Diet Pepsi: My Drug of Choice
For a dollar thirty-
five a day I get a pleasant mix
of carbonated water, caramel
color, a little rap, some country
landscape and don't forget the rock
paper, scissors shoot, Aspartame is what they claim
will knock my socks off and treat
me to a trick unlike any Halloween
extravaganza where we first
met- the phosphoric acid clearly
lining my tongue eight months before we'd find
the courage to kiss. As if I hadn't already kissed love
in the form of a liquid drug swimming laps
straight to my heart preserving its freshness
with Potassium Benzoate. This is a love that burns
your cool throat like a forest fire with words on recycling, dieting,
smart spots that can't contend with your philosophic
coffee sprawls, all three thousand
chemicals enticing you to explain your own
metamorphoses the way Ovid would eloquently
tell you you're full of shit, relativism is just perception
with a cooler name for you and your friends
to joke about while you pay your respects to Bacchus
or Dionysus if he hadn't changed his name as many times
as caffeine changes its form as drug
of choice for colleges hoping to kick
their students off the streets and into the wee
hours of capitalism with a buzz
looking for a hive of natural
flavors. Naturally I want to flavor
you, make you see what I hide
from myself, a social construct unwilling to be anew
as the campus is when I look back
to the path I came from unrecognizable with eyes widely
taking in a paper of deaths-kids
my own age taking the stage
and departing without their final curtain call.
Well here you are, my ode to Diet Pepsi,
my hymn
to the youth of universities, my song as you set sail and remember "there is nothing
in the world that does not change" for change is merely an expression of a train
of thought and we'll all stand together
to recognize the final tributes of a lost world, a lost
generation, akin to the one we continuously find in ourselves.
