How many valedictorians could avoid mentioning it?
My sister's couldn't.
She sits, a subdued blue speck,
ambiguously anticipating the culmination of eighteen years,
as if finally, after listening to the beach ball
and swatting around the commencement address,
things fall together.

Parents and poor scholarly types marvel
as the speech connects the dots to JFK,
quoting the scripture of the Catholic martyr,
"Ask not what Oxford's book of quotations can do for you ..."
Quotes can be poetic, and poetry is
the only time mother saw grandpa cry -
mechanically soft drops collecting on his German chin -
when he watched the TV capture them
burying the man so hot,
even Marilyn Monroe wanted Jackie's piece of him.

(God knows what Marilyn Manson would want of him).
Words have the significance of
a tree branch tumbling from Brazilian rainforest canopy
on top of undiscovered exotic mushrooms.

Somewhere, in a young dot-painting of hats,
they have come closer to a more crucial overwhelming question.
At the tip of tomorrow's tongue
they obsess with forbidden words,
like Everest tourists in a random act of nature,
caught suddenly aware of mortality;
OD'd, in yesterday's hallucinations.

If I wanted to walk in a school like Bruce Willis;
if I were on some divine mission to rid the world
of young, ignorant jocks and niggers and Christians,
I'd wait 'till now, after Star Wars,
and I'd at least be so charitable as to
not go down in a gentle library.
I'd want to donate the implications of one final rage --
the uncomfortable comfort of television-addicted mothers,
no longer capable of remembering LBJ's war,
only Milosovech's audacity:
"How dare they try our sons,
prisoners of war!"