The Beat goes on

After ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg, 1926–1997

I saw the best minds of my generation employed by Macintosh, leaving hysterical later,

dragging themselves through the needless trips of boards looking for an easy fix,

who wandered around and around at meetings in a bewildered mode wondering where to go,

and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who scribbled all night umming and aahing over software implementations which in the yellow morning were strategies of gibberish,

nimble-headed cat’s-paws yearning for the ancient heavenly direction, S.J., secret hero of these peons, NeXT man and Adonis of development – joy to the memory of his innumerable days of toil in empty lofts & Daddy’s backyard,

who dreamt and made incarnate Macs in 84 through icons juxtaposed, and joined the elemental PCBs and put the new OS of Macintosh together tampering with collations of Xerox Palo Alto Research –

who cowered in forsaken gloom in Spindler’s era, burning their money in wastebaskets and hastening through the Error to the fall,

who burned their brains with Copland until Ellen brought in Tevanian’s angels demanding instantaneous conformity,

and who were given instead a Mac devoid of OpenStep Game Sprockets Open Transport & AIX,

which were burned alive in their innocent panelled suites on Infinite Loop amid threats of doing worse & the cranked-up chatter of the ironic regiments of Macdom & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Commercial Reality,

who went out pouring through Cupertino and drifted in teams, woke on a Saturday morning, and picked themselves up out of bar-rooms hung-over with endless Tequila & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who journeyed to Apple, who died in Apple, who came back to Apple & waited in vain, who watched over Apple & brooded & loned in Apple and finally went away for lack of a dime, & now Apple is lonesome for her heroes –

ah, Gil, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the financial soup of all time,

but you will rise reincarnate in the clothes of Rhapsody and blow away the suffering of Apple’s followers with a multi-threading multi-tasking System that slaughters the competition down to the last window

with the absolute heart of the One GUI rising out of its own ashes good to beat a thousand jeers.

First published in MacUser, 18 April 1997

Tagged as: Apple, Language, MacUser