitably hear Pimp C’s slurring syrupy Texas drawl going “I got a pocket full of stonnnneeeeesssszzzzzzz” and that usually means I start freestyling heart scripture gibberish, which luckily out there in the woods is not gibberish at all but perfectly beautiful in its unscripted unedited unthunk-about-with-educated brain state. “I got a pocket full of stoonnnnnnneeeeeesssszzzzzzzzz…” alhamdulillah.

B4BVSHK4 0F TH3 4L03...

babushka of the aloe,

who after I took this pic

started killing the aloe

25-Man Metaphysical Roster: Southampton F.C.

[25-Man Metaphysical Roster is a football dork methodology meant to establish a listing of players who have been most active for English Premier League teams in their past 100 non-friendly matches. Essentially, it is calculated by minutes played, but weighted towards most recent games. The end result is a listing of the 25 players in a team’s recent history who have had the largest hand on their metaphysical sporting trajectory. The English Premier League was chosen because it is the highest level of football played in an English speaking country, and I speak English. Also, it is what comes on TV here in the USA, where I fucking live. And yet still I should clarify I hate English, and also America. Thus maybe I hate myself. Should I not fail in maintaining my unpaid deadline, a new 25-Man Metaphysical Roster will appear on the 1st and 15th of every month.]

WORKING THROUGH A MISSED YEAR BECAUSE WE RE-LAUNCHING THIS BITCH ON JUNE 1ST, 2019!!!

#1: NATHAN REDMOND (up from #7 last time; also his FIRST METAPHYSICAL STAR)

#2: PIERRE-EMILE HOJBJERG (up from #11 last time)

#3: ORIOL ROMEU (down from #2 last time)

#4: RYAN BERTRAND (down from #1 last time)

#5: JACK STEPHENS (up from #6 last time)

#6: JAMES WARD-PROWSE (up from #9 last time)

#7: ALEX MCCARTHY (up from #14 last time)

#8: CEDRIC SOARES (down from #3 last time)

#9: JAN BEDNAREK (up from #20 last time)

#10: MAYA YOSHIDA (down from #5 last time)

#11: MARIO LEMINA (up from #15 last time)

#12: WESLEY HOEDT (down from #10 last time)

#13: SHANE LONG (same as last time)

#14: JANNIK VESTERGAARD

#15: YAN VALERY

#16: ANGUS GUNN

#17: DANNY INGS

#18: STUART ARMSTRONG

#19: CHARLIE AUSTIN (same as last time)

#20: MATT TARGETT (up from #24 two times ago; also previously ranked #22 for Fulham on 01-May-2019)

#21: DUSAN TADIC (down from #4 last time)

#22: MANOLO GABBIADINI (down from #17 last time)

#23: MOHAMED ELYOUNOUSSI

#24: STEVEN DAVIS (down from #12 last time)

#25: FRASER FORSTER (down from #8 last time)