HOWL For Carl Solomon I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- ery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand- father night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis- ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago, 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 leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual 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 beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes 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 sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy- ment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, 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 cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel 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 drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas- saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in- stantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho- therapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, 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 mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur- nished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat- ing plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash 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 speechless and intel- ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years. II What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch 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! III Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night Allen Ginsberg, 1955
HOWL 2.0 For Fixoid I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by tumblr, blogging hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the 4chan threads at dawn looking for some tranny dicks, angelheaded hipsters burning for the facebook heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- ery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of lcd screens floating across the tops of desks contemplating gifs, who bared their brains to Google Map how to get under the El and saw Cory Arcangels staggering on boing- boing posts illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Lauren Conrad and Blake Lively among the scholars of blog, who were expelled from the EFnets for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the Windows of the 95, who cowered in unshaven chatrooms in underwear, burn- ing their CDs in wastebaskets and listening to the SouljaBoy Thru The Phone, who got busted in pubic forums returning through Flickr with a belt of JPG's for ffffound, who made fire in MS paint intels or drank martinis in Silicon Valley, death, or purgatoried their inbox night after night with Delicious, with Dashboard, with waking nightmares, Re- dbull and cock and endless balls online, incomparable blind; tweets of Amazon cloud and lightning in the modem leaping toward poles of Adam4Adam, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of internet Time between, P2P solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chain lettered themselves to email for the endless ride from Blogspot to holy Blogger on common meme until the noise of hard drives and hamster dances brought them down shuddering mouse-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of .ZIP, who sank all night in submarine light of Rhizome floated out and sat through the stale gif after noon in desolate Nastynets, listening to the crack of M.F Doom on the Pandora jukebox, who blogged continuously seventy hours from bed to desk to kitchen to toilet to desk to the App- le Store, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists tweeting on the stoops on fire escapes on windowsills on Empire State out of the moon, ROTFL screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of YTMND's and YouTube's and Space Ghetto posts, whole intellects disgorged in Total Recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, memes for the Ad Agency cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen Live Journal leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Triangles In Space, suffering Email sweats and Terabyte disk-grind- ings and products of China under dirtstyle-with- drawal in notcot's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the MySpace blog wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes at keyboards keyboards keyboards racketing through spam toward lonesome render farms in Bang- ladesh night, who studied Zuckerberg Jobs Duke Nukem of the Disk telep- athy and bop DFA records because the cosmos in- stinctively vibrated at their fingers in iTunes, who loned it through the booksmarks of J.O.D.I seeking vis- ionary internet angels who were visionary internet angels, who thought they were only mad when Ballmer gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in bandwagons with the Dipset of No- homo on the impulse of winter midnight torrent light smalltown rain, pause who lounged hungry and lonesome through Gawker seeking news or sex or soap, and followed the brilliant Segal to converse about LOL Cats and Shaq, a hopeless task, and so took ship to The Pirate Bay, who disappeared into the volcanoes of GeoCities leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dancing gifs and the Java and ASP of poetry scattered in fire place Homested, who reappeared on the Kanye West Blog investigating the M.I.A in leggings and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin sending out incom- prehensible Facebook invites, who burned Trapped in the Closet DVDs in their drives protesting the third season of Flavor of Love, who distributed Macromedia warez in Lime Wire weeping and undressing while the sirens of Lars Ulrich wailed them down, and wailed down Kazaa, and the Soulseak users also wailed, who broke down crying in blue screens of death naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who SurfTheChannel streamed The Wire and shrieked with delight in Aeron chairs for committing no crime but the shows own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the office and were dragged off the their desk waving Blackberrys and power- points, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly fixed gear cyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the hipsters, caresses of Bushwick and East Williamsburg love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in coffee shops and the Dolores parks and free WiFi spots scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up on the FAIL blog behind some Epic Fail subpar post when cute overload kitties and puppies came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their Lonelygirl15's to the three old shrews of fake Greg Goodfriend, the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar Ramesh Finders, the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and Miles Beckett, the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on his ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who masturbaited ecstatic and insatiate with a bookmark list of free porn a Redtube vid a Megarotic NSFW vid a clip- hunter vid and fell off their chair, 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 downloaded the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to twitpic the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through miseed connections in Nerve.com stolen virgin-cards, Tuker Max, secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Douchebag-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & bougie backyards, movie house parties Beatrice Inns, on rooftops in cubicles or with gaunt Public Relations chicks in familiar L train lonely pet- ticoat upliftings & especially secret podcast-stations solipsisms of johns, & midtown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid MPEGs, were Ctl Alt Deleted in dreams, woke on a sudden Brooklyn, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with Heartless mp3s and horrors of Xzibit Yo Dawg memes & stumbled to unemploy- ment websites, who blogged all night with their socks full of crud on their OS X docks waiting for a door in the blogosphere to open to a room full of Friend Requests and YouTube hits, who listened to Suicidal Tendancies on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the World Trade Center blue floodlight of the boom & their heads shall be crowned with turban in oblivion, who ate the Value Meals of the Dollar Menu or digested the iced lumps at the muddy bottom of the rivers of McFlurry, who wept at My Chemical Romance and The Streets with their iPods full of Onion podcasts and bad music, whose files sat in dropboxes breathing in the darkness under the 2GB file limit, and finally were downloaded to blare MSTRKRFT in their roommate cluttered lofts, who coughed up nakid pix on the fourth chan of /B/ crowned with flame wars under the carpal tunnel sky surrounded by orange crates of theology cliff notes, who typed all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who saw rotten.com animals lung heart feet tail Seinfeld & Taco Bell dreaming of the Terri Schiavo kingdom, who plunged themselves under Whole Foods trucks looking for a wireless signal, who threw their Storm™ 9530's off the roof to V-Cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Technology, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who got on Gawker three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open thrift stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent Prada shoes on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the Ad Age Daily emails of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis- ter intelligent Art Directors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolut Reality campaigns, who signed off the Media Bistro list this actually hap- pened and trolled away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & EBT, not even one free beer, who sang out of their Windows 7 in despair, fell out of the subway Windows XP, jumped in the filthy Red- hat, leaped on Snow Leopard, cried all over the manual, danced on broken Linux distros barefoot smashed 5.25 floppies of nostalgic Mac OS 7.1.2P floppies finished the Repair Disk Permissions and threw up groaning into the Disk Warrior, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal spindle whistles, who barreled down the information super highways of the past journeying to each other's keynote-Golgotha jail-broken-solitude webcast or TED talk incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I was a venture capitalist or you were a venture capitalist or he was a venture capitalist to find out fiduciary, who journeyed to Shareware, who died with Shareware, who came back to Shareware & waited in vain for the 30 day free trail to expire, who watched over Shareware & brooded & loned with Shareware and finally went away to find the Freeware, & now Shareware is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless data recovery centers praying for their disk's salvation and light and breasts, until the geaks illuminated its data for a second, who crashed through their gMail accounts in jail broken iPhones waiting for impossible head hunters with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Monster.com, who retired to Freelance to cultivate a habit, or became Production Assistants to tender QVC or What Not to Wear to Jersey Boys or Survivor auditions to the Black Entertainment Network or The New School to Narcissus to Portland to the bong rip or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the rap music videos of product placement & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw vegan chicken salad at Hampshire lecturers on Feminism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin MySpace updates of suicide, demanding in- stantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of bandwidth ConEd bills data roaming fees Cable Modem- repair sometime in between 10am-5pm buffers Internet Addicts Anonymous & amnesia, who in humorless protest erased only one symbolic Mr Show clip, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for some black thick rimmed eye glasses, and Wondershozen and Arrested Development, to the visible Mad Men mondays of the awards of the Smallville of the Season 6, Two Girls One Cups's and Goatse's foetid JPG, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock- ing and rolling in the midnight Pottery Barn-bench Ikea dolmen-realms of love, dream of life outdoors a night- mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with Mamma Metasearch finally ******, and the last fantastic Altavista query flung out of the taskbar of Windows 98, and the last window closed at Y2K. and the last cellphone slammed at the wall in SMS relay and the last fur- nished room emptied down to the last piece of Design Within Reach furniture, a yellow paper 3M™ Post-it® stuck on a CRT monitor in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Fixoid, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total Au Bon Pain soup of the Internet and who therefore ran through the icy For Dummies books obsessed with Adobe Flash of the CS3 of the use of the Illustrator the Photoshop the After Effects & the In- Design align function, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Bevel & Emboss through images juxtaposed, and trapped the Cory Arcangel style of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation in AOL Instant Messen- ger to recreate the syntax and measure of poor Google searches and stand before YouTube speechless and intel- ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the Corey Worthington bum and Crank Dat beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of Melissa Smith in the P. Diddy shadow of Making The Band 3 and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an OMFG soft synth cry that shivered the blogs down to their last Rapidshare upload with the absolute heart of the tweet of life butchered out of their own bodies good to read a thousand more tweets. II What sphinx of silicon and solder bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation? Babbage! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming inside the forum threads! Boys sobbing in WoW Raids! Old men weeping in the Drudge Report! Babbage! Babbage! Nightmare of Babbage! Babbage the loveless! Mental Babbage! Babbage the heavy judger of men! Babbage the incomprehensible prison! Babbage the crossbone soulless routers and Servers of sorrows! Babbage whose towers are judgment! Babbage the vast stone of flame war! Babbage the stun- ned governments! Babbage whose mind is pure machinery! Babbage whose blood is running money! Babbage whose fingers are ten armies! Babbage whose bandwidth is a canni- bal dynamo! Babbage whose ear is a smoking fuse! Babbage whose eyes are a thousand blind Windows! Babbage whose server racks stand in the data centers like endless Jehovahs! Babbage whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Babbage whose antennae and satellites crown the cities! Babbage whose love is endless gigahertz and megabytes! Babbage whose soul is electricity and banks! Babbage whose poverty is the specter of genius! Babbage whose fate is an Amazon cloud of sexless IP addresses! Babbage whose name is the Mind! Babbage in whom I sit lonely! Babbage in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Babbage! Cocksucker in Babbage! Lacklove and manless in Babbage! Babbage who entered my soul early! Babbage in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Babbage who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Babbage whom I abandon! Wake up in Babbage! Light streaming out of the sky! Babbage! Babbage! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! virtual cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Babbage 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 internet 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 laptops! Down to the river! into the street! III Fixoid! I'm with you on the Internet where you're madder than I am I'm with you on the Internet where you must feel very strange I'm with you on the Internet where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you on the Internet where you've murdered your twelve Followers I'm with you on the Internet where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you on the Internet where we are great writers on the same dreadful cyberspace I'm with you on the Internet where your condition has become serious and is reported on your blog I'm with you on the Internet where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you on the Internet where you drink the tea of the posts of the spinsters of TMZ I'm with you on the Internet where you pun in the tags of your Delicious the harpies of the bookmark I'm with you on the Internet where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual Tumblarity of the abyss I'm with you on the Internet where you bang on the catatonic keyboard the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in a well connected madhouse I'm with you on the Internet where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you on the Internet where you accuse your rebloggers of insanity and plot the NetArt socialist revolution against the fascist national Rhizome I'm with you on the Internet where you will split the heavens of Google Images and resurrect your living human image from the superhuman tomb I'm with you on the Internet where there are two-point-one-billion mad com- menters all together singing the final stanzas of Man in the Mirror I'm with you on the Internet where we hate and kiss the Internet under our bedsheets the Internet that blogs all night and won't let us sleep I'm with you on the Internet where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' computer fans roaring over the roof it's come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you on the Internet in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the information super highway across the Atlantic in tears to the door of my apartment in the Eastern night Ryder Ripps, 2009