What thoughts I have for you tonight, Allen Ginsberg, for I used my cursor on the scroll bar in my living room with carpal tunnel self-conscious looking at the full screen.
In my hammered weariness, and shopping for captioned images, I went into the mobile-focused e-commerce fruit supermarket, dreaming of your visual hierarchy!
What locally grown peaches and pixellated shadows! Millennials shopping 24/7! Apps full of Gen Zers! Baby boomers in the gluten-free muffins, Gen Xers in the non GMO tomatoes!-and you, William S. Burroughs, what were you doing by the paleo friendly farfalle?
I saw you, Allen Ginsberg, childless, isolated old flit, jabbing at the apples with your stylus on the fruit page and asking for a frat boy personal shopper.
I heard you asking questions of each in the chat page: Who picked the apples? What price organic bananas? Will an Undergrad deliver my package?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant digital aisles mining your data, and followed in my imagination by the secure website cookies.
We strode through the open web pages together in our solitary fancy browsing quinoa, clicking on every sugar-free delicacy, and never proceeding to checkout.
Where are we going, Allen Ginsberg? The same-day delivery cut-off is in an hour. Which generation’s minds will madness destroy?
(I read your book on Kindle and dream of our odyssey on the website and feel absurd.)
Will we add to cart all night through solitary menus? The tabs add screen to screen, hard drives crash, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we troll dreaming of the lost America of no self-checkout lines past blue Alexa speakers in home pages, home to our dial-up Internet?
Ah, esteemed patriarch, gaffer, censored old groundbreaker, what America did you have when Bezos quit selling books and you turned on a smoking desktop and sat watching the culture disappear in the black turnaround of the 24 hour news cycle?
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