[Internal evidence from this poem suggests that the author went to Rice University, as have many of the once and future editors of SpecGram. However, none of us ever met anyone by that name—at least, no one will admit to it. The original manuscript was considerably longer, and involved a road trip including a desultory stop in what appeared to have been College Station. During the transport of the manuscript to SpecGram Towers, the protective convoy made its own desultory stop in College Station to allow a reading at Rudder Auditorium. Most of the rest of the manuscript was destroyed by a squadron of outraged and infuriated Texas A&M ROTC cadets who took rather strong exception to the apparent aspersions cast on “Reveille”, the university chancellor, and the Aggie football team, as well as the presence of a rampant triumphant longhorn steer. The commotion began somewhere around the reading of the line “such men give me the chuckles / ’Cause when they walk they bruise their knuckles”—though survivors of the melée indicate that this precipitating couplet was unrepresentative of the tone of that section of the poem. Doubly unfortunately, the usual protocol of photographing, 3D-scanning, electron micographing, and x-ray crystallographing any and all submissions was not followed. The leader of the pre-transport prep team did manage to take a selfie, which includes a picture of the manuscript rendered in latte foam. All of her interns are being flogged as punishment. —Eds.]
I saw the dullest minds of my generation destroyed by nonsense, nonce-rhymed limericks wretched,
dragging their feet through amphibrachs and looking through thesauruses,
scraggly-bearded hipsters burning through the midnight oil for the proper weighting of connections in the machinery of brain,
whom poverty of stimulus inspired to heights of folly in the sempiternal darkness of the Charles River flowing across the tops of cement-booted cognitivists,
who battered their brains to pulp against the Gnome and saw glossematic Danes staggering drunk in tagmemic non-illumination,
who passed through universities with radiantly crazed eyes hallucinating assignations and light operettas among the scholars of yore,
who were expelled from the academies for functional & publishing triolets via Windows or even Linux,
who cowered unshaven in lands over there, stashing their stipends in wastebaskets and listening for outraged unpaid informants through the wall,
who got busted in their ternarily branching nodes returning through Laredo with the latest batch to fund their fieldwork,
who served fare in Taco Bells or drank too much coffee impaired and sleepy, language death or visa-cancelled their careers time after time
with Merge, with Trace, with Obligatory Contours, null morphs and endless cock-and-bull,
incomputable parse trees of idiotic sound and fury in the mind leaping toward poles of Cambridge & New Brunswick, illuminating all the changeless world of Ideas betimes,
coyote sodalities of Rayzor Hall, backyard garden path necropsy dawns, coffee wiredness down in the steam tunnels, storebought gourdfuls of yerba maté joyride Shiner-drunk pedaling, heat and haze and branch collapses in the pouring summer rains of Houston, dashcam rantings and kuding light in mind,
who chained themselves to shuttles for the endless ride from Stadium to Fondren lacking Allegra until the sneezes of mold and pollen brought them down shuddering throat-ragged and reddened bleak of brain all drained of mucus in the wet heat of a drained bayou,
who ran all night in shaving cream but the president was out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in dingy Valhalla, listening to the helium laugh of the generativist Wurlitzer,
who talked continuously seventy hours from zoo to quad to pub to La Madeleine to museum to the Sallyport,
a lost troupe of Lewisian conventionalists jumping down your throat off on tangents to conclusions off Sid Rich at the chance,
yacketayakking screeching plummeting withering cicada memories and anecdotes and footfall crunchy walks and paths and loading docks and walls and lawns,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights for an average of B, food for the squirrels cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere, i.e. New Jersey, leaving a trail of ambiguous lexicalist tracts leading nowhere from Bunce Hall,
suffering Houston sweat and Chomskyan role-bindings and migraines bowed under caffeine withdrawal in Newark’s bleak future doom,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the graveyard of ideas wondering what to think, and thought, leaving no spoken doubts,
who stirred up dust in bookstores bookstores bookstores tripping over sidewalks toward lonesome quads in Uncle Willy’s hedges,
who studied Chomsky Lovecraft Horne Tooke’s hornbook aphasia and pop crapola because the cosmos instinctively quailed at their approach in Cambridge,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking native Amerindian informants who were native Amerindian informants,
who thought that Hell’s not so bad when Houston baked in petrochemical stench and rot...
