15 | June | 2024 | Fred Aiken Writing

throw it out,
don't be caught with that old,
ratty thing, it's past its prime,
no longer sublime,

it's the one thing
that comes with me
no matter where i go,
despite the fact that i cannot

give a good gosh-darn reason
why i keep dragging it along,
i'm not sure it understands
what it means,

but it means,
it means,
it means

standardized

i did not do great on the SAT’s,
or on the GRE’s, for that matter,
it’s not something i’m particularly proud of,
but i do not like to study for standardized tests,
and it’s not because i’m a bad test taker,
because i do fine on tests, for the most part,
but i just never really understood the types of questions
the standardized tests would ask,
nor did i fully comprehend what they were trying to gauge,
like how much of my soul i was willing
to spend on such mind-numbing studying?
but oh well, i suppose i wasn’t meant to be a doctorate of philosophy anyway,

though mostly because that’s also not what i studied

Fred Aiken Writing

June 15, 2024

old sum-thin

June 15, 2024

standardized