MINIMUM WAGE PARKING LOT POEM #2
Kenneth DiMaggio
Suburban teen
runaway
far from your secure
and safe world
After a friend
who put you in touch with
a dealer who told you to wait
for him at this
State Checks Cashed
& food stamps accepted
shopping plaza
In the meantime try
to blend in
by covering your Grateful
Dead psyche with your
grays sweat shirt hoody
Virgil will soon be back
to take you on a personal tour
of Inferno and also to deal
some Readies
Why
just a hand and not the rest of the body
in the fast food dumpster?
Why
all these satellite dishes
on the nearby tenement
porches about to collapse when
the glamorous reality that gets
tuned in ends by being snuffed up
as one more addiction
by people who make ends
meet
by mixing them with baby powder
And the cops who pour
sugar in their coffee now try to scratch
the winning lottery ticket numbers from a day they hope
will end in a cease fire
And the scum bags to them are the existentialist heroes
to others
Dante forgot
to write about Limbo
that permanent
holding pen
in the abyss
where suspects charged
with what crime
waste their lives
buying from the ring ring ring numb
grocery store and the sale sale shoplift fashion outlet
and if you still need more salvation there's the Pentacostal church
in what used to be the Laundromat Dante
never wrote about this rusting overturned shopping cart cosmos
but Virgil
can sell you a piece of Hell Purgatory and Heaven
all in the same vial
Suburban teen missing
boy
it might be your
body discovered within
the next dumpster heap of greasy French Fries
and hamburgers
the risk taken by this once
psychedelic pink flamingo kid
when he saw how life for him
would be a steady routine of purchasing a more expensive brand
of sustaining but soul-less groceries
