They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to

The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.

The thing is, it has to do with heart - we have to understand what hearts are for before we can get back to heaven or paradise or the power in our minds.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation... the essence of minstrel.