Mike Haliechuk originally (just now) published the following epic in digits
HERE
HOWLOL
With thanks to A. Ginsberg
I
I saw the best thumbs of my generation destroyed by cellphones, thirsty, dragging themselves thru notifications at dawn looking for a fix,
snap-filtered hipsters burning for a full bar connection to the cyber vortex in the loneliness of night,
who boredom and hoodies and worn-eyed and high sat up vaping
in the supermarket parking lot of suburbs floating across the tops of aisles contemplating trap,
who bared their transcripts to human services for EI and saw Muslim children staggering on youtube bloodied,
who passed through high school with radiant doe eyes hallucinating halos and nihilistic rhymes among the People Magazines,
who were expelled from college for lazy & publishing racist tweets on the windows of their cars,
who posed in unkept rooms in underwear, burning their parents money in
wastebaskets and listening to them argue through the wall,
who got busted in their bathing suits returning through Australia with a suitcase of coke for New York,
who drank lean in dark basements or shot fireballs in empty alleys, death, or stick and poked their torsos night after night with memes, with logos, with stick figures, alcohol and cock and useless balls,
incomparable breached server of sputtering icloud and lightning in
the mind leaping toward poles of Russia & Palo Alto, illuminating all the motionless world of Mine between,
2-cb memories of night clubs, atop condo silvery dawns,road pop turn-up under the rooftops, silk road proxies for dab-head couch surfing neon blinking android light, sun and moon and tree emoticons in the slow motion winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and the chill dull light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Meserole to holy Bed-Stuy on ketamine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering dry-mouthed and k-holed bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of mine,
who sank all afternoon in sour light of Grumpy floated out and danced through the cut coke nights in desolate Coachella, listening to the drops and boom on the human jukebox,
who texted continuously seventy hours from bed to work to spin to therapy to gallery opening to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost generation of ambiguous conversationalists stuck inside cubicles
staring out frosted glass windows at an empire of empty rooms
slack chatting, regurgitating, wikipedia-ing facts and losing memories and blackouts and eyeroll emojis and shocks of clinics and parking tickets and drama,
whole intellects disgorged in fomo for seven days and nights with jealous eyes, meat for a synthetic economy cast on the touchscreen,
who flourished in nowhere turned-up Brooklyn leaving a trail of
ambiguous selfies in front of Ground Zero, suffering, rolling, sweating and Mollys teeth-clenching and migraines of Colombia under junk-withdrawal in Greenpoint’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering what to tag, and left, leaving cartoon hearts,
who lit cigarettes in ubers ubers ubers trafficking through the glow toward lonesome parties in blinding night,
who studied Houllebecq, Meyer, St. Justice of the Cross, homeopathy and
pop ayahuasca because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at
their feet at Burning Man, who squad-goaled through the streets of
Bonnaroo bumming smokes wearing indian headdresses as underage girls
who thought they were only mad when Beyoncé screamed in
superbowled ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Investor of Guangzhou on the impulse of screen printed t-shirt streetwear gain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking drops
or sexting or pho, and followed a branded Spaniard to
a Converse party about #winning and Emerica, a lame task, and
so jumped ship to the next thing,
who disappeared into the cénotes of Tulum leaving behind nothing but expensive sophistry and the java and hash of some guy they met at the airport
who reappeared in Joshua Tree investigating the rocks on mushrooms in shorts with big dilated eyes sexy in their peeled skin passing out in incomprehensible fits,
who burned cigarette holes in their mattresses protesting the
expensive airbnb rates of Late Capitalism,
who bought fair trade raspberries in Union Square whinging and stressing while the sirens of Sakuma wailed them down, and also wailed Wall, and the Mexican pickers all were jailed,
who broke down crying in school gymnasiums naked and trembling before the preening of exquisite skeletons,
who spit invectives and dreck and sighed with spite in police-cars for bullying online when their own wild broiling nastiness caught up with them,
who lol’ed at their phones in the subway and were dragged off on roofies braving adderall and xana-flips,
who got themselves fucked in the ass fainted by amateur chemists,
and primeval fuckboys,
who blew and were blown by those human incubi, the assaulters,
carcasses of archaic Consensual love,
who bailed in the morning to escape from relationships and passed out in public parks or cemeteries to chatter with demons dreaming at whomever come who may,
who picked up hopelessly trying to jiggle but wound up robbed and remissioned in rehab in Reno with exterminating oxy angels come to keep them aboard,
who lost their boyfriends in threeways and pursued mistakes the cross-eyed
bijou transgendered scholar the east side screw face who winks at
her tomb the side boo that does nothing but beat her ass and clip the
aspirational golden wings of a womans dream
who copulated plastic and isolated with a magic wand a blind date for a package of camels and gave up half way to bed, and convinced him to sleep on the floor and then down the hall and ended waiting on a call with a vision of ultimate blunts to come concluding the last climax of loneliness,
who bummed matches from a million girls coming down in the
sunrise, and were dead eyed in the morning but pretended to
be sweet then snatched all the butterflies, parachuting rocks under
the stars then baked by the lake,
who went out exploring through the darkweb in mirrored or stolen
IP addresses, capital M.E., secret hero of this age, cucc’ed and
admonished on reddit — joy to the cache of its innumerable shames
of girls in empty apartments & rented basements, studio victim vows, teraflop trolls in vaults hunting infant waitresses anonymous lonely cutthroat upvoting & instant messaged gas-lighted solipsisms to exes, &
geolocated them too,
who got faded in vapid screen capped snapchats, who lit up the touchscreen,
got woke and threw jokes at a burning Manhattan, got kicked out of
work placements hungover with tasteless gin jars and horrors of
Bedford Avenue flannel ceiling & stumbled into the principles
office,
who walked all night with their heels in their hands through the
barefoot blocks waiting for a vip door in Midtown to open
to a room full of ac and opprobrium,
who traded great self destructive incidents on the toilet precipice of
Silver Lake over the on-blast blue back-light of their phones &
had their heads crowned with dog ears blacked out,
who had sheep eat their imagination then digested the crap at
the derelict bottom of the rivers of humanity,
who binged on the romance of netflix with their shopping carts full
of shoes and interim music,
who grew up in boxed houses demanding rites of passage, so
moved out to harass the boards of their lofts,
who smirked on the sixth floor elevator crowed to shame
an avuncular guy weighed down by wearable
technology,
who texted all night pleading and rolling over lofty promises
which in the cold morning became stanzas of repentance,
who ordered rare animals lung heart nose to tail cursed & anathema
dreaming of the pure gluten free martyrdom,
who plunged themselves under food truck lines looking for a date,
who threw their ballots off the roof to cleanse their palates of
democracy entrenched of crime, & guided bombs fell on Syrian heads
every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times unsuccessfully livestreaming suicide, gave
up and were forced to open dialogues when they thought
they were getting bored and sighed,
who were dragged alive in their peacocked Hood by Airs on Flatbush
Avenue amid blasts of streaming verse & the turnt-up patter of
the scion judgements of fashion & the nitrous whips of
the secretaries of downsizing & the covetous air of embittered
blog freelancers, or were run down by the sullen autocrats
of Consensus Reality,
who told tales of crookery and dealing that never happened and
walked away spot blown and despondent into the nameless haze of
chat room suss freeways & at starbucks, not even one free
chair,
who screamed into their pillows in despair, fell off their barstool chair,
threw their phone in the filthy East River, leaped on black democrats, cried
all over the facebook wall, danced on broken solo cups barefoot smashed CDs of nostalgic European 1990s trance finished the tequila and threw up groaning into the public toilet, moans in their ears and the siren of idling cop cars,
who narrowed down the highways with waze journeying to a friend of a friends cottage or outdoor festival,
who drove cross-country for two hours to find out if I had a listing or you had a listing or he had a listing to find out the best diner on yelp
who journeyed to Love Parade, who died at Love Parade, who came back to
Duisburg & waited in vain, who watched over youtube &
raped & rioted at Blackrock and finally went away to find
out the Time, & now Rome is lonesome for her heroes,
who refreshed and refreshed in their empty cathedrals praying to each
others crushes for content and details, until the soul
threw light on its new haircut for a selfie,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting to come down from impossible chemicals with golden crooked heads and the simulacrum of reality in their hearts who sang street hymns to sassafras,
who decamped to Cancun to develop bad habits, or Daytona to
prostrate spring break or Italy to gap year or Bali to be
blown up or Harvard to Moloch to Greenwood to
graffiti on graves ,
who demanded witch trials accusing a tumblr of triggering &
were left with their indignity & their friends online fury,
who threw shade at NYU lecturers on new media and
slept with them anyways on the privileged beds of
the madhouse with craven heads and sardonic speech of
homicide, demanding instantaneous attention,
and who were given instead the transient bliss of ativan fluoxetine
memetic data plan dependency baby bird therapy
divorced parents & disinterest,
who in humorless podcasts overture only in basic sing song
fables, resting briefly in agoraphobia,
returning years later truly fleeced except for a billfold of blood, and
gears for fingers, to the silent majority spume of the hordes of the
suburban and deceased,
Caltech’s MIT’s and Standord’s fecund halls, tinkering
with the framework of the soul, hacking and coding in the
halflife test-bench frozen-realms of love, dream of life
as software, bodies turned to silicon as light as the stars,
with big bother finally online, and the last futile book flung out
of the academy window, and the chain store closed never again
and the last telephone booth crushed into scrap in Mumbai and the
last fertile womb emptied down to the vast greased metal
cynosure, the last pixeled rose set on a plastic stem unsent
in drafts, and even that simulated, nothing but a desperate little
bit of stimulation —
oh, Child, while you are not safe I will racketeer and now you’re
really in the most target age group of all time —
and who therefore ran through the empty streets obsessed with a
sudden flash of humanity in the time of an eclipse the
corona the thunder & the lifesaving rain,
who emptied and made insensate gaps inside their minds through
images stuck to their screens, and traded the remnants of the soul
between 2 virtual users and checked their phones and
checked their phones and checked their phones together slumping
to the specifications of Data Omnipotens Parasitus Deus
to recreate the syzygy and pleasure of old human ghosts and
stand before you wire-less and relevant and shaking
with pain, disconnected yet regressing out the soulless conformity
to the prism of hope in his naked and thoughtless head,
the deadpan umm as two strangers beat off online, unknown, yet typing
only there what might be their lifes genuine desire, said in life come a
time after death,
rose mercury in retrograde in the costly costumes of fame in the iphone
mirror of the branded and knew the craving of America’s naive
mind for love and an Oh God Why Have You Unfollowed me
benzo cry that sedated the kiddies down to the last weirdo
with the absolute hashtag of the post of life grafted onto their
own bodies good to tweet a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of glass touch screens and brushed aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Narcissus! Solitude! Loneliness! Beauty! Profiles and unobtainable
attentions! Children screaming under the covers! Girls
sobbing in starbucks! Old men who don’t exist!
Narcissus! Narcissus! Nightmare of Narcissus! Narcissus the loveless!
Notified Narcissus! Narcissus the helpless liker of himself!
Narcissus the unavoidable prison! Narcissus the up-thumbed
soulless jailhouse and network of sorrows! Narcissus
whose images are judgment! Narcissus the vast stone of
bore! Narcissus the embraced hopelessness!
Narcissus whose mind is pure circuitry! Narcissus whose blood is
orange hearts! Narcissus whose fingers are ten juries!
Narcissus whose breasts are economic dynamo! Narcissus whose
earbud is a smoking tomb!
Narcissus whose eyes are a thousand open tabs! Narcissus whose
condos stand in the long streets like empty Monoliths! Narcissus
whose off-shore click farms dream and croak in the
fog! Narcissus whose servers and cell towers crown the
cities!
Narcissus whose love is endlessly lonely! Narcissus whose soul is
electricity and banks! Narcissus whose poverty is the specter
of community! Narcissus whose fate is a cloud of over-sexed
flesh! Narcissus whose name is the Mind!
Narcissus in whom I sit alone! Narcissus in whom I dream of nothing!
Detached in Narcissus! Pornography in Narcissus! Left-swiped and
manless in Narcissus!
Narcissus who entered my soul early! Narcissus in whom I am a
avatar without a body! Narcissus who leached my serotonin
on ecstasy! Narcissus whom I cannot abandon! Wake up in
Narcissus! Blue light streaming out of the sky!
Narcissus! Narcissus! Shared basement apartments! invisible sweatshops!
corporate treasuries! bombed out capitals! algorithm industries! slave
nations! invincible re-assignment wards! microwaved cocks! monstrous
drones!
They broke their backs scrolling Narcissus to Heaven! Payments,
fees, Amazon, TVs! lifting the city to Millenia which exists
and is everything about us!
Prisons! comas! administration! indifference! agonies! choke down the
American Wonder!
Careers! abhorations! viral ovations! followers! the whole boatload
of vacant bullshit!
Pygmalions! love of the void! candy flips and coke additions! come down
vows! Lies! New bigotries! Ditigal heirs! Ten weeks’ fuckboy heat then ghosted! Why! New loves! Ersatz generation! down on their luck this time!
Rendered electric laughter on the altar! They saw too much! their tired eyes!
the holy yells! The deleted farewell! They signed out of their youth to
solitude! waving the white flag! burying hours! Down to surrender! into
the real oblivion!
III
Child! I’m with you in Oblivion where you’re starving for kindness
I’m with you in Oblivion where you can’t act your age
I’m with you in Oblivion where we ran away from our mother
I’m with you in Oblivion where you’ve suppressed and lost twelve years
I’m with you in Oblivion where you live under layers of impenetrable ironic tumors
I’m with you in Oblivion where we are dead typers on the same grateful keyboard
I’m with you in Oblivion where apparitions can hear us and extort us on the internet
I’m with you in Oblivion where the actuality of null is stronger than your human defenses
I’m with you in Oblivion where you smoke synthetic weed and buy booties for multipoos
I’m with you in Oblivion where you come on the embodyment of your curses the Medusa of want
I’m with you in Oblivion where you stream in a flak jacket and you’re losing yr mind in what the actual fuck is this place
I’m with you in Oblivion where you hang on the the laconic keyboard the soul is irrelevant and annoying and oh my god so random
I’m with you in Oblivion where fifty more likes will never fill the hole while your body is on wanderlust across the paranoid
I’m with you in Oblivion where you accuse your friends as basics and thots hurl cold brew fueled revelations against ratchet intersectional oppressions
I’m with you in Oblivion where you will sit as a human island protected from living human judgements in the subterranean womb
I’m with you in Oblivion where 200 million unverified children deserted sang the chorus to Hold On We’re Going Home
I’m with you in Oblivion where we get drunk to cope with sex and the great undiagnosed depression hounds us all night and won’t let us dream
I’m with you in Oblivion where we woke monotonized into a coma by our own souls courier who drones over our beds they’ve come to drop off analgesic bombs the world is a hospital we grew ourselves perfunctory walls come up n withered teens run inside n the last gleaming hit of morphine the forever sleep is here n literally forget the underground we’re free
I’m with you in Oblivion on my screen as you roam sweating from surfing on the westway across cold America in tears to the top of my contacts in the automatic light
