I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through
the dark halls at dawn looking for an angry byte,
angelheaded hipsters burning
for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who stared until eyes were
consumed by a sun-fueled void until naught but the cyber and the real remained,
who greeted the yawning sun
at the dragging night’s end and never saw it rise,
who sealed the world away,
closing iron doors, blinding windows, and electric ears until only the perfect web coma remained,
who bled a red tapestry of
learn experience innovate innovate innovate innovate,
who lived in a smoke-filled
jungle on the west wing of the bird called Founder until every fag was burned to ash,
who gripped a lonely cock
until smoke and flame erupted, revealing a wash of flecked fatigue and misdirected desire,
who watched the American
dream die, who mourned it, buried it, left it, visited it, and sealed it away deep in the stone cold tomb, knowingly
shaking their head at its passing, but still called
it, chased it, sought it out, hunted it down, and found its lifeless corpse no
less appealing,
who sprinted across the
Baseline in light and dark, gripping their mortal coil in a sea of tires and wretched metal monsters and swimming across a
tide of asphalt in the hands of a sleeping clock, who wailed in a lake of fire
and the gnashing of teeth as sand turned to glass and the liveliest shriveled into a dry cracked discordant
melting harp,
who engaged the regulated
norms and patterns, matching circles to circles and squares to squares until all shapes were as one and
triangles were deigned the messiah,
who stacked words on words
and Jenga was brought to life, spilling bricks as it tread a wanton path of creation and left in its wake a
deadly game of Backgammon,
who reduced to dust a corpse
and a goat in sacrifice to the gods of traditions only to find they’d killed the brother of a sleeping giant and the
wife of a wretched creature,
who marched, five by five,
across a river a billion times to end a war whose purpose had long since been erased by those who started it
for reasons unknown, unquestioned, and uncontested
to the dismay of those who could remember the reasons, even as they themselves began to forget,
who faced regret, embraced
it, absorbed it, made it themselves only to be consumed by another,
who flashed through a
thousand lives in the search of an expressive meaning for life, passing it by unknowingly from tips to toes, caught in
a net just out of reach of a glass half full, struggling, grasping, gasping until the prize was won and then drinking their fill until only a glass half empty remained,
who had nothing promised and
left with less,
with the absolute heart of
the poem of life crushed under the weight of anxiety of life until there was nothing left to give.
