America has crashed.
You scroll around and wonder what’s going on and why,
And wonder how much longer it will be before
it reaches where you’re sat.
The unseen administrators have frozen the seas,
Taken the planes out of the air and placed them on the ice.
Now they’re down in the server room,
Crying hot tears and pissing themselves
As they wrench out circuit boards
And cut their hands on border controls.
You look at the transatlantic window
At jpegs of dollar signs corrupting into digital mess,
Bright white light burning brown, bubbling holes in the stars and stripes,
like a frame of stuck film.
And the old code that has been slowly removed
Kicks in a moment before
the foundations are ruined, and for a moment everything seems ok -
freedom and liberty restored,
A frozen image of a redwood,
The Grand Canyon on a day of big, blue sky,
The Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights,
The whole Constitution, loading matrix-like,
Backed by golden California valleys before the place
became unreal,
Then a blue screen,
Darker than the real sky ever was.

Reboot America.
This land was once ’� is now America.
The Eiffel tower with giant Golden Arches perched atop it.
Grease from steroid distended beefburgers lubricates the elevator
Smoothly up to the top where just in time you turn and look with a toss
Of your plastic coated hair, lush and beautiful,
Because you deserve it, you’ve worked so hard,
At a firework explosion of the stars and stripes
Glorious in the dark sky of Christmas.
Franklin walked here. Pleasure and happiness.
Wealth and Power.
The God that conducted lightning and gave you your country!
If you don’t like it, get out of the country!
A lightning flash mistakes the camera night for day,
The round face of Big Ben is a Pepsi logo,
A blue and red hand click together on 12, pointing to the stars,
In ello America! a chime a happy voice says
’�H The time sponsored will be with you shortly by Pepsi’�stead of
And on a giant screen on the side of the Houses of Parliament computer rendered Penguins skate
around an ice statue of Tom Paine's prodigious head
on a winter landscape, giving each other fizzy drinks.
Inside is a sex club for the highest earners of the new virtual economy,
Downloading animations of threesomes and orgies,
Silver dishes of digital cocaine,
their avatars, frozen, or stuck in only three frames of their thrusting, snorting loop, or dismembered by lines of lost code,
Devastating their bodies like cancer, zeros where once
There were faces,
And their owners somewhere in their dressing gowns,
Unshaven, fat, unwashed, watch in frustration,
Cocks and dildos and mice and keyboards at the ready,
spliffs in ashtrays curdling their pungent smoke into the still, screen-lit air,
waiting.

Millions become disembodied cameras in a fragment of war, a middle-eastern town adrift in cyberspace, but empty ’� no guns, no avatars, no flashing dots on the maps where the terrorist team have to plant a bomb, no headshots through sniper rifle sights, just invisible cameras who cannot sense each other, who fly far away and look back round at the whole town and the blackness that surrounds it, a town with no markets, no bedrooms, no dreams, an infinite blackness, where the depressed forward key doesn't seem to work or move you forward anymore.

Reboot America!
Let's get this show on the road! You’ve got to pick a side so
Pick America. Full Spectrum Dominance, cocacolafreedomfries in the Sky, Sex Space Stations Orbiting Weightlessfcukinganalsexmilfbigcockinterracialbangmywife in the heavens!
That’s what we want, we’re animals of love! The holy ’�the one’ relationship conversations over lattes in Americas across the world and holy land! Holy America! Song of Myself Whoresensitiveflorencenightingaleeffectyoungmeninloveglisteningbeardsoldierfuck, Holy Road! Hollywood! Onward talk into the night of business and tea and the continued Americaversion of Buddhademographic capture! Enlightened Guru! Transrelationalsensationalgreentea in the Bay Area! PoetYEAH! Slammin’. Post-modern consciousness, problems thereof: radical vocabulary ’� Hella yeah! Therapists and the most exciting goodfood city in New York ’� Have you been to Chanterelle? Sex in the City EMPOWER PUSSY. Shopping Downtown.

Shopping. Bombs go off. The bitmap of the explosion freezes over Times Square. People there can only see a bright light. Sound fails.

It’s in you! There’s no dogma! It’s all in YOU! YOU have the power to control your destinyveteransagainstthewar!

And in the quiet you can stop by the woods
On a snowy evening,
And you can take out your cameraphone
And send a photo to your lover,
Or if you’re single
Or you can’t get a signal
you can stand and watch
The stars wheel in a grand arc,
In wool and ice and vast coldness,
Miles to go before you sleep.

Hey! He’s taken a line from a Robert Frost poem,
Sort of, that famous one, whatsitcalled,
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening I think,
Google it quickly’� ah shit, the internet’s still down. Jeez, now this guy is evoking the critical voice within the poem, as well as taking lines from another, which is known as intertextuality. These are typical characteristics of Ismism. Ismism is when you start talking about Ismism and become fucking idiotic because you’ve become totally desensitised and travel down prefabricated lines of thought and bust them out because you’re so fucking bored. Ismism always ends up with the creation of Ismism again in a loop of really very boring thought that does nothing for anyone and manages to disconnect from .

Hey let’s teach the kids it! Yeah kids. Check out Ismism. Let’s put it on the curriculum! Entire Universities filled with students drinking and talking about Ismism and fucking! Fuck yeah! Hey! I invented Ismism. You like that? You like that, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeahhh. Yeahhhhh. Yeahhhhgghhggh Yeahuh ugh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh ughhhhhhhhhgggghhh! Oh yeah. I’m going to write an essay about ismism eroticism, pornography, or ’�porn’ as it’s more commonly known, and female desire in the Ism. It’s going to rock. And I’ll take on this kind of impenetrably pretentious intellectual tone throughout and try to disguise the fact I don’t know what I actually think or whether I believe in what I’m saying. Do I? Well who knows. Writing the Self in the Ism. I love that shit.

God, it’s dark. I can’t _see_ anything.

Well, while we wait we may as well have some more poem. Where the fuck is it gone?
Shame, this one started out really good as well, with some real provocative imagery. It made me think about how much time I spend online and how we’re becoming a kind of monoculture based on illusion ’� it's, like, so ironic. But also the allusion to Franklin and France shocked me in that our cultural heritage, in all cultures, has been moving towards a kind of Union for ages. What’s the Union now? Hey, isn’t that what that Hegel guy wrote! About the absolute? Fuck yeah! Let’s bring in a bit of old Hegel while the lines are down.

(Clicks on talkinghegel.exe)

Hegel: You fucking swine. Don’t you dare mention me. You haven’t read any of my actual work, only the Wikipedia entry. You completely simplify and misunderstand my thought. Just like that fucking Karl Marx. Fuck YOU!

Yeah but Mr Hegel’�

Hegel: Call me Heinrich.

Heinrich? Is that your first name?

Hegel: I don’t know. Why don’t you Google it you fucking piece of shit.

Touche. I can’t at the moment, the internet is down. The thing is Mr Hegel is that your dialectical theory is in itself open to its own powers, so the theory in itself is a thesis open to a kind of synthesis, causing a kind of implosive drag which has, in my opinion, impacted upon uhhhh..

Hegel: Go on.

Upon uhhh Mass Culture. Implosive, self-reflexive, unsure of its own values.

Hegel: You are a fucking idiot. Why don’t you do what you’re best at and go and get laid and pissed and all that shit that you do. All this theory stuff is shit. Life is about relationships, learning skills, contributing to society, not some fucking dumkopf theory, doing good work and having a family, that sort of thing. Being useful. God knows that’s what I should have done instead of writing impenetrable prose that nobody, including myself, really gets.

Yeah I read you were hard to read. That’s why I din’t bother.

Hegel: Didn’t. Didn’t bother you fucking cretin. FUCK! I hate this. I can’t believe I’m a computer program in a poem.

Is this still a porm? I mean poem? I though it had kind of degenerated. I don’t really know what it is. I know, I’ll review it. I reckon I’ve got far enough through it so that I can review it.

’�Reboot America is a kalaidescopic journey through the melding of the cyberspace and real world’�" man that’s a shit start..

Hegel: You’re writing as if you’re trying to ape what you see on the back of books. You’re being a quote whore. You just want to see your review on the back cover.

No I don’t.

Hegel: Yes you do.

Shut up. I’ll shut you down.

Hegel: Please do.

’�Reboot America is a postmodern epic that stuns you and leaves you lost in a the remains of the real world whose inhabitants have become so attached to the virtual that upon its collapse they find that’�’�

Hegel: That sentence is already far too long. I hope you’re going to finish it soon.

(right click on talking Hegel, close)

There is nothing in the house
That you can just unwrap and eat.