A Beat Poet Buys Girl Scout Cookies

I was walking—

walking the long suburban sidewalks of America,

the ones that loop past cul-de-sacs like tired thoughts,

past mailboxes shaped like trout and pickup trucks,

when I saw the folding table of destiny.

Two Girl Scouts.

Sashes jangling with merit badges like jazz cymbals.

Boxes stacked like small cardboard temples

to the holy union of the munchies and capitalism.

A sign written in marker:

COOKIES — $6

Six dollars, man.

Six dollars to soothe your hunger.

Six dollars to fill your soul.

Six dollars for transcendence.

I leaned against a Honda Odyssey

still warm with the domestic engine of America

and looked at the menu of life.

Thin Mints.

Samoas.

Tagalongs.

Trefoils.

That wasn't a menu of cookies, man.

It was poem

Verses to a song your stomach sings

One of the girls looked up at me

with the calm economic certainty

of a young entrepreneur who knows

the quarterly numbers will close strong.

Who knows a soul in need of a little

Somethin' somethin'

Hook me up, Girl Scout

“Would you like to buy some cookies?”

Would I?

Would Kerouac have hitchhiked the highways

without a pack of Thin Mints in his rucksack?

Would Ginsberg have howled without coconut caramel Samoas

sticking to his metaphysical molars?

I said,

“I’ll take a box.”

She said,

“Which one?”

And suddenly the road opened before me—

a thousand miles of cookie possibility.

Thin Mints:

cool dark jazz cookies

that whisper from the freezer at 2 a.m.

Samoas:

sticky halos of coconut enlightenment

drizzled with the chocolate of minor sins.

Tagalongs:

peanut-butter planets

orbiting a biscuit sun.

Trefoils:

plain, honest,

the Ford pickup of cookies.

I stood there trembling

in the late-afternoon wind

like a man deciding

between salvation and a second cup of gas-station coffee.

Finally I said,

“Two boxes.”

The girls nodded.

They had seen this before.

Men undone by the great American cookie choice.

“Cash or card?”

Cash, man. Always cash.

You don’t swipe enlightenment.

I handed over twelve crumpled dollars—

the price of sweetness in this mortal coil.

They passed me the boxes like sacred texts.

And I walked back down the sidewalk of America

past the minivans and barking dogs

past the quiet lawns humming with suburban karma.

I opened the Thin Mints immediately.

Right there under the open sky.

The chocolate cracked.

The mint hit like a cool trumpet note.

And I thought—

I need some milk

Then I thought—

maybe the road isn’t Route 66.

Maybe it isn’t some dusty highway

running through desert sunsets and broken diners.

Maybe the road is just this:

a folding table,

two Girl Scouts,

a cardboard box of cookies,

and the sudden holy knowledge

that you probably should’ve bought three.