In a K-mart outside Wilmington, Delaware,
on a trip from Washington, the capital of the nation
to New York, the capital of Sodom--
detoured by teeming fourth of July vacationers clogging 95
 Northbound and the Delaware Bridge,
I saw fourteen varieties of tanktops in salmon and pea green;
an old woman rasping through an oxygen tank in the unreformed
 yellow restaurant,
underneath the Marlboro cowboy;
a vast column of Coca-Cola, discounted to 99 cents for 2 liters,
only slightly more expensive than gasoline;
and it made me think of going home.

I saw large expanses of sporting goods with meandering hunters,
while I searched for a map and asked myself:
“How did I get here?  What have I done?”
     There were no Chinese firecracker-stands gearing up for independence,
no inner city, no beltways or coffee stands or
used book outlets or Jews.
There were no street-hawkers, power-walkers, or cosmopolitan chicks.
There were no alibis or counter-arguments, no offerings or suitcase-
bombs.  No red-dress hooker beckoning, or box office deserted, no
shining revelation -- just aisles.

In a K-Mart outside Wilmington, Delaware,
I bought a map and a coke and a Snickers,
I thought of where I wanted to be: “I want to go home!”
“I want to go home!”
Wired with hours to go before I slept, with a half-digested lunch of
carrot soup, and out-of-place round glasses,
frustrated at my rejection of mass transportation,
not writing or working, not fucking anyone for the moment,
I zigzagged through the departments like a speed freak on K --
In the face of the K-mart checkout clerk, not the slightest wizened
 by experience, I saw God.
In the rows of prewritten greeting cards, I saw epiphany.
In the flattened asphalt parking lot, I saw the wilderness.
In the racist boy dangling legs on the dashboard of his father’s car,
 I saw redemption.
 

There are no Beats at the counters, they are outsourced.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the poet has left the building.
The icicles have turned to sand, nothing beside remains;
the visions of Gautama glimpsed half-nakedly by hippie bikers,
are the province of stranglers,
and the motorcycles once holy are now in the hands of large concerns.
The untreated wastelands of the Delaware-Pennsylvania border
are now an anomaly.
The traffic clogs the roads and the music America sings is muzak,
while it shops among the pastel underwear for the right, desirable
negligee.
 
 
 

Jay Michaelson
jay@metatronics.net