SLEEPING MOLOCH
September 1914
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!
‘What the fuck . . . ’ the beast growls.
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
Moloch whose blood is running money!
The blue mosquitoes of the future
are sucking the monster’s blood,
shooting in its brain (as big as a sperm whale)
through electric arrows of images,
a phantom voice and the silhouette
—fat and naked and so funny—
of a long-bearded miniaturized guru
pissed off by a grey skyscraper.
Moloch the incomprehensible prison!
Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse
and Congress of sorrows!
‘Who’s riding my ass? . . .
You come in a queer package, but you got guts.’
says the beast scratching its nose.
Moloch stands up, with its arms and ankles
decorated with bracelets set with gleaming jewels . . .
No, it’s all bullshit, none of that, wait:
the giant, approximately 600 feet tall,
naked like chatterbox Ginsberg’s ghost
is shaking off ground, mud and small hills
from its crocodile skin.
—Now you see it—
—Now you don’t—
French and German soldiers slide down its shoulders
while the monster grabs some bayonets,
and old sharpened bones to pick its teeth.
The trenches, lying so still for months,
—the veins and the arteries of Moloch—
suddenly take off vertically
dripping down slowly like red honey,
quickly draining, weakening the beast
who rubs its still sleepy eyes.
Moloch salutes the horizon, over there
—it seems the world’s oldest and biggest general—
where appear the ghosts of the future,
(white and skinny)
and those fresh with a pierced helmet,
(black, fat, with their souls still attached, like tails)
squashes some mosquitos
and lies down again, forming again the battlefield
for all those armed ant colonies,
dressed in bright red and blue uniforms,
belly up, now, with their little crazy paws
trying to catch a flag or a machine gun,
—maybe just one more day—
before everyone else.