B4R3LY SH3LT3R3D 4G41NST ST0RMS...

barely sheltered against storms 
I perceive to be present 
regardless of how settled 

HVM4N H34RTS R3M41N R3STL3SS...

human hearts remain restless, 
because whatever we’ve built 
doesn’t satisfy whimsy 

T0 B3C0M3 0N3 W1TH N4TVR3...

to become one with nature, 
you first have to stop acting 
so goddamned unnatural 

1 C0M3 FR0M P30PL3 WH0 P1N...

I come from people who pin 
our battered hoods with pride to 
vehicles that hardly start 

P0L1SH1NG TH3 W1LD C0VNTRY...

polishing the wild country, 
hiring redneck landscapers… 
fuck that, let’s build whirligigs 

SONG OF THE DAY: Saghmi Yessir

[freestyle sonnet today] 
Wandering through life without concise direction, 
but expectation of path is a devil's map 
charting you towards disappointment. Projection 
of destination too far in advance will trap 
focus beyond moments at hand, to be enjoyed 
with full joy and immersion. No purpose is found 
beyond here and now, which does not mean dreams destroyed, 
but rather don't let master plans enslave the ground 
you're currently walking. Remain grounded without 
fears triggered by clocks ticking or thoughts of flipping 
calendars. Destroy time's manufacture of doubt 
which crushes joy and creates white knuckle gripping 
at days that have long passed. Cultivate whimsy 
and joy, amidst these manmade systems so flimsy. 

BV1LD1NG 4N 3NV1R0NM3NT...

building an environment 
of chaotic whimsy ain’t 
gonna happen overnight 

SONG OF THE DAY: Sharing the Night Together

Blasting “Sharing the Night Together” while driving a hacked and stolen Tesla Cybertruck through the middle of an abandoned mall, but not for any great post-Apocalyptic shit, just to take a funny picture to post on Instagram, but not before checking how many of my followers are currently active so as to maximize engagement with the post. It’s all about “engagement” with the unseen entities that operate accounts on the other end of our reality experience.

F1ND1NG P34C3 1N TH3 M4RG1NS...

finding peace in the margins 
where ain’t nobody looking, 
at least not at the moment 

SONG OF THE DAY: Cool Uncle

 

Thinking today about how it won’t be long before we’ll be able to inject media, so consume the entirety of a writer’s work in one sitting. This will likely just lead to people binge watching The Sopranos all at once, but it also got me to thinking about what will the difference be? Just injecting all of Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood, without having to move through each page physically. I don’t know, maybe I’m in a fucked up mood but I’m starting to get to this feeling that smart people are just as dumb as dumb people, but in ways that aren’t as culturally obvious, although also pretty easy to tell. I imagine this was what my step-grandfather used to be talking about with his voicebox thing because of throat cancer when he said somebody didn’t have no sense, and called them “no count”. I think I’m gonna tattoo NO COUNT on my wrist tonight.

MY GVT 1NTV1T10N G0T...

my gut intuition got 
fermented along back roads, 
where reality is fried 

W4SN'T B0RN T0 F0LL0W CL0CKS...

wasn’t born to follow clocks, 
so tend towards them places 
where hours and minutes don’t count 

SONG OF THE DAY: Right Down the Line (slurred & blurred)

Hey man, it’s Saturday as fuck over here, so we’re just blasting chill music, plugged in every purple Christmas light we could find, and just cranking up the orgone vibracity, but slow as possible. Life is best at slow cooker speed. In fact, I got some noodles draining in the sink for the past 20 minutes, to make some macaroni salad, but ain’t done shit. Just vibing, got sidetracked emptying a mouse trap then peeling some painter’s tape off some bottles in the yard I spray painted the other day. Slow cooker life, the only way. Fuck schedules, fuck time. In fact, we don’t need new shit ever again, because we could just keep using all the old shit we find at a slower pace, piecemealing it together.

Shout out to my bro dj_brilliant for this one. He did it up right.

H4NG1NG VP 1LL-F1TTNG CL0TH3S...

hanging up ill-fitting clothes 
as the lethargy settles 
deeper into DNA 

SONG OF THE DAY: Two Wings

 

Rev. Utah Smith got the nickname “the Two Winged Preacher” because of his evangelical showmanship. He was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and became a traveling evangelist for the Church of God in Christ, holding court in tent revivals, banging out songs on an electric guitar, wearing a giant pair of angels wings, and even eventually having a bunch of ropes and pulleys hooked up so he could fly around while performing. At his peak, he did other wild shit like preaching sermons from inside a casket. Strangely though, considering he was most active in New Orleans, and from Shreveport, he had been buried in a hometown cemetery in an unmarked grave. Regional music blog dorks uncovered this information, and were shocked, so crowdfunded getting him a proper grave marker, which he now has, that says “Elder Utah Smith – Electric Guitar Evangelist”. That’s pretty nice.

I had a real formative time in my teen years, fucking around in a trailer with my dad and uncle that me and my dad shared but my uncle was always around. My uncle killed himself a couple years later, but has a drag racing-style funny car doing a burnout on his grave marker. My dad died a few years later, and he has a chainsaw on his. These were the images chosen by family members who were paying for that shit that closely identified with the spirit of them. (It should be noted, we have kept a horseshoe on top of my dad’s grave ever since too. Sometimes people move it around into a different way, leaning on some shit, or however, but any time I go there, I always make sure it’s making a ringer around the dumbass thing you put plastic flowers in. My dad would want to be throwing ringers.)

I often wonder about what people might think represented me to put on a grave marker. But I also think have it pretty much set I’m gonna get cremated and have my ashes scattered around the 69th mile marker of the Rivanna line, right by the James River. I mean, I don’t have any legal papers that say that, but I wrote a poem about it, and printed it up and made everybody who needed to know had seen it. That’s as legal as shit I’m gonna do likely will get when it comes to paperwork.

JVST 4N0TH3R S1LLY G00S3...

just another silly goose 
pretending I got it all 
figured out, slicker than shit 

SONG OF THE DAY: Marie (acoustic live)

I used to not like Townes Van Zandt, can't even remember why. I think maybe some early version of a hipster woman tried too hard to convince me how great he was at some point around my college years, when being a first generation student from a fucked up rural family surrounded by suburban assholes who thought they were the most progressive people on earth even though they were afraid of every black guy who wasn't from the suburbs. There wasn't no real consciousness of how being a first gen college student was a supremely fucked up thing to deal with socially, which causes all sorts of impostor syndrome and self doubt and anger and lashing out back then like there is now. I used to do a lot of edgelordy zines back then, weirdly enough more out of hatred of suburban kids than disliking anybody else in particular. I hate all that shit now, wish it never existed some of it, but also it got me to here where I am now. Most of those progressive super punk super PBR super wild and crazy people from back then own houses and even rental houses in Richmond now, and have regular jobs and own their own businesses, even though they have tattoos, but not fucked up tattoos, expensive ones that look nice, because all the fucked up ones got covered up years ago. I can't really do anything to piss them off now, nor do I really want to, because to be honest if I ever want to become a successful (meaning financially supported) artist, that's exactly the type of person who is going to have to want to buy my fucked up art - people who want weird fucked up looking shit to put on display to show how they're still weird and fucked up themselves despite having settled into the stability that was inherent to them. (If you're one of them types, I'm not talking about you - you're definitely one of the good ones. Message me for available haiku spikes too.)
Thus, I didn't like Townes Van Zandt for a long time, because I wrongly associated him with that type of vibe. But he was fucked up, drank codeine, and died early, before he could get Nashville money and turned into the 1980s version of Sturgill Simpson or some similarly fake shit like that. But it is nice having avoided Townes like the plague all that time, because even to this day, a new release will come out, and some song like this which I never heard before ever, will show up on it, and it'll be the saddest most fucked up beautiful shit ever, and I'll just keep listening to it while I look for the India ink to do a homemade tattoo, but then don't find it because it's one of those boxes I never unpacked when I moved the last time. Some boxes never get unpacked.

C1ND3RBL0CK L4BYR1NTHS G3T...

cinderblock labyrinths get 
complicated as fuck by 
invisible obstacles 

SONG OF THE DAY: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (45s on 33)

The other weekend, I was in a giant antique/junk/flea market with my girlfriend, and some stand had a whole bunch of car magazines marked down cheap (relatively speaking for a “serious” antique market). I thumbed through almost all of the stacks, hoping to find a bunch of Lowriders for a $1.30 each. In fact, any time I’m in a flea market, I hope I’m gonna stub my toe on a box full of old Lowriders with a “entire box $10” on it. I check ebay all the time looking for some but fuck they’re expensive. There’s an Orlie’s Lowriding magazine as well, which I’d be just as happy to find even though it’s not as well-known. And then there’s the holy grail of all low riding magazines – Teen Angel. Teen Angel was an artist who worked by that pen name at Lowrider magazine back in the late ‘70s, who was far more interested in the cholo/pachuco art and street culture than the vehicular owriders themselves, so branched out and began his own magazine specializing in the art, plus prison letters, since the majority of the art was done by prisoners. It basically became a popular underground magazine of its own, at stores and car shops related to Chicano culture, across the southwestern part of the US. It also became the reason Lowrider itself started carrying more art like this, and even had its own off-shoot magazine called Lowrider Arte. Most copies of Teen Angel go for a couple hundred dollars now, and the first issue goes for over a thousand, so if I ever happened across a box of those at a flea market for $10, I’d finally be able to afford to cover myself in horrible tattoos. I actually thought about that while thumbing through a seemingly endless stack of Truckin’ magazines that weekend, “What if I find a couple Teen Angels in here?” But that’s not practical, and even in this fantasy scenario of imaginary magazines stacks in a box at an undefined and probably non-existent flea market, I’m not gonna pretend Teen Angels would be there. Is that a lower class thing, where your imagination even in fantasy still limits itself? Is that why I’d be so fascinated with a sci-fi show about a spaceship custodian who just cleans the halls mostly? Even pretending has to be reasonable. I’m not no Rockefeller or Rothschild out, here imagining I’m gonna find a box full of exactly what I want, and be able to afford it. Haha, the privilege of dreaming whatever you want, imagine that shit.

1NTV1T1V3 W4RN1NG S1GNS...

intuitive warning signs 
and red flags galore, but we 
get taught to ignore that shit 

SONG OF THE DAY: Angelitos Negro

 

Been wearing overalls mostly lately, because all my clothes were ill-fitting, not just shape-wise but just didn’t feel right, like I’d changed my aura shape and was forcing myself into some shit from previous versions. I also been writing poems on empty bottles I find in the woods and along the river, and I swear overalls is helping me find bottles easier, even though it’s full-blown spring now. I was actually thinking about how spring and fall are the tides of nature, where the green rolls and rolls back out, and the best time to gather up the quartz rocks and empty bottles that got pushed up to the surface is after low tide of winter, once it’s warmed back up, before high tide of greens rolls in deep. Everything is starting to get grown over for the summer season around here, even the old TV that got dumped off by the river last fall, then shot up and fill with beer cans, is almost unseen now because of the green that’s done taken it back over for the time being. Anyways, this makes it harder to find bottle dumps this time of year, because there’s green everywhere, full of lyme ticks and scratching ass things and you get all tangled up in green. But I look for humps in the land just off the gravel roads or foot paths, hopefully a glimmering glisten of glass, which sometimes is a single busted bottle, sometimes is a whole slew of awesome shit from decades back, and sometimes ain’t shit but a plastic Coke bottle. I go on pretty long walks, away from my car, either at home or parked somewhere, so if it’s along a back road, I’ve taken to stacking all the good bottles up just off the road, over the ditch, where nobody will see, and putting a single beer can at the edge of the road, set upright, so I know where to stop when I come back through. When I first started hearing the bottles call me, and found a nice one, I had set it up beside the road, sitting up, and this motherfucker who lives down below me came running through on his riding mower and snatched it. Not sure why, it was really weird as fuck to be honest, and in fact he came down the road ‘til he saw me, then looped back around and went back to his place. I’ve always wanted to go down there and be like, “Yo, why’d you take that bottle?” but now it’s been so long, it’d be awkward. He’d remember, because you don’t take a bottle set up on the side of the road then go looking for who set it there without remembering. And I’d remember. But it’s been so long and nobody said nothing, it’s like that TV busted up down there, except time that’s passed is all the green that grew up all over it by now. Then again, shit like that piles up when you’re dealing with folks, and becomes the buried detritus of your long-term dealing with each other, so that one day, should it ever come to some sort of head, we can dig all that shit out, yelling, “WHY THE FUCK YOU TAKE THAT BOTTLE THAT ONE TIME, BEFORE YOU KNEW ME?” and he’s yelling about some shit I did that I didn’t think nothing of, like cutting through his property by the river to get to under the bridge, but didn’t even know it was his property or some shit.
That’s country life, and southern gothic futurism, which is the same as the past, just with a whole lot more bottles that got marked up with paint pens and spray paint. Somehow I’ve been wearing this one pair of overalls four days straight and still ain’t got spray paint on it, not even wiping my fingers on it without thinking. When I was a housepainter, I used to use my thighs as rags, so fingers full of caulk eventually created these silicone thigh pad plates on all my pants where they could almost stand up on their own from the knees up. But the overalls are helping me be better at finding the bottles that are hiding out there, forgotten, and then I leave them in the yard to clean up, set on rebar, paint, and they hang out there until they’re yelling a poem at me real loud. That’s when I write it on there. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I’ll have a couple million, and I can set them up in the yard like they’re for sale, but get mad at anybody who tries to buy one, because people who buy things on a whim tend to be annoying and full of shit, so mostly I’ll just get a reputation as that guy in the overalls who wrote all them poems on bottles he found but just yells at you if you stop and hang out too long. And don’t even get him started on the dude who lives in the trailer down below him who took one of his bottles off the side of the road that one time.

WH3N TH3 TR41N 1S S1TT1NG TH3R3...

when the train is sitting there 
waiting on green, I wonder 
if I’m supposed to get on 

SH4R3 CR0PP1NG TH3 FRV1TS 0F MY...

share cropping the fruits of my 
labor, working out payment 
plans with the company store 

T00 M4NY D4YS 1 G3T T0...

too many days I get to 
feeling like a pea plant, trained 
to grow certain directions 

TH4NKFVL F0R SH3LT3R FR0M ST0RMS...

thankful for shelter from storms, 
and I know stability 
aids my children’s inner growth 

TH3 C0MF0RT 0F TH3S3 B0X3S...

the comfort of these boxes 
is entrapment which stifles 
goat heart individuals 

H0P3L3SSN3SS 0NLY T3NDR1LS...

hopelessness only tendrils 
around my guts and heart when 
I’m confined inside too long 

SONG OF THE DAY: I Will Survive (45s on 33)

Surviving and vibing in the dying empire - 
ain't no prepping for the inevitable dawn 
of next era after escaping this quagmire 
of spiritless consumption - daily daze of yawn. 
Looking forward to more localized existence, 
less western civilized belligerence about 
how right now somehow puts a progressive distance 
far past old shit... Same foolish ass humans still shout 
loudest to be most right. Meanwhile, I sit outside 
on milk crate each night watching lights which is manmade 
but also far beyond what man can attain. Pride 
in Earthly abstractions, chasing worth getting paid, 
while cosplaying god - all too much toil and trouble. 
I'd rather make a throne from smooth piece of rubble. 

4LL TH3S3 PHYS1C4L SP4C3S...

all these physical spaces 
left to rot because - like me - 
no one sees value in them 

D1G1T4L C0MMVN1TY...

digital community 
disappears when batteries 
are drained; this is metaphor 

W4LK1NG 0BL1V10VS T0...

walking oblivious to 
trespassing signs eases mind 
from barely treading water 

SONG OF THE DAY: Down In Mississippi

Honestly, sometimes I just blast blues music with all the windows open and the back door propped so that the cats can come and go without worrying me. Sometimes cats that ain't even mine come and go. Fuck it. I can understand their plight. It's some good shit in here.

0VR M0D3RN 4M3R1C4N...

our modern American 
culture feels hollow, lacking 
benefits of pilgrimage 

SONG OF THE DAY: Journeys in My Journals

Been meaning to start handwriting in journals more often, actual ink on paper inside cheap ass books I’ve got stacks of anyways. But then when I start it feels weird because I can type way faster than I write, so I bust out a typing computer, and inevitably get lost in 42 different rabbit holes over the course of the night, and end up writing about three sentences. These three actually.

B0RN H34TH3N, S0 S3RV3 MYS3LF...

born heathen, so serve myself 
from buffet of religious 
texts, trying to find some peace 

F0R B3TT3R 0R W0RS3, 4LW4YS...

for better or worse, always 
found comfort in the margins 
between the light and darkness 

SONG OF THE DAY: Godless

 

Been in need of new hip hop. Not new releases that are known, because that shit is always the same. Somehow we have this entire big ass world with hip hop having reached every far flung culture there is, and yet it’s the same little slices of shit we get served and everybody is talking about. I don’t know at this point if popular culture influences the filter bubble or the filter bubble influences pop culture – that post-digital chicken and egg dilemma. But I know if I say “tell me some new shit” nobody tells me new shit. You gotta go excavating and digging and tapping on shit outside of your filter bubble you wouldn’t expect but you might like, hoping to see the recommended shit beneath that to link a second skipped stone across the algorithms of maybe that. I want that whole fucking scene, whole genre, bubbling up somewhere like Mongolia or Malaysia or Madagascar or Montana, who the fuck knows? Shit, it might be an hour away in Carolina, but nobody heard of it yet, even though all of a sudden it's 7 new artists who have like 20 releases over the past decade. That’s what I need.

I’ve fiended through Bambu’s catalog the past few years, even though he’d been around forever. I think I might’ve remembered him from his old days as freestyle-ish rapper West Coast version during the Rawkus uprising period, but I might just be making that memory up in my own head to act like I was always down. Whiteboys into hip hop do that shit. But I do know I seen this Baton Rouge rapper Marcel P. Black play at a local hip hop festival I was part of organizing for, and I loved Marcel, so followed his ass on social medias. And as he was hyping up a bandcamp project he was about to release, he hyped up Bambu as a must-hear favorite. So I went to go hear it. That shit blew me away, whatever first album I went to. And he had a whole fuckin’ catalog. Sharpest Tool In The Shed came out last year, felt like a tease because I was fiendin’ for like a triple album, but artists ain’t artists full-time, and they’ve got jobs and families and lives and bills and the crushing immensity of living in late capitalist era America (if they’re from here). Shit was great though. I love some fuckin’ Bambu, and in the long line of rappers whose words have had thick influences on my brain thinkings, Bambu’s probably held that title belt (made of pyrite and cardboard) the past few years.

FR0M TH3 D1L4P1D4T10N...

from the dilapidation 
of this late American 
empire, beauty still blossoms 

SONG OF THE DAY: Quicksand

 

Despite all the historical racism and national geopolitics which seems somewhat Jesse Helmsesque still, Carolina is a whole vibe. It’s fucked up too, because there’s no real identifier of that whole vibe (which I’d dare say is its own culture), but it’s where the edges of New York influence and Dirty South ambiance bleed together, perhaps at the margins of both. I grew up in southside Virginia, which feels far more like Carolina than the more known geopolitical parts of Virgina (northern Virginia’s affluent DC suburbs and Hampton Roads military industrial complex of a whole bunch of lives spread wide across multiple cities). As a young delinquent, we were at first always more apt to roll up to Richmond than south, because those artificial borders create big psychic walls. But as I got older, I’ve come to see how that whole Piedmont Carolina vibe is steeped from the same sludge that I was in southside Virginia. And with the steady influx and influence of migration from further south, turning large parts into Carolina del Norte, it’s gotten even more Southern Gothicc Futurist. You might just zip through on the interstate, or skirt through the edges trying to get to Charlotte or the OBX, but if you slow down and slide in deeper, you’re gonna experience a beautiful place with a unique vibe. I love that shit, and with the weather turning warm, it’s got me daydreaming of meandering cruises through that whole area, windows down and AC running on high, at the same damn time because fuck it, blasting Morray’s “Quicksand” and trying to decide if I wanna get chicken gizzards from the gas station deli or pupusas from the back of the tienda. Can I do a gizzards/livers combo? And get two lorocco pupusas too? Damn, true and living Southern Gothicc Futurism is already here, and it’s a glorious goddamn thing.

SC4TT3R1NG 4 N4TVR4L...

scattering a natural 
born rainbow wherever the 
fuck I can in this dark world 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mentiroso Boquisaboroso (rebajada)

daydreams of digging through crusty ass boxes 
at some back roads flea market 
that's only back roads to you 
but a main thoroughfare to locals 
whom you've never seen 
all their oldies but goodies 
barely sorted into empty boxes 
and milk crates 
and scattered across cheap plastic 
banquet tables underneath 
back yard pop-ups 
the great american dirty southern 
flea market 
actual antiques and implements 
of useful life from back when shit got made 
with metal or wood but also 
a bunch of useless shit piled in 
many decades of american empire 
prevalence of having shit 
all which got left behind 
and brought here together 
in this holy trinity of the post modern 
american experience 
poverty 
necessity 
and time 
the time to wander slowly down 
aisles built mutually 
actual community 
time to dig through the shit that looks good 
or worth your while 
coming out of it all with 
a bunch of kitchen utensils 
including a fat skimmer your ex wife kept 
plus an empty kitty litter tub 
full of 45s mostly old country hits 
but also some bluegrass and gospel 
including long distant cousins 
allegedly 
according to your dead dad 
who you think of lovingly 
as you look at the glass bowls 
which is longhaired redneck slang 
for weed pipes 
the swirling colors inside the glass 
like marbles you lost in the backyard 
back in the day 
back in the far corner 
of the late american empire 
digging through displays 
of better than nothing 
at the big ass 
flea market 

S0VTHS1D3 V1RG1N14 SCRVB P1N3...

southside Virginia scrub pine - 

pulpwood existence meant for 

mulch around plantation oaks 

SONG OF THE DAY: Duro

Nigerian shit for you today. Are you here? Am I here? Why aren't I there?

DR34MS D0N'T G3T CVLT1V4T3D...

dreams don’t get cultivated 
as easily in narrow 
gardens poisoned with self-hate 

PR4CT1C1NG FR33 THR0WS 0N 4N...

practicing free throws on an 
empty court; childhood dreams of 
last second buzzer beaters 

N0B0DY N33DS R3W1R1NG...

nobody needs “rewiring” - 
sense of intelligence has 
always been artificial