Pretentious was once six years old.
She couldn’t spell her name like all the other kids
so she made the Dictionary her Bible
and worshipped syllables in a prayer,
practicing vowels with a bruised tongue
until she got them right.
Pretentious earned the right to say
Ostentatious, serendipitous, idiosyncratic,
in place of flashy, happy, weird.
Burning words into her mind’s eye like a cataract
felt like hours of paper cuts from hardcover novels
and clicking knuckles from dogearring pages.
But Pretentious was a try-hard,
a compound princess pampered in fancy pants.
It’s easy to be a try-hard, thesaurus parrot.
Mold a mousetrap tongue or dumb it down.
Measure out syllables in increments of two MAXIMUM.
Pretentious didn’t know why it was a sin
to sprinkle in words that sound like poetry
and look up their meanings. But the world loves it simple;
now she keeps her heresy a secret.