http://www.howl2.com/

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