These lines continue to cultivate the magical tone generated in the “Neon Fruit Supermarket”. The way the speaker describes the interior of the grocery store as "shiny" and "neon", coupled with his paranoia regarding security that follows him, infers that the speaker is experiencing an altered state of consciousness. Or maybe the speaker is dreaming this whole experience. The speaker shows genuine affection for Whitman with the lines: "Which way is your beard pointing tonight?" / (I touch your book and I dream of our odyssey to the / supermarket and I feel absurd.).” Ginsberg creates a somewhat comical and affectionate tone with these lines. It appears that the speaker has a romantic attraction to Whitman on some level. This takes the theme of the speaker's adoration of Whitman to new heights. “A Supermarket in California” was written in 1955, a turbulent era marked by widespread civil unrest and a subjugation of individual freedoms in the name of national security. Ginsberg and his contemporaries were fed up with the societal norms that existed at the time and used their poetry and literature to express these ideas. This contempt for society is manifested in