King Sooper


Picasso Man with a Straw Hat
and an Ice Cream Cone - 1938
King Sooper
__________________

“What remains is to fully bring
Plath’s poetics into the framework
of the same cultural logics that
produced The New American Poets—
think of Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in
California, for instance—a revision”
—Barrett Watten

“Walking into King Sooper
after Two-week Retreat
A thin redfaced pimpled boy
stands alone minutes
looking down into the ice cream bin.
—Allen Ginsberg
“Cabin in the Rockies,”
Collected Poems (1947-1997)
_____________

What thoughts are you having kid
peering down into the ice cream bin
hungry with fatigue and wanting something
to cure your aching adolescent hardon
self-consciously letting me watch you

I’m hungry & horny too after my
two-week retreat up by that cabin
there in the Rockies with nothing to do
except sip tea & meditate on Buddha
who never did show up anyway
___________________

the kid & I in the King Sooper
standing way in the back both of us
there shopping for images tonight
like a couple of Whitman badboyz
bored lonely dreaming of sex

Meanwhile the peaches are rotting
with putrid penumbras stinking up the
neon aisles amidst Warhol cans of
tomato soup stacked childless alone
with me queering the avocados
__________________

Up there by the cabin where the
only sound was the wind with me
sitting on a tree stump with nothing
to do except think of Neil Cassidy
nude 18-years-old in bed with me

The frozen blueberry Popsicles look
cool & inviting so does the orange
sherbet on a stick & other frozen
delicacies just waiting to be sucked
sampled swallowed and blown
______________________

Cruising the kid I see him getting
hard down there in his tight jeans
his living breathing pork chop slowly
easing down the side of his leg with
him letting me ogle at it shamelessly

No families shopping tonight
No aisles full of husbands, wives, kids
Not even any grocery boyz other than
The one bending down erect like a
Lost American genealogical tree root
_____________________

What’s the use strolling thru 7-Elevens
letting my imagination lollygag thru
endless WalMart menageries of cheap
Chinese tires and antifreeze specials
Ugly pot-bellied shoppers of Lethe

Well, maybe I did find Buddha after all
being up there all alone in the silent cabin
without bananas, apples, popcorn, candy
no supermarket odyssey to distract me
saving it instead for a young dharma dick?


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