Graduation Day

billions the system digests, voraciously gorging on cold hard lucre, so i can stand here before you and hurl a mortar board into the sky. see it spin, Kubrick's bone, 2001 cleans a big, big carpet, watch it morph into the future in the twinkle of an eye. your hopes and dreams are with us, slapping spines as we pass, yet already i pine for the linear sprawl of the early days. so strange to see your faces, smile, beam and nod approval, skin cracking skin in applause, lips mouthing volumes of praise. am i walking away from something, or walking towards something new? at this point i am uncertain, so i walk, not too slow, not too fast. the future is unwritten, and our burden is to seize the pen and write its outlook or epitaph with one eye on the destined, the other fixed on the past.