In Moloch [prose poem]

                                                                 What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

—Allen Ginsberg,

Howl, Pt II

1. A crisis in civilization has come.
2. Nature is red in tooth and claw.
3. Banks are more dangerous to a People and their Liberty than any invading army.
4. I believe as Lincoln that America is the last best hope for humankind.

“The Jacobins were right,” he remembered having recollected having heard something like this in these or perhaps other words, or both, from one or another, here or there, now or then. Whether he is accurate, or was accurate or not, in his appraisal is not the issue, but then we do have his words here verbatim from something he had written how long ago we are not going to tell because we do not remember; and the words are verbatim as we have said because they were written, as I have a copy of the text he had written, a photo-copy of it made by a mutual friend, a photo-copy of the text in this man’s hand, presumably. Where this mutual friend had come across it is not an issue because this mutual friend’s copy is a copy of the text that this “he” wrote; and whether it was copied from the original or from another photo copy we do not know and are not likely to find out, those facts kept from us by unseen and unfelt, unknown forces. We do not believe that it matters much because whatever we say about what we have and how we have it is what we say when we say it for yiou to read here and think what you want anyway. We are not assuming omniscience here, which is something not nearly as ubiquitous in fiction as we were lead to believe every time we liked critiquing omniscient narration back as undergraduates.

Here is the photo-copy of the text I received by our mutual friend, and in it is contained the assumed words penned by the assumed author of the text, again, a mutual friend of mine and the woman who gave me the photo-copy of the page in long hand torn out of spiral notebook like he used to like carrying with him as did a poet friend of mine who used to live around the corner from fourteenth street in Manhattan sometime in the late nineties before he died of a protracted suicide:

How can any medium not critique the media, I may wonder, as I ask, as I do puzzle over for a time; but for however long I do, I come back to the prime position in all first philosophies, “I know nothing” but without concluding “I can know nothing.” The former is a place to begin an inquiry into knowing; the latter is a resolution of hopelessness.

So we dance as I dance the dance of bringing on the will to power, almost as my primitive forebears danced the dance to bring rain . . . and all of us do lose because power becomes more powerful and money becomes more monied–yes, present simple, not present perfect. What then is more influential?

As I have alluded to in other essays I have written on or around the like, there is no city more like New York today than the Jerusalem of Jeremiah, third century BCE? Of course, there is no city like this 3rd century BCE city than Shanghai today, or Paris today or tomorrow, or Moscow yesterday, today or tomorrow, or all our yesterdays or tomorrows and tomorrows in Cairo, in Bombay today, or in the London of Blake, or the New York of Allen Ginsberg, ruled over by the hungry beast god Moloch: “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” (Ginsberg).

 I just do not understand how we think we will not have to murder too many of them in a great en-masse orgy of blood and death. I am hoping against hope that Money in its greed will see some light; but with as stupidly and as systematically undereducated every level of academic achievement has been fostered, I am hoping against hope that the Greed and the Power tapeworm the Elite are infected with—would I be surprised if these semi-literate morons infected with the sickness of Greed in a world without Truth pushed the People into one orgy of blood following another of violence and even more bloodshed?

No. I would not. In my old age, I might welcome it. I am after all we, and we are ourselves greedy, especially with how much it would cost us to change—the one way poor people have of emulating the rich being greedy is by being cheap; and we are cheap. Yes, the flip side of greed is cheap; they’re one in the same.