'i've only ever really read one poem. i, i have to admit.*  
You know, that, that one poem that everyone’s read, whatsit,
Howl by Ginsberg, 'best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness,-starving-hyste­rical-naked,' , yeah, that one;'
'It's just, I identify with it so strongly.' she says,
'That poem is soo me.'
It's funny how commentary on a generation 60 odd years ago come across as timeless insights..
how we learn that true spirit of rebellion and counterculture three generations ago,
  as it is taught to us by two generation ago countercounterculture academics.
but I guess, inevitably
                                         we
                                                  return,
  to those half drowned pontifications inevitably decried into transcendental truth by the onward spilling ratchet of cultural recognition;
  that sense of universal oneness generated by the unwashed ramblings of beat-generation hipsters dense innuendo in run on sentences running, running from their upper-lower-middle-class New York homes and their privilege of true vacant meaninglessness and despair,
   to those nervous tucked in shirted clean shaven scholars swooning over the same seme drugged, melancholic bearded men profussing the deepest of opaque truths only found up the furthest reaches of their own *****.
  As we push through to our lectures, the mosaic in motion of blazer wearing mac-users and mac-pac wearing blazers,
  As we hysterically interpret the formatting conditions for our reports, which could hang in the balance of whether the dreams we once had will ever be actualised,
  As we felt lost and found and found and lost at those park benches under the stars, where occasional strangers strolled by offering sessions and life-stories,
  As we paid exorbitantly to get out of our parents homes, and into tin-can flats with broken windows, absentee landlords and cracked paint only held together by all the moss, (the empowerment that is wage slavery,) for in our youth, poverty is not an ever-present pejorative, but the rite of passage to show that we are alive,
  As rituals of manhood are defined by two things and two things only; how much insomnia one can accumulate to meet insane and inane deadlines, and how much one can illuminate the walls in ***** from all the beers, spirits, cheap wines and questionable home-brews,
  As the government dismantles the human-rights commission, and we nervously attend the rallies initiated by the radicals, and the man on the megaphone calls on the crowd to chant and we can only mumble and laugh nervously at ourselves,
  And when the next speaker runs onto stage feeling the need to plead to this already nervous, placid mass that this is in-fact a PEACEFUL PROTEST, and that we are all true patriots and they insist everyone start singing the national anthem and we all look down and we again mumble, or pretend somehow not to hear them,
  and when, in this biggest independent rally around a unified cause our generation's ever seen, we have never felt so alone ,
  and isolated,  
                                  we
                                             remember,
                                                                    those earlier days,
  When we'd bleach our hair; we'd poison ourselves white, in the vain mystic hope that this was just the transition period to the time when we'd get true colour into our lives,
  Remember our wonder at the Eurocentric Asiatic television representations of the Abrahamic faiths, given transubstantiated holy revival by the medium of Saturday morning digital pastel pasture; when we were children staring excited and wide eyed into the Metatrons Fire of Sinai 'Random Almighty Mega Damage'; as Dante and the seraph class Tyrant-infused-Michael inevitably made battle with YHWH, -in the one True End,- as we grinded within the monolithic emerald obsidian halls, Mystical wonderment spilling forth from our reddened hollow eyes, at the beautiful unlimited expansive world contained within our console/consoling digital unit discs; conformally mapped and etched into the convex hull of our minds,
  Where we were gods, doing battle with every possible creature in morphospace, filleted into overpriced cards and cartridges, for which our strategies meant so much to us though none of us really understood the game,
  When we could quote verbatim every piece of dialogue in GTA2, and get concerned glances from our parents as we conjured veiled imagery of bukake-ladled innuendo which we didn't really understand until six or seven years later,
  When sexuality was a special secret club our elders and the kids in the years above came across so wise for being a member of, rather than an anti-turing test; a farcical ritual where everyone tries their best to imitate the hyper-reality of MTV while hiding the nervous feelings that this whole thing was really meant for someone other than us,
  When creating a whole new lexicon for our self-hood (be it artistic, ******, political or philosophical) felt like existential emancipation; a transcendental rebellion against the normalising identities and semantics of old, rather than an impenetrable circle-**** taxonomy,
  When one day we'd unveil a new term in some text, and it would completely change our outlook on every corner of our lives,
  Or, the next day, when we'd give up and just sit back on rolling banks, and look out at a veil of stars,
  Or the next day, when we'd wonder desperate and painfully, which of the last two was the real pursuit and which was wasted time? (Or was it this day, the day spent building an illusory dialectic between them?)
  Remember when we were in kindergarden, and you had to pass through the kitchen, -the adults zone,- to get to the toilet, and you'd feel both shame and wonderment listening in of the snippets of conversation muttered by these titanic figures; discussing abstruse issues from the newspaper in foreign yet noble tongues?
  Remember when we were teens, and every form-checking observation and question from these same adults was so painstakingly pedantically banal and asinine, that one could only respond with monosyllabic grunts and silent hysterics?
  And remember as 'young adults', when we'd inevitably entered this same dull Aristotelian world of forms, how we'd ask the same adults for advice on filling these paperworks, at once still asemic gibberish, and at once the fine-print that contained and predicted our lives?
  Remember when our dreams for the future were not bounded by the economy of our grade point averages and just how much debt we were willing to incur
                                …
I've seen the best minds of my generation climb into pre-packaged little boxes; and pay through the teeth for the privilege of doing so.  
  Akin to a 'Howl' they call it? Our cry for selfhood? What a scream.
It's not even a cry. Barely a whimper.
More of a zombified groan, completely aware our intrepid Journey of Self is just a pricey guided tour. (Tv Ad's static commodified existential emancipatory platitudes; 'your place in the world' / 'well it's my place and it's my time' urgh.)
And so we march asleep; all lame all blind.
  Trudging through the mind-fields; arguing, unravelling the semantic distinctions between the empty boundaries and the boundaries of emptiness.
  Transcribed down for essay deadlines,  /  assessing our lives trajectory as dead lines,
Becoming increasingly aware,
  We are not the living beings, the dasein, the Übermenschen being actualised; we are the machinery through which the institutions, the factories, the markets and education facilities actualise themselves.
  (While the only acceptable language we can breathe in opposition to these ratcheting pedagogical machines is the lexicon they provide us..
  ('oh, you hate systemic neoliberal alienation; the deestablishment of ontological anthropocentrism? Tell me more about the esoteric uselessness of academic culture.') bluh.)

But

       the more we follow those phantom images we built of ourselves,
the more we become aware they are but sirens; hypnotic dreamlike figures luring us to our doom,
  and as this awareness dawns; and the cognitive dissonances and schizophrenia grows,
       We


                                just try to keep calm and carry on regardless.

Can we really claim the arrogance of having a better path?
The conceit that there's a better cliff we should be guiding ourselves to to top ourselves off?
I don't know,
I reaally
really
just don't know.

You are witnessing a prodigious talent and promise, and to a lesser extent but still to the degree whereby it should keep you awake at night writhing in cold sweats, your life, slip agonisingly through your open and clammy palms. Promise means so little if not actualised. You have been granted chance after warning after fortuitous escape yet have blithely spurned every omen and will one day fall, swiftly and perhaps terminally. You are almost certainly depressed. You say you love your girlfriend, and you mean it wholeheartedly when you do, but you worry that the relationship perpetuates as without her there would be no reason to rise with the sun. Even if the relationship is  unstable, and at times verging on the unhealthy, you believe you love her but are too great a coward to consider decisive action if that belief is to reside or subside. Your friends range from kind and honest yet deeply flawed to somehow toeing an inextricably thin line between dependability and duplicitousness. Conversations with a certain few of your friends necessitate decrying every undercooked ethos you've every conned yourself into believing you hold (you could well be the most hypocritical liberal to walk the earth, for you are innately and irrepressibly selfish) yet you still nod placidly as your conscience squirms. Grotesquely, like a beaten spouse, you crave the gaze of those who have treated you with the most insulting derision, but are too proud (of what?) and, a running theme, too cowardly, to stoop to a simple detante. You must change, for it pains you on a most base level to have to accept the feeble, whimpering, simpering spectre you have become. You must be bold, brave, unashamed in your convictions, anything but pursed and silent lips. You have a voice, and you must now speak loud enough for them to hear, for that which has become blunted must be whetted, sharpened, readied for battle to be unsheathed at an utterance. Heed the signs and change, for our sake. You, a milksop who attentively notes the sophistry of courage, you can still be brave, and you must be.

For one day you will be swelled with a courage and fortitude to fill your sails taut, enough to leave this place, forget these people and bear you away.

"Look up from your phone, shut down that display,
stop watching this video, live life the real way."
These I've heard from someone, from somewhere I have seen,
Which is ironic, as I got them from my phone and my computer screen.

I have lots of online friends and I feel less lonely,
I also have real friends but they tend to leave me abruptly;
Without gadgets, we have to talk whilst making more than a glance,
With them, we talk even whatever the circumstance.

We talk to face to face, make mistakes, say sorry;
Type with a keyboard, pick your words, less worry.
Error isn't bad, I'm just saying it's embarrassing,
Especially when it's your error that'll make them go laughing,
With social media, I can have a second chance,
Unlike talking nonstop and talking without plans.
Though, frankly saying, still do be careful,
To what you type, what you post, it can be a handful.

They say with the internet, we cause quite a commotion,
With a status or a tweet that's emotional yet without emotion,
In the cyberspace, we are who we want ourselves to be,
In the cyberspace they hate, You can be you, I can be me.

Codes and programs aptly created,
Becoming a vessel, both beloved and hated;
Social media, a platform, where one can rehearse,
Social media, an enigma, both a blessing and a curse.

Born of the era of the neos we have witnessed,
When letters were once written, now they're typed and addressed;
When once we had to know where they're at,
Now we could just dial up online, just sit down and chat!

But as time flew by, faster and faster,
From its real aim, we grow farther and farther,
Once used to connect those who haven't been actualised,
Now also to those who can now make them compromised;
Those in front of you, or even just a block away,
Because of social media, you think they are in lightyears astray.

Type your "****", your " LOL", your "*** XD",
Type what you want, but does that mean you're really happy?
Go ahead and put that colon and parenthesis,
Make exaggeration of your nonexistent catharsis.

They say they're amazing, they say that a lot,
But sometimes what they are is something they are not.
I know in this space, that we're free as we would have ever been,
Thanks to the brains and the alloys far more than aluminum and tin,
Still remember that it's also a human sitting at the other side of your screen,
Just think about your actions; if you were them, what would it mean?

Don't fall to your own damnation, don't ruin the plot,
Don't let a digital presence degrade you and rot;
If it won't do you good, just stop where you should,
Or ask a real person to help you if you never understood.

Life does confuse us, life *****, sometimes,
When everyone around seems painted in crimes,
I get that you'd seek help to someone that'll differ,
But is that someone understanding you deeper?

Chatting with someone miles away won't be a recluse,
'Cause after all, what is even there left to lose?
It feels nice even from far away to feel loved, accepted,
But wouldn't it be so much better if they were to hold you, comforted?

Sometimes a wild guess has nothing to lose yet too much to risk,
Sometimes it's better to just move by yourself and start to frisk.
Before searching the ocean of people far and wide, of those good to preach,
Try looking around you, they might be just upon your reach.

They may say words that make you feel less blue,
But make sure those words are words thay stay true.
Because letters may be harmless, words can be blunt,
But when sharpened enough become a ****** stunt.

Phones and computers are ever-easy to use,
But make sure that with it, you fall to abuse;
It makes them addicting, I'll admit,
But we also have to know they have a limit.

Try to close that screen, try to look in front,
Try and talk to one another, no plans, no punt,
We're not a generation of idiots: smart phones, dumb people,
We're a generation of breakthroughs: smart phones, smarter people.

Sometimes we become too rash and get too rushed,
We use them too much then we become brainwashed,
But it's alright if we fall and abject,
After all, no one's made humanly perfect.

It's a paradox, truly, it really is,
That when you’re too busy looking down, you don’t see the chances you miss.
But for the chances you miss, the inevitability you take,
For the new chances that you're ought to make.

Maybe you'll still make, the girl of your dreams come true,
Get married, buy a house, accept each other's peaks and waterloo,
Love and then hate, then sail through this test,
Experience happy and sad and exciting and scary things, up until you rest.

It's okay to look down and type what you feel
Just don't forget to go out and experience everything real,
I still have a thousand words that I want to say,
But all of them point you to living your life in your real way.

To fall in love with writing
is to fall deep into an endless cavity.
Ready your stance for your emotions to be barked,
for your fears to be actualised,
for your dreams to be ignited.
Words serve a purpose to grasp the blind hearts roaming this wide escapade of awakeness.