Are you ready for the brain drain?  That illustrious time when our minds allow themselves to be dumbly herded into a small room, where they are butchered and fed to the statisticians and politicians?  Are you ready to give them your all, bubble away your will with your number two pencil?  They won't ask you to sell your soul, you know.  Just lend it to them for a while.

Are you ready for the brain drain?  Ready to sit there in the white room and feel your grey matter flow with the consistency of molasses down your arm, through your cramped fingers and on to the, say it with me now, Answer Document?  Oh yes, the sound of those instructions read in a monotone, teachers bored as you are.  They pay prices too.

But be concerned with your own price, it's uniquely yours to pay.  Feel it sap you, drink your neurons, the music of the test. The music, the non-music, the everything taken away from you...just a student.  Just a faceless student facing a say it with me now, crisp and clean and standardized: Test Booklet.  Just like that.  White.  Sterile.  Blank.

You think you're someone special?  Think you can write or draw or dance or sing better than anyone else?  Well, that paper is here to tell you, you're wrong.  Think you can't be reduced to numbers, an algorithm, a growth percentage landing with a paper slap on the desk of the superintendent?  How bout that guy?  Let's make him take that test.

In fact, let's make everyone take the test!  After all, numbers give us growth!  Progress!  Funding!  Appreciation!  Tests for everyone!  Oh.  No?  Well, that's alright.  Nobody's perfect.

Are you ready for the brain drain?  I guarantee that tomorrow, I won't be able to write this poem.  But there's nothing I can do about it.

Moo.  Let's all go to the brain drain.