standardized

by Fred Aiken

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