Ms. Moon’s Five-Minute Grocer’s Break
And a reference to the Patty Hearst case
Aesthetica Moon inhales her swisher sweetly inhales more smoke
than her lungs can bear
Gray smoke swirls
mists against the border of a light blue Nissan
Aesthetica casts away the hazy memories
merchandise — denying barcodes as she denies her son’s bald spot
Ms. Moon throws
lightning spears at hubcaps
rips Tag #6 to shreds
Tears the “Buckle Up!” sticker from her truck
thrusts it into the storage rooms of Homeland
Safeway
IGA
where cockroaches (otherwise known as managers)
order their troops to pour ice-cold milk
sour white ripples down sapphire aisles
Tommy rolls his hotwheels
down the spiraling river
That’ll be $6.57
cars, toy dollars, toupees, toy pesos
Hot checks bounce
diving into hailstorms of oblivion
Blackberries jumping off the highest shelves
of the aisle where nuts and fruits —
not the foodstuffs
converse with lettuce
Aesthetica Moon tightens the grip around her swisher
Listening to the most recent Last Podcast on the Left series about Patty Hearst, I learned about the Symbionese Liberation Army and that one of the members renamed herself “Mizmoon.”
That immediately reminded me of a poem I wrote many years ago — the one above. I wrote it in high school, revised it for my grad school thesis and have again revised it for online viewing.
Oddly, I feel it channels a lot of that rebellious, bored, instinctual energy to question authority and buck the system. It also recalls Allen Ginsberg’s fantastic poem, “A Supermarket In California.”
