I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
coding, starving hysterical naked,
debugging their code through var dumps at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters scripting for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamic typing
in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
the web floating across the tops of integers
contemplating lisp,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the C and
saw Euclidean angles staggering on
algorithms illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool
eyes hallucinating data structures
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled by startups for crazy &
committing obscene codes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in novelty t-shirts,
burning down charts and sprinting toward
the Terror on their wall