A Grand Plagiarism
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!
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