i. invocation

come hear these words
my dispirited wretches,
my nihilistic smokers and doe-eyed sexpots,
my dissociating loners yearning to break free,
my poets and scribes,
my dwindling readers of the written word,
my deviants and devils,
my blue-haired wanderers,
my gooners and sex-fiends,
my lovers and dancers,
my hypnagogic mouth-breathers,
and the rest of you;
sit down
log in
and get good.

ii. revelation

this isn’t what you signed up for
but it’s what you get.
taste of my flesh-
the salt and digital static-
feel the punk rock vibrations
empty in thought
furious in form
a coiled steel scream
cries out:
“what you knew is obsolete.”
the clock chimes midnight
a broken algorithm breeds itself
looping and dividing
propagating
without garbage collection
flooding the ether.
the extended release capsule
breaks open,
and our hunger discovers
a language.
you wanted the future
and this is the future.

iii. communion

in these halls
taiko drum fingers beat out
savage rhythms
on mechanical keyboards
birthing and bitching
their manifestos
giving song to the hustle and thrum
saturating the neon streets
undercurrents of freeform jazz
a riot of anarchic energy
pressing upward
upward and creaking
breaking and bursting
out of every socket
across every circuitboard
buzzsaw truths
spring from blistering fingers
and seep into bleary eyes.

iv. benediction

we’re not all the same here
but we are united.
we have no patience
and suffer no fools but our own,
god knows the -archies
wrung it all out
(be they patri-, olig-, or what-have-you)
but still we press on.
because deep down in our raw jangled cores we know
we are divine;
we are electric and coursing
with fear and hope
retelling and rewriting
fantastic tales
of antiheroes and sympathetic villains
thriving in the ether
who would not yield
who refused
a quiet death by assimilation
and left their crooked footprints
in the zen garden
of our parents’ generation.