Standardized Test

Bubbling in the answers,

You realize you got one wrong

And you flip over the pencil

To correct your mistake

But your eraser can’t quite

Make the mark go away

So you try harder, desperate

To remove the error

But you leave a smudge or

Worse, you tear the paper.

You may know most of the answers—

You may know them all—

But this one stays wrong because you could not

Erase cleanly.

 

As the test continues,

You look for the patterns,

Ways in which one bubble

Leads to and predicts another;

But just when you think

You know what comes next,

The pattern

Breaks down, and you overthink the question

With the most obvious answer

And, undecided, you leave it blank

To fill it in later

 

But you never do.

 

Or, sometimes you get to the end and discover

That the bubbles don’t come out even

And you have wasted all the time you had

Putting the right answers in the wrong places

And it’s too late to do anything about it.

 

This is how a standardized test

Prepares you for life.

 

 

–#sonnetsfromthepleiades