A Ditty on The Wages of Cheating

I took a test
while sitting next to my “smart” friend,
a test I had not studied for.
And so I stole my answers surreptitiously
from the page that he was writing on,
thinking they were full embodied in
his proclamations of
his mastery of subjects taught
within the university.

But to my consternation in the end
I found that he was not the brilliant kid
I thought he was
or let alone, the one
he’d bragged himself to be
because I saw
that when my graded test
was handed back to me
I’d barely “earned” a D.

What lesson did I learn from this experience?
That I should always study more
and have more sense
to never be so dumb to trust
a boy who boasts how intellectually
equipped  he is
when bragging shows he probably
is compensating for his knowledge that
he’s really not a wiz.