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
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
long, dragging day,
blazing sun beating the asphalt ragged,
reading for hours at a time, studying for god knows what,
staring at a screen as the words fail to come,
lifting hundreds of pounds of coffee,
my back begins to screech,
i think i breathed in creosote,
i should probably go see a doctor about that,
but that’s a tomorrow problem,
tonight i will sleep,
i will sleep,
i will sleep
Fred Aiken Writing 