.Howl

by Mark Cohen

I saw the best jobs of my generation destroyed by madness, IPOing hysterical money,
dragging themselves through the Sand Creek Road at dawn looking for a capital fix,
lightheaded market-makers burning for the Ferrari mindshare,
who sat up betting in the Internet darkness of menlo alto,
who bared their code to NASDAQ and cabled broadband routes to appetite America,
who were invited to academies to forecast insider prices on the 401(k)s of the skull,
who chanted Moore’s Law and permanent utopia nanosecond after nanosecond, with dreams, with lofts, with espresso,
who chained themselves to highways for the endless ride from PARC to holy Redmond on Big Gulp cola until the Windows of possibility clicked shut,
who teleconferenced cross-country to find out if I had a positioning or you had a positioning or he had a positioning,
who copulated ecstatic with PCWorld PCMag PCWeek MacWeek,
who eluded the last pitch of all public relations,
who asked a vp if engineering if marketing if a focus group,
who shot out of Brooklyn, B.S., unlocksmith of SOMA—joy to the memory of his innumerable AEs who in client parking lots laughed without mercy while the P&L mysteriously balanced,
who were made & paid by the incomprehensible caresses of geek and nerd love,
who landed in a lecture on Jewish philosophy this actually happened and returned to the office unmissed missing nothing,
who studied Sun worship, Oracle entrails,
who shopped all night in the techno glow of Fry’s, floated out through brown guacamole Tuesday in unhappy T-shirts, praying for the flash memory of atomic motherboard,
who fell on their future in genie-lamp grad schools paying for wish-acceleration and hedging the index of failure,
who disappeared into the earthquakes of California leaving behind nothing but the e-mail address of downtime,
who broke down crying in stock exchange cafeterias—

ah, David, while you are not employed I am not employed

and who therefore ran through the valley of the shadow of downsizing obsessed with the junk-mail CD of the industry leader free to use for a thousand hours.

Mark Cohen lives in Piedmont and works in high-tech public relations. He is the author of Last Century of a Sephardic Community (Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, New York). E-mail: cohenullen@mcihispeed.net