Belated posting. This was (partially) performed at the Quagg’s Summer Soul-stice. Like the work it steals from, it’s intended for mature audiences only.
Whimper
(a grand plagiarism, with apologies to Ginsberg and everyone else)
I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by
facebook, tweeting hysterical nothing,
blogging themselves through the vacant web at dawn
looking for a unique pageview,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the displaced human
connection through the starry dynamo of the machin-
ery of night,
who empty and alone and hollow-eyed and high sat
up typing by the supernatural darkness of
cold-lit flatscreens floating across the tops of cities
contemplating buzz,
who bared their brains to strangers behind handles and
saw New Media angels staggering on tenuous
links adumbrated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Flickr and Boing-Boing trajectory
among the scholars of code,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on Windows online,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror of dot-com collapse,
who got busted in their unix beards returning with
torrents, with gigs of ISOs for the underground,
who ate pizza in cubicles or drank caffeine in
Silicon Valley, death, or purgatoried their
minds night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with coding nightmares, al-
cohol and cock-ups and endless bugs,
incomparable blind; plans of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Netscape & Amazon, illuminating all the im-
possible world of Wealth between,
VC presentations in halls, backyard BBQ brainstorm
dawns, wine drunkenness over the desktops,
storefront roll-ups of phreaker joyride neon
blinking modem light, night and moon and A-Star
searches in the roaring winter dusks of Oakland,
slashdot rantings and kind Linus light of mind,
who chained themselves to dot-coms for the endless
ride from startup to holy launch on benzedrine
until the fall of markets and egos brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of 2000,
who sank all night in submarine light of usenet
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate offices, listening to the crack
of doom on the napstered jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from cube to
pad to bar to Redmond to MIT to the Golden-
Gate Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the mousepads off keyboards off trackballs
off freenet out of the web,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and office pranks
and shocks of mergers and crashes and theft,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, cipher for the
data-center scrawled on the whiteboard,
who vanished into nowhere Zen Santa Cruz leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Boardwalk
Giant Dipper,
suffering Eastern threats and Seoul switch-grind-
ings and ping-floods of China under packet-
storms in Rackspace's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
world of warcraft wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in meetings meetings meetings planning
endless merger roll-up lonesome server farms in
night dark fiber,
who studied Knuth Booch Bjarne Stroustrup tem-
plating and Rational Rose because the experts in-
stinctively fell at their feet in meetings,
who loned it through the streets of Bangalore seeking vis-
ionary indian implementers who were visionary indian
implementers,
who thought they were only mad when Los Angeles
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chairman of Enron
on the impulse of winter midnight street
light big city greed,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Stanford
seeking cash or sex or dope, and followed the
brilliant fruitarian to converse about NeXSTEP
and BSD, a hopeless task, and so took flight
to OS X,
who disappeared after bad performance reviews leaving
behind nothing but the sketches on notepads
and the emptied folders of source code scattered in
undocumented abandon,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible manifestos,
who burned firewall holes in their LANs protesting
the electric constant gaze of Carnivore,
who distributed Cypherpunk pamphlets in Union
Square laughing and decrypting while the sirens
of Los Angeles called them down, and called
down Wall Street, and the NSA also
called,
who broke down crying in white laboratories outpaced
and trembling before the machinery of first
mover advantage,
who hacked servers in the night and shrieked with delight
on chatrooms committing crime celebrating their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees over the DMCA and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by endless
venture capitalists, and screamed with rage,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the Media, caresses of pundit and tech-writer
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in office
closets and the Playa at Burning Man and
conventions scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to google but wound up
with a site on Xoom where translated Turkish
I Kiss You made a hero of Mahir,
who lost their dreams to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the advertising dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
microbrew a sweetheart a streaming webcam a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who published the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to webcast the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Cupertino in myriad
freelance side-jobs, D., secret participant in these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Westside-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in public relations & convention back-rooms,
bathroom blowjobs, at wild poolside parties with
scrawny waitresses or familiar colleagues; lusty
skirt upliftings & especially secret bedroom
videotapings & home recording studio too,
who rendered out vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden morning, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with designer vodka and horrors of New
Media CD dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who coded all night with their eyes shot with blood on
the deadline hours waiting for a door in the
heavens to open to a room full of fanboys
and approbation,
who created great flamewar dramas on the compartmented
bulletin boards of all subjects under the warlike
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the market share of the imagination or digested
the userbase at the murky bottom of the ratings of
Alexa,
who wept at the romance of the Street with their
portfolios full of options and bad music,
who sat in cubicles breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build steampunk casemods in
their condos,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Westwood printed
with putting-greens over the corporate sky surrounded
by expensive suits of real-estate,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten contracts schemes doublecrosses cheats
& hoaxes dreaming of the pure profit
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under beta releases looking for
an bugfix,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who quit their jobs three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to work for e-commerce
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent hipster suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
broken polygons of virtual reality,
who bit into Hawai'ian chili peppers this actually hap-
pened and staggered away blazing and defeated
to the useless faucet by the pingpong table
and was offered scorn, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
favor with bosses, jumped in the filthy mainstream,
leapt on bandwagons, cried all over the street,
danced on broken crack-pipes barefoot smashed
compact discs of nostalgic European
1980s German techno popped ecstacy and
threw up sushi into the coed toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of streaming
podcasts,
who scribbled down the creations of the past journeying
to each other's fanfic-Sci-Fi slash
stories or YouTube song incarnations,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a plan or you had a plan or he had
a plan to outdo the latest,
who switched to Java, who failed in Java, who
came back to Java & waited in vain, who
coded in Java & brooded & designed in
Java and finally went away to swear by
Rails, & now Java is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless boardrooms praying
for each other's IPOs and stock and deals,
until the soul shed its hair emerging bald and empty,
who crashed through their time in hell waiting for
coked-out music producers with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
lies of possibilities,
who retired to Bolivia to escape a debt, or Tennessee
to tender maternity or Costa Rica with a boy
or Santa Rosa to self-produce Reality TV or
Law School to New Mexico to the
reservation or Doha,
who demanded usability trials accusing Nielson of hype
& were left with their CSS & their
table layouts & a mess of standards,
who threw font salad at Art Center lecturers on design
and subsequently presented themselves on the
web pages as experts with shaven heads
and flash-heavy sites, causing in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the crowdsourced memes
All Your Base - Ate my Balls -
Jib Jab - Hamster Dance &
Rickrolling,
who in humorless protest returned only XHTML
with no graphics, living briefly in fixed-width terminal type,
returning years later reinvented except for an archived
page and wikipedia edits, to the visible mad
man doom of his wife and the dreamers of the
North,
Sonoma State's Stanford's and UCLAs's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes across IRC, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with the merger finally ******, and the last cooked books
flung out of the window, and the last office
doors locked at 8 A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last computer
stripped down to the last piece of
removable memory, a yellow post-it note twisted
on the monitors, and even that purged
of passwords, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
scrawl
ah, Allen, while you are gone your words are not safe, and
now they're really getting trashed and rewritten this
time
and who therefore ran through the virtual streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of power of the use of click-tracks
the logging the database the metrics & the cyber-
netic plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in links and text
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of knowledge between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and URL of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you arrogant and intel-
ligent and shaking with lust, adulated yet con-
fessing out the soul meaningless trivia to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman ego and yearning to matter, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the endless sphere of blogs in
the recursive echo chamber of the bandwagon
suffering of America's naive mind for novelty into
an eli eli lema sabachtani tweeted
cry that echoed the empty cities unheard
with the absolute ignorance of the poem of life beaten
out of their own being such waste unseen a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of silicon and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Mammon! Solitude! Filth! Television! Entitlement and unob
tainable dollars! Ravers screaming in the
nightclubs! Boys sobbing in arcades! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Mammon! Mammon! Nightmare of Mammon! Mammon the
loveless! Metal Mammon! Mammon the heavy
deceiver of men!
Mammon the incomprehensible prison! Mammon the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Mammon whose buildings are mirages!
Mammon the vast stone of war! Mammon the stun-
ned governments!
Mammon whose mind is pure machinery! Mammon whose
blood is running money! Mammon whose fingers
are ten ad agencies! Mammon whose breast is a center-
fold fantasy! Mammon whose ear hears only
profit!
Mammon whose eyes are a thousand bank windows!
Mammon whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless golden ingots! Mammon whose fac-
tories grind out insecurity and want! Mammon whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Mammon whose love is endless oil and gold! Mammon
whose soul is electricity and banks! Mammon
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Mammon
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Mammon whose name is the Mind!
Mammon in whom I sit lonely! Mammon in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Mammon! Cocksucker in
Mammon! Lacklove and manless in Mammon!
Mammon who entered my soul early! Mammon in whom
I am a desire without a body! Mammon
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Mammon whom I abandon! Wake up in Mammon!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Mammon! Mammon! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Mammon to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!