{"id":291,"date":"2021-07-20T19:00:01","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T19:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/?post_type=product&#038;p=291"},"modified":"2026-04-11T15:35:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T15:35:05","slug":"miles-to-go","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/product\/miles-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Miles to Go"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Listen &amp; Peruse<\/h3>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bWwArRYZw2Y?controls=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/center><center><a href=\"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Forgotten-Voices-Miles-to-Go-Perusal.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><button>Perusal Score<\/button><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"border: 1px solid #666; padding: 10px; background-color: #eee;\">\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Miles to Go<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">by Coco<\/p>\n<table>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"324\">Every single movie is ending<br \/>\nfaded to the black<br \/>\nWhether it\u2019s a coronary violence<br \/>\n(a massive heart attack)<br \/>\nOr it\u2019s a flyer from the fire of an automatic Mack<br \/>\nYou get a go and then it\u2019s over<br \/>\nAnd you never coming back.<\/td>\n<td width=\"300\">Every single planet\u2019s just a<br \/>\nsmall exploding rock<br \/>\nOn ours, the lives of all the greatest men<br \/>\nLike Roosevelt and Bach<br \/>\nAre interlocking with the beggars<br \/>\nAnd the traders of the stock<br \/>\nStill the universe surrounding them<br \/>\nIs winding down the clock<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"324\">Every single life is ending<br \/>\nPretty much the same<br \/>\nAs just a struggle\u00a0for the money<br \/>\nOr the love<br \/>\nOr for the fame<br \/>\nAnd it\u2019s a fight like every night<br \/>\nFor all the hungry sick and lame<br \/>\nAnd then you die a year goes by<br \/>\nAnd no one even knows your name<\/td>\n<td width=\"300\">For every single friend of mine<br \/>\nI\u2019ve ever had to lose is still a<br \/>\nghost that I am carrying<br \/>\ninside my tennis shoes.<br \/>\nThe nihilist is wandering past the woods,<br \/>\nso lovely dark and deep<br \/>\n\u2018Cuz for them<br \/>\nI still have miles to go<br \/>\nBefore I sleep. <em style=\"text-align: center; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;\">\u00a0<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&#8220;I asked my friend Coco, who I knew to be a brilliant writer, to write a lyric for this project, and within about an hour, they\u2019d sent me this expertly-crafted text. From the exquisite rhyming, driving scansion, and poetic references, you can clearly see their brilliance, anger, resignation, and resilience. For Coco, and many of my other homeless friends, their lives are marked with the relentless grief of losing people they love to overdose, exposure, violence, and despair, and this text beautifully captures the experience of slogging forward with those ghosts. Our homeless community walks upwards of 10 miles a day, from meal to meal, camp to shelter, and from one place they\u2019re not welcome to another. When the lockdowns happened at the beginning of the pandemic and all the shelters and libraries and fast food dining rooms closed, our homeless community literally had no other legal place to be except trudging endlessly along the sidewalk, as their feet bled and their shoes disintegrated. Thus, I chose to set the text using a blues work-song because the experience of homelessness is a relentless, involuntary, dehumanizing, and often fatal form of oppression that is well represented by a musical tradition that was developed by enslaved Black people, and was continued into the 20th century by hard-labor prison chaingangs. The driving foot stomps are characteristic of this genre, and are also reminiscent of the endless walking of our homeless community.&#8221; \u2013 Katie Kring<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Coco is a survivor of over a decade of collective homeless experience, domestic violence, and addiction. They have ridden the rails, slept in vans, tents, and trap houses, overcame addiction, been locked up for petty poverty crimes, and parented some terrific children. Throughout, they have remained a loving parent, a brilliant writer and communicator, and a fierce advocate for justice for those experiencing poverty and marginalization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Miles to Go&#8221; is a blues work-song setting of a text by Coco, a homeless person, about loss and perseverance.<\/p>\n<p>This piece is part of the Forgotten Voices song cycle, and can be purchased as a stand-alone piece, or with the song cycle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[69,55,38],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-291","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-choir","7":"product_cat-forgotten-voices","8":"product_cat-choir-satb","10":"first","11":"instock","12":"downloadable","13":"taxable","14":"shipping-taxable","15":"purchasable","16":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katiekring.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}