high school graduation speech 6 years later 

why did i ever want to give
a high school graduation speech?
i don't know what i would have to say to 
a room full of bodies i knew very little about.
there was a guest speaker who told some 
story about cows though i don't remember
the moral. in 6th grade i became acquainted 
with a pervasive discomfort. the school was
made of paper & my skin was made of 
water balloons. there were a lot of 
birthday parties. there were also a lot
i didn't get invited to & i scrolled through
photos on facebook. there were lights 
at all those school dances & our shadows
obscured on the linoleum floors of cafeterias 
& gymnasiums. not once did we ever play 
dodge ball though i felt as round & as red
as one of those games. was there something
i intended to say? one afternoon they piled 
old books from the library into a dumpster
& told us we could take whatever ones we wanted.
i found a psychiatry guide book from the 1950s.
our school was old & in the one hall i remember
they had photographs of each class that ever 
graduated. aimlessly we might comment 
on the students hair styles or their stoic faces.
there was a sense here of digging like one day 
they might hand us all shovels & tell us
to encounter the earth beneath us. we had no pool
though we swam laps in soupy september heat
that made murky the second floor halls.
there was fog on the windows. no one was
dissecting sharks yet. how the years came around
in perfect circles-- the return of the sticky heat
as a sign that we were almost nothing & no one again.
i never did anything interesting with a summer
though in middle school once i went to a dog training camp
& once i might have been in a play. what happened 
between? i'm asking not for closure but 
as a body who lived in rift. i wore the same
gym uniform from middle school to high school:
grey shirt, blue shorts. maybe i too would have told
some story about cows, about pulling over on 
the side of the road & marveling at these great
huge animals. how they eat almost all day 
to have enough energy-- faces to the the grass.
the smell of sharp green. a few times we noticed
deer out the window of the one science class.
a doe & two babies & all the sapling legs.
that pause while everyone looked to the window
& the teacher glanced too. i would have told 
everyone i only ever wanted to be
one of those animals.