Conversation without Walt Whitman

After one glass of red wine I think I'm Allen Ginsberg,
walking through West Side looking for poets behind the cabbages
or bananas or watermelons or whatever the hell vegetable it was
Ginsberg found people behind, except even my demons have deserted
and it's just the vegetables and the cleaning people looking at me
while I pretend not to think about where you might be now,
instead of walking through a supermarket looking for the ghosts
of poets -- of poems -- words -- that used to come more easily,
from stranger more familiar places, even from behind cabbages bananas watermelons,
and intoxicating without the wine.


(I know, my alcohol tolerance is shot to hell. And I still need to read on cosmopolitan democracy, how?)