#86: Measure Meants Can Mess Your Sense! ("Yardsticks")

You Might Feel You've Been Indicted,
Pigeonholed, Pecked Or Plighted . . .
But Don't Go Gettin' All Excited . . .
It's All For Love Of Sport.
We Need To Know Who-All's Been Cited
The Best, The Worst, The Dazed And Knighted . . .
And Leave The Surfing Serfs United
In Somebody Else's Court.
And Lucky For Us, The Trip Was Short!

Not all States were lessons of pain.
Some States we just blew through.
I might ease the reader's worries by
recounting one or two.

Well, once, the Buggy stopped and we
could see our hill was gone.
We saw a billion paper shreds
instead of normal lawn.

There wasn't any grass or trees.
There wasn't any life.
There was just this giant readout shaped
much like a giant knife.

Then numbers would go scrolling up,
and then go in reverse . . .
and either way, they didn't appear
the better or the worse.

I guess it was Jo-Mima . . . saw,
like distant bombs and flack,
the sky lit up with the numbers' rise,
and dimmed when they fell back.

And though we made quick work of it,
I'm still not really sure
how we came to recognize
what that State stood for.

At some point, while we watched the scroll,
Jo-Mima hit the core . . .
that money is a counting tool,
and really, not much more!

I think the saber shape was there
to teach us something more,
but since we'd got the gist of it,
we heard the Buggy roar.

Another time, I can recall,
though this one kind-of fades,
we found ourselves in classrooms, stacked
with papers topped with grades.

It turns out that the purpose of
that State, we soon discerned,
was "As" and "Bs" are measures of
not what a man has learned . . .

but not more than a system which
is used to herd us forth
into corrals that then permit
some stranger's brand of worth.

We laughed, if I remember right,
at how a State might claim
a lesson for life might be that we
could play at such a game.

Still, I guess we got ourselves
back out and on the road,
or we'd still be there, trying to find
some magic, secret code.

We didn't need a grade to say
we passed that crazy test.
We made our exit . . . that alone
confirmed we were the best.