who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for eternity outside of time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on madison avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of absolute reality,
who jumped off the brooklyn bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic european
1930s german jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-golgotha jail-solitude
watch or birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if i had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out eternity,
who journeyed to denver, who died in denver, who
came back to denver & waited in vain, who
watched over denver & brooded & loned in
denver and finally went away to find out the
time, & now denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to alcatraz,
who retired to mexico to cultivate a habit, or rocky
mount to tender buddha or tangiers to boys
or southern pacific to the black locomotive or
harvard to narcissus to woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at ccny lecturers on dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
east,
pilgrim state's rockland's and greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ***, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. a.m. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, carl, while you are not safe i am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in time & space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of pater omnipotens aeterna
deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of america's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
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!
