Once Come Graduation Day

[billy]

this poem was removed by the poet and replaced because i open my mouth, sorry all but you now have to reply to it
on a serious note; after a couple of reads i thought it a bit too wordy the poem spoke well enough but at times needed to be quieter.

the last three lines of the poem felt to easy, [a quick finish]. it seems i point out a lot of negative thing but most are minor with easy fixes.
i like the idea of becoming the farmers once you take charge, {animal farm} it just feels like the poem is trying to hard to be a poem. all that said it isn't as bad as i extol. the aspiration and belief belied throughout the poem are part of the human condition. i like how the poem didn't shy away from seeing and showing that all that glisters is not gold.
to the poem:

Once Come Graduation Day
 
Sitting in a quaint little coffee shop  quaint and little are too close. choose [quaint] not sure sitting holds a lot of relevance either.
while still in college; talking
of the great things, dreaming great dreams borderline cliche
about wonders we would one day do.
For six long years we had fought for
our hard won wisdom and now we stood,
looking from a vista to see where
the race would shortly be won!
You said, “One day soon, I will create a new form; you i think it were who told me to keep quotes on their own line once, i reciprocate.
I shall call this new form the, ‘advent novel!’. missing the closing quote marks.
You sat tall for a short man while commanding
“single malt,” as though it were your war cry!
"I shall write two masterpieces, I will call them,
‘A farewell to . . .Materialism,’ or, ‘Corporate Greed,’
or maybe, ‘Multinationalism!’ for me i'd like to see each set of '..' on it's own line.
Yes, in that genre: something of that breed,”
then retire to a monastic lifestyle, at Esalen, i'm not sure why but i enjoy this line, it has direction more so than any so far.
as will befit may stature, as well as [my]
my most humble nature!"
 
There was I with my pithy little poems,                                           
welding them as a rapier at men of straw, wielding
penning them against the wall, this first three lines create an ebullient image of the righteous
but CEO’s to our later dismay
were much more straw than men after all:
much too easy for targets; were they not?
So straw became sand and Everyman  three straws are breaking the camels back why a capped Everyman?                  
hated them for their financial success,
especially when there was no largess
to their employees forth coming.
When they were already so widely hated another hated
the world needed no poet to tell them,
of their baseness and evil,
when already their anger would not be abated.  
 
I was not so ambitious as you, 
I would be content with my little book of verse,  
merely shaking the foundations of the universe.
That was all that I envisioned.                                                         
 
We were such children, so naive back then,
living off what we thought was our due,
the ever and eternal parental dole.
Now look at us two, different divisions,
but still in the same corporate role:
we're now the enemy we once claimed to hate. another hate                              
Even on the fast track, don’t you find it drool,
a boor? What we once defamed we now extol!
But you’ve got to stake your claim don’t you?
Like good white bread you must rise to the top.
Our little books, yours of prose, mine of verse,
never seemed to make [made] a stir. No one appeared
to have the thirst: the revolution had already died.
I know that I cried, inside myself that day:
when my parentals* said, "get a job, no more play";
then hurtfully, "you're cut off, go fend for yourself".
I was a child no more, once come graduation day.
 
 
Erthona
 

 *the person this poem was based on often used this word to describe his parents. You may see it as trite or dated, please let me know if you do and if you think it is disruptive to the poem. Thanks.


©1999, revised 2015