the college student

he doesn’t go to berkeley
though it seems he should
with hair riding on shoulders
and fingers raised in a perennial v
like a gunsight for the bullet of idealism
he lives his life full throttle
raging thru the night
in bars and bedrooms and
gobbling by day the lies of
professors in classrooms
chewing them only to spit them back
in the face of the mother culture
(your golden nuggets of truth
taste like gristle to me)
he knows he’s not going anywhere
really just another pawn in the game
like the construction worker
setting girders for a parking garage
(pack ‘em in for the next football game)
no, the long hair, the dope,
the pretty girls all around,
the books, the war protests…
he’s just a college student
now 20 then 60 then dead
but look what’s left of him
in the halls and classrooms and
bars and under canopies
for smoking pot on the sly
another student just like himself
another name another game
but somehow really all the same
someone new to carry the torch