A Supermarket in The Villages

Allen Ginsberg

Today is the Royal Oak Beatnik Coffee House, the neighborhood social event (80 people coming!) that I have carefully planned and coordinated since volunteering in May. There will be folk singers plus our resident talent, black berets for everyone, a pot luck supper, fake cigarettes and (electric) candles on the tables. And Me. I'm doing a poetry reading.

I plagiarized (bastardized) a poem by Allen Ginsberg (the poet laureate of the Beat Generation  - I saw him in person in the sixties at the University of Illinois) called "A Supermarket in California". My version is re-titled "A Supermarket in The Villages".  I've included the original version with the centerpieces along with a short dictionary of Beatnik slang. Here is my effort, wish me luck!

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Harold Schwartz, as I walked down the

streets under the live oak trees with a headache looking at the early morning sun.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for breakfast, I went into the neon fruit
Spanish Springs Farmers Market, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what mangoes! Whole families shopping at The Villages!  Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, even grand-babies in the tomatoes!  And you, Jerry Carter, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, John Johnson, happy old golfer, poking among the pastries and eyeing the baguettes.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who kneaded the dough? What price are the
bananas? What’s for dessert?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of honeybells following you Cathy Kobe, and followed in my imagination by Villages Security.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy, tasting
freely offered samples, possessing every ripe delicacy, and never paying the cashier.

Where are we going, Harold Schwartz? The vendors close in an hour. Which way does your golf cart point tonight?

I gaze upon your statue in the waters and dream of our odyssey in the Farmers Market.

Will we walk all day and night through the streets of stores?  Will we sit on lonely benches while our women shop at Chicos? The trees add shade to shade, lights are going on in the Square and soon we'll both be Line Dancing.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America we left behind in frigid cold climates, remembering our old cars parked in driveways covered with snow, home to our silent former cottages?

Ah, dear Villagers, friends of Royal Oak, what flavor of Hagen-Daz did you have when the Boat Captain poled his ferry and you stood on a Sunset bank watching the boat disappear on the blue waters of Lake Sumter? 

;-)