today is a special day!

It's Poem on Your Blog Day!. Inspired by Ms Lauren's steady stream of poetic posts, I will post for you one of my favorites. If you're lucky, I might even write one, later. After I finished editing that story I wrote, for Hans. Or before. I dunno. Anyway.

I have a penchant for beat poetry and spontaneous prose, thus I line my shelves with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and others, and I try to suppress my eternal desire to just let go of everything and travel, let the wind or I-Ching take me whichever way it pleases into experiences I can only dream about in upper-middle class suburban America. To be both an observer of the people living their lives normally, existing within the system, and an active participant in the communities of individuals making their own society (but without the junk habit). I present to you a poem by Ginsberg that never fails to raise an unholy and joyous giggle in my soul.

A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what where you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quite poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of the Lethe?