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A rock sat in the woods, thinking,
for many years, of many things.
Realized God and His plan
How to perfect life for plant and man
but it was a rock, and rocks can't speak
so it had to keep it to itself

Although I put it sophomorically, I think this really reflects a conflict I felt then (and still feel to this day) where we live in our own objective heads, but only shared reality matters. (The awareness of that tension may have sprung from my sometimes frantic youthful concern of keeping myself right in the God's Eye View of things, lest I end up burning in hell.)

Later in life I ran into this poem:

Don't knock a stone: don't say things like "stone dead."
A stone always knows what it's about.
It holds itself together better than you do,
better than I do. A stone is comfortable
with its battery of cunning smithereens
milling around, bouncing off one another
exactly right in their tight little compound.

Any old stone--you think it can't talk?
Dumb old stone? Ho! Every atom in it talks,
every part of every atom talks. Just listen.

Trust your eyes and ears to recognize your
grandmother. A stone doesn't need eyes and
ears to know what's coming down the pike.

A stone knows what it wants, and gets it,
pressing up tight against the fluffy surrounds,
all that space made of the same stuff as the stone stuff.
Don't knock a stone: it'll show you up,
put you down, cover you up, forget you.

I think that is an interesting partial refutation to what I wrote in high school. And kind of splitting the difference is a poem I found in between:

I was talking to a rock
and I said, "Stone"-
I talk to them like that-I said,
"what makes people feel extraneous?"

To which the rock in its own idiom
replied, "Extraneous's ass!
You think you got it bad.
Try igneous extrusion.
Try a little freeze and thaw.
Try glaciation.
Stand out in the weather for ten thousand years.
We'll talk extraneous."

One thing about rocks:
they cut you half an inch of slack
but never. That's why guys like me
idealize them. I said, "Sage"-
I laid it on a little thick,
this rock I'm talking to,
it's not much bigger than a Chiclet,
but I don't want to give offense-
so I said, "Sage, what
should the human species do?"

To which the rock said nothing,
but he got that look. You know:
they're thinking to themselves,
"Drop dead."