II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
          their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
          nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
          tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
          stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
          weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
          loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
          judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
          crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
          sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
          Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
          ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
          blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
          are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
          bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
          tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
          Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
          streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
          tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
          smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
          whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
          whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
          whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
          Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
          Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
          Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
          I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
          who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
          Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
          Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
          skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
          industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
          houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
          ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
          Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
          us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
          gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
          boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
          gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
          spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
          Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
          the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
          wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
          They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
          carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
          street!