“i’ll tell you that i’m happy if you want me to / but one step further and my back will break”

For Poetry Monday, with a cut for length:

Howl Under a Blue Light Filtered Moon, Elden Locke
(Dedicated to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds of my generation scrolling themselves to death,
starved for meaning, lit by the blue glow of a thousand screens,
dragged through the feed at 3 A.M. looking for something real.

Angels of burnout, prophets of anxiety,
wired into coffee and code and self-diagnosis,
naked in their rooms, refreshing the apocalypse for updates.

Who texted their prayers into the void and got an emoji in return,
who built their gods out of hashtags and dopamine,
who confessed their sins to algorithms that sold them better ones.

Who wandered suburbia in eternal leases,
tethered to Wi-Fi, dreaming of the open road but afraid of gas prices,
who howled under fluorescent lights of office towers
as their dreams were formatted into PowerPoints.

Who made love to ghosts through pixelated glass,
mouths pressed to screens, hearts buffering,
and cried out for human touch in the language of memes.

( Who believed in justice and were met with comment sections )

Source. Relevant Ginsberg.

---L.

Subject quote from Everything She Wants, Wham!.