In Memory of W.H. Gates
I.
He was deleted in the dead of winter
Screensavers frozen, the Airport getting no signal,
And spam disfigured the public's email.
The Microsoft stock sank all the dying day.
O, WTF and OMG
The day of his death was a dork's cold day.
Far from his virus
Computers ran on in the cubicle forests,
And novice typists were ignorant of shortcut keys;
By mourning tongues,
The pain of Windows was kept from its users.
But for him it was his last afternoon by himself,
An afternoon of Halo and chat-roomers;
His hard drive became corrupted
His firewall was finally hacked,
A virus invaded his mainframe,
The current in his system failed: he became his blue screen.
Now he is scattered across a billion websites
And wholly given over to Norton's poor protection
To find another kind of virtual reality
And be punished like a Trojan Horse in an email.
The script of a dead man
Is rewritten by the fingers of tech-geeks.
But in the impotence in the beds of to-morrow,
When the lonely are grunting like level-twelve dwarves,
And the online gamers have the solitude to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of his room is almost done with the final boss,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one got a free hamburger at Wendy's.
O, WTF and OMG
The day of his death was a dork's cold day.
II.
You weren't pretty, like us, but your wealth could buy us all.
Your greasiness in childhood, physical neglect,
Poor health; sad Washington urged you to technology.
Now Washington has her sadness and her weather still,
For rainfall encourages depression: D&D
In the basement of your mother's where cheerleaders
Would never want to tamper, you survived
All methods of brutality—the super-wedgies,
Raw skin from Purple Nurples; You survived
And clicked to happiness. A mouse.
III.
Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Gates is laid to rest:
Let the soulless PC lie
Emptied of its circuitry.
In this nightmare world of porn
Staying up until the morn
All the Windows users fret
Each sequestered in the 'net
Auto-sexual disgrace
Stares from every pimpled face,
But with a handle like "IceCold"
You can make yourself seem old.
Follow, gamer, follow yet
To the bottom of the 'net,
Make yourself seem pwnz0r-733+
By typing words that few can read
In a chatroom made for teens
Lose yourself in fantasies
Boast of sexual success
In your semi-literate text
In the DOS mode of the heart
Teach us all how to restart,
From the depths of our defeat,
Let us all Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Sent as a joke to The League of American Poets, this poem is a parody of W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"
