29 Mar 2025

Max
Wallis

New
Moon

Apr 13th

Mar 14th

Prophets

After the second part of

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl

Which prophets of cigarettes, liquor and cocaine bashed

open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Doherty! Bukowski! Morrissey! Carling and sugary MDMA

Bitcoin and bravado! Men crying in their bedrooms! Boys

sobbing in their office cubicles! Old men weeping in the bowling alley!

Doherty! Bukowski! Morrissey the Messiah! Curtis! Musk!

The heavy enablers of men! The incomprehensible digital-prisoner

sell-outs! The skull-and-bone flag of a bullrag-waving generation!

Plathitudes and Hughesbris. A parliament of pain!

All these dead and not-so-dead befores!

All this that stood and fell and despite it all:

saw their cities extend into the fever pit of men.

And in doing so Hell became.

Behind the poem...

Prophets erupted from Moloch’s furious incantation in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl – his savage naming of the gods devouring his generation, now redirected towards our modern idols. Social media. Digital solitude. Toxic masculinity. Curtis. Morrissey. MDMA. Musk (not a prophet, but something worse). Plath and Hughes linger, too – not as targets, but as myth: brilliance folded into legacy, pain into prophecy. I’ve known the sadboys and the sell-outs. I’ve been the boy crying in his bedroom. This poem became a fever list, a chant, a reckoning. It ends, of course, with a city in flames and someone still tweeting.