T. Stewart Assignment 2

The Middle

Alarms blaring,
teachers droning,
pages turning,
Logdog barking,
laughter and
music filling the space in between.

My eyes have seen an
array of spectacles, my
heart has felt
the tremors, though few.
I pass the days with sighs.

It is the epitome of impatience,
an adolescent purgatory. And
after this long it all blurs
together, events indistinguishable.

Four years striving for
somewhere I will strive to
be somewhere else.

     The main chunk of imagery lies in the first stanza, where I describe the sounds of high school. Here we also find my allusion to the legendary Logdog - both of these strategies serve to connect with my audience, other academy students who know exactly what I'm talking about. The whole takeaway from the poem is that high school is basically a filler, a middleman, a place of transcendence (minus the divine connotation), a purgatory, where participants wait it out. This parallels to the last line of the first stanza, about music filling the spaces - to me, high school is just consuming time til I reach my next goal. The tone is reflective, anxious, and dissatisfied. The repetition in the last stanza serves to emphasize the anxiousness. Diction like "sighs" and blurs" and the choppiness of line cutoffs "(syntax) illustrate the dissatisfaction, as well.