Merciel

The “smartest” girl I know confesses on Facebook
that she’s an introvert to her one thousand friends.
She would rather read a book than go out for drinks
according to her weekly posts of Buzzfeed links.
In conversations, she refers to Mark Twain
as Samuel Clemens, and translates our laymen speak
into an esoteric dialect rehearsed
since college but she always misses my connotations.
She uses Tumblr because her thoughts won’t fit
into tweets, most of which she expresses through sunset memes.
She no longer follows my blog because I disagreed once.

She considers grammatical fallacies and misused
apostrophes torture, but she has never won
a spelling bee like me. My trophy’s at the Goodwill,
discounted to a quarter, if you want to see it.
It comes with my Mensa spam. I gave it away
because masturbation’s a sin, and I never
got laid with the results of a quiz anyway.
I half-assed my A’s to make time to sleep, watch TV,
and play video games. She worked her ass off each day
so she wouldn’t end up at Jack in the Box like I used to be.
I now work on websites, changing the colors of links.
She earned her master’s degree in teaching
and makes three-fifths what I do with my corporate BS.

She tells me I will die alone; I remind her that she will too.
She waits for Prince Charming like her Jesus godmother taught her to,
but she’s no Cinderella, Snow White, or even much of a Lady,
and I’m more Elsa than Anna when it comes to love.
I don’t need a mate because I don’t have a soul.
I don’t need a god to avoid feeling alone,
and I don’t need to be liked for a profile pic
covered with flags to show strangers I care about shit.
I burn bridges she’s terrified of crossing.
I’m Kanye West: unfiltered genius with a godlike fashion sense,
and she’s Taylor Swift: fake as shit church princess.
She says she’d rather read a book than party, but
while I slept through New Year’s, she carpet-bombed
Instagram with pictures of her friends—
teabaggers and anti-vaxxers—and thanked them
for making her poor, dumb, lonely life worth living.