Having “Having a Coke With You” With You, by Mark Leidner. Original post by Seth Simons here.
Transcribed:
You asked me if I knew the poem “Having a Coke with You” I said I vaguely remembered it but didn’t really and then you recited it in its entirety as we were walking from somewhere up by City Hall down to South Street and the whole time you were reciting it I was thinking “Was that the end of the poem?” after every line and each time I thought that, I thought it more intensely because as the poem got longer the fact that you were reciting it from memory became increasingly harder to believe until about halfway through the poem I stopped thinking about how long it was and started just listening to it which I had been, but only a little, because of all that. Anyway then I started listening to it for real, and when you finished I thought that was the end of why you had done that but as soon as you finished, you started talking about how you used to think that that poem was just about being in love and how being in love with someone was so wonderfully banal but then you said that recently you thought it was more about the futility of caring about art at all when you could spend all that energy caring about someone real instead, and you said that now that I’d heard it you wanted to know where I stood if anywhere on that question and I was as struck by the question you posed as I was still stunned that you could recite so casually such a long good love poem, and as well, that you hadn’t even recited it primarily to acquire appreciation for your recitation so much as to ask what I thought about what you thought about it now, versus how you thought about it then, and this was when I knew I wanted to be with you forever.
