Midnight Ramble

Coca-Cola Dream debuted at the Personal Mythologies II reading at KWH in 2003

Something happened to me for the first time this year, something more or less momentous. Something I’ve been waiting for jealously since I began to write. I had the dream. The dream in which a succession of images appears in such a way as to make the creation of a poem not only necessary, but inevitable. I’ve always envied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s of the poetic world, who could smoke a bit of opium and come out with a Kubla Khan. I’ve tried writing in various states of intoxication but wound up, as Ginsberg would have it, “rocking and rolling over lofty incantations that in the morning were stanzas of gibberish.” This time I got lucky. Here's the dream: I’m standing at the corner of Walnut and Broad, under the awning of the ritzy hotel there, I forget what it’s called…the Bellevue! I’ve got an edition of Shelley in my hands— hard-backed, blue, looks like it’s been sitting in an attic for a few generations. I come across a curious poem that begins with the word “swimming” repeated eight times. My response, in the dream, was to make the assumption that this was Shelley somehow anticipating the last moments of his life— splashing around amidst an infernal storm off the coast of Italy, ineffectuality trying to keep his head above water.

Then I noticed something else curious about the poem— it made frequent and loving mention of Coca-Cola, which seemed to be the leitmotif of the piece. Of course, we know that Shelley died a century before poets began to imbibe the carbonated wonder. I found this perplexing, but (hey!) it was a dream, you know. It had its own sort of logic. End of dream. I woke up, I had some time to kill, I remembered the dream, and felt it incumbent upon me to take the hint of the Muses and write the poem that Shelley never did. To be frank, I’ve become something of a Coke-a-holic in the last year, anyway. Have one with lunch, dinner, with a midnight snack. Anytime. What I like about Coke is that everybody drinks it. As Andy Warhol said, “The President drinks it, Liz Taylor drinks it, and, just think: you can drink it, too!” Coke is America, and America, in a very real sense, especially culturally, is Coke.

As I began to write, I found myself using the standard Whitmanic technique of putting the rhyme at the beginning of the line, rather than the end. This technique has the advantage of creating parallel structure, with cadence, rhythm, metric symmetry, without the encumbrance of a formal rhyme scheme. It is economical, utilitarian, and eminently American. Poetic apple pie. God only knows what Shelley would’ve thought.