From HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg, 1955

     What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their
          skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
     Moloch!  Solitude!  Filth!  Ugliness!  Ashcans and un-
          obtainable 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 judgement!  Moloch the vast stone
          of war!  Moloch the stunned governments!
     Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!  Moloch whose blood
          is running money!  Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
          Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 factories 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!  Pavements,
          trees, radios, tons!  lifting the city to Heaven which
          exists and is everywhere about us!

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