Modern Howl

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.