What is omnipresent, never-ending, and yet unnoticed
are the students in this city, prowling their orange-brick campus home.

They blend into the background of one another,
fresh out of adolescence and clones in their everlasting, irreplaceable gray sweatpants,
sweatshirts and backpacks.
Every hairdo messy among a thousand human beings.
Every expression fatigued, languid under the oppression real life offers.
Sipping their life-juice (coffee) ordered from their culinary lifeboat (Starbucks),
Internet-browsing on identical laptops.

They're all so the same, but don't you want to be them?
Live off ramen and Lucky Charms?
Oh, the mechanical fredom.

You wonder about their own (lack of-) sleep-fogged view.
Do they have any sense of self? Individuality? Do they spend evenings pondering profound philosophical questions regarding and grading themselves as if each student were different from another?
Do they have any mind other than the clockwork attached to their schedules?

Oh, I think they're just like me.
I think that at this precious moment in time,
they belong to their classes;
their parents are the wristwatches they all inevitably carry, their cell phones, their graded projects.
Individuals inside indistinguishable cutouts,
but all this regularity will eventually pass.