1
More and more the parents lay themselves to rest
in tombs they carry with them on their daily rounds.  
The world spirits them away 
and cocoons them in all the sounds 
and rhythms stirring on the factory floors, 
around the retail bins, behind the gilded doors
of boardrooms-wherever CEOs
and bottom lines call them to their best.

2
In antiseptic rooms of tenements 
and up-scale homes, in barrio and urban sprawl, 
everywhere that parents hope to save 
their dearest ones, the children lean in reverent thrall 
into their shining screens, their rooms 
lit up with death that bleeds but does not pain,
with cyborgs and cyberkill and massacres 
by robot men.  These are the sacraments.

3
Parents and children, we make our sterile peace--  
artificial flowers on a lawn, limp menage
plastique frozen at its verge,
where childhood takes its refuge in the arbitrage 
of love deferred and turns a profit from the pain:  
parental guilt bartered for a gleam, a geegawed gain.       
Though now and then a lost and soft or callow child 
does break down -- and blow the world away to find release.

-- Julian Crowell (American Poet)


A personal note from Julian Crowell:
"My thanks to Plainsongs for publishing 'Moloch'
in their Winter, 2001 issue."