A Supermarket in New York

(Based on "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg) 

 

I wonder at you Allen Ginsberg

What you're doing besides the

Stacked cans. Some people itch 

For a different kind of music (drum beat 

Sacrifice; bosom brothers; Holy is–)

But you still are beating your fingers

On the tops of the goya beans, I’ll give

You a hint, they’re closed mouthed,

 

Sealed. Unlike you, who even here, 

By the tiny cashiers and their 

Chafing lipstick, the butcher’s rusted slicer

And the fake bread gnawed on by a

Food stamp, gush and spill with

Wanting to grab the All American’s 

 

Hand one sweated Columbia Night.

You were born here to suffer

And I suppose that’s all you’re doing.

I’m speaking too quickly

Maybe it’s James Dean I’m addressing

And why address any of you men

 

Who won’t ever understand me

And perhaps you are like 

             Burroughs

And hate women. 

 

But maybe it’s nothing:

A fly on cheese

Imported from a chaste unwinded

People, unmolested by drench fog

(You) as they duck through dream alleys 

Of meeting (or happenstance.)

 

Little Kids float like cherubs around my hair, 

I want to smash their bodies like 

porcelain figures of Vargas Llosa.

I do not possess your broke beat love,

I don’t even possess your Whitman’s

desire to claim a thousand dependents. 

I possess a roach desire to entrap Colossus’s head

in the oven (husbandry, that underdust dirt-trap of 

Manhattan, the place

 

That just isn’t a place at all.)

And you feel suddenly very small

And humble in the aisle of deli meats

You want to repent, you tell me, but

Your whole body still girates, and from the mirror

Behind a Boar’s Head, another face stares 

At yours with something like spinal terror

Feral misunderstanding, you are eating 

Your rags…

 

A sound– De Andrade? Why are you hiding 

Behind the sugar loaves? Why are you giving into

Servitude? So you’re telling me all I’ve got

To look forward to is a Tollhouse cookie

And a vague comparison to Beauvoir? For 

Everything in this rapid beating Allen heart, 

No one ever proposed to take a look into

A supermarket in São Paulo?

 

Stop wringing your hands. The Titan 

Looks dead and wounded bleeding 

From airplanes, the red and yellow car light

Proclamation, first to the sky, and first back 

To earth…You poet who is (nothing supposedly) but 

Baudelaire twice removed, kill this man. 

​

Tear out his ligaments, yes even the 

Ones stretched out by Peace Love & Yoga

Make him your Naked Lunch. (Maybe I

Am fulfilling a violence not in you.) Make him 

Hear you, throw ransom at his ears, and as

You speak to him, know fully that I’m loving you. 

 

I am swallowing the night from the window

It’s all over now. The faces have washed from 

The cottage cheese, reflections cleansed by time

From mirrors, and I have forfeited five dollars to 

The woman who snaps up my clothes and 

Spits out a degenerate. So I wad away and

The mad male poets sing back at me. It’s too late now.

Yes, even for you De Andrade, all we do in these

Conversations is sit and echo each other: go home.