One Eight

When people ask me if I’m going to college,

I say yes, but leave it at that.

I don’t want to tell them

I’m a spineless submitter

to a system of postsecondary education

that sucks and saps our wealth until we are forced

into a state of economic dependency.

I don’t want to share the secret

that for the rich it’s a means of wealth continuation

but for everyone else, it’s a means to a job that might pay off our loans

but when it doesn’t it’s a means to a bottomless pit

and we quell these qualms with bottles

and we pretend that it’s okay.

We spend so long embellishing resumes and engaging in the perfunctory...

we forget how to function, and how to get funky.

When I grow up, I want to be a mermaid.

I’ll swim the seas of suburbia,

the seas of my youth, and the seas of faraway France.

Because in a world where education is farther from priceless than I am from France,

and in an institutionalized hole that I dug myself into,

I’d rather be mythical.

At eighteen, scales seem prettier than skills.