I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by startups,

        weakened caffeinated bloated,

hunching themselves over glowing screens at night looking

        for a syntax error,

filthyheaded coders burning for the algorithmic

        connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of Steve,

who overworked and malnourished and burned-out and tired stayed up typing

        in the fluorescent wired-ness of south park warehouses sitting

        in the sacks of Herman Miller contemplating Java,

who bared their brains to VCs on Caltrain and saw

        Torvaldsian angels stammering at conference room tables

        powerpointed,

who eased through universities with curious humor

        improvising Yahoo! and ebay among the

        networks of war,

who dropped out of the academies for startups & committing

        hurried code to be the first to market,

who packed into unadorned rooms in moscone, stuffing their

        totebags with t-shirts and listening to the Guru with

        the laser,

who lost years working for equity marketers in Austin

        with a half-baked idea,

who ate pizza at meetups or drank microbrew at Google

        Numbed, wasted, or killed their minds night after night

with HTML, with CSS, with servers, earbuds and

        endless javascript,

insufferable meetings with clients and lawyers in

        the open workspaces of Brannan & Bryant,

        interrupting all the motionless focus of code between,

Mountain Dew rush of flow, laptop white fruit LCD wakes,

        jolt nerves terminal blinking cursor shell, bourne again

and configuration files in the remote innards of Linux,

        irc rantings and kind opers and faqs,

to recreate the systems and bonds of pre-Internet humans and

        stand before you victorious and heroic and bursting

        with pride yet secretly fretting over the next update

        to the library that binds together his fragile code,

tech and sales scheme in Time, unknown, yet putting down in readme

        what they need to fix post ipo

and rose disillusioned in the elastic pants of freelancing in the makeshift

        home office and uploaded the suffering of crushed dreams

        into another lorum ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur

photoshop mockup that failed to “pop” enough

        and the incessant client change requests inciting their

        own souls to threaten to leave for a thousand years.

* with apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl