Amir Abou-Jaoude Assignment 2

Tele-fiction

I remember thinking

As I made sure my pencils were sharpened

That it would be like what it was

Did I take my calculator?

On TV

Because on TV

Everyone was so bubbly

And they just looked so 

Excited and I wondered where

They got all that energy from

On TV, everybody had a locker

And every locker was decorated

With pictures of mom and dad

And Spot, the dog who almost died last fall

And I thought that in a week

I would have a locker

And I could stuff pictures in it

Just so I wouldn't forget anybody

In the six

Or was it seven?

Hours I was there

It was a stupid idea.

I had been to school before

And six hours wasn't that long

But it seemed like a big transition

And it seemed like I was Captain Kirk

Hurling myself into

Where no man has gone before

Wherever that was.

What I do know was that

Some man had been to my locker

Because it was sticky on the inside

And when you tried to open it--

The handle caught.

So I couldn't stick pictures in it 

And I found that with homework

And speech team and whatever else

I couldn't make it to my locker

And the people here

They weren't bubbly

And now I knew where their energies came from--

Coffee.

But it was better than TV

Because I learned about people

and I learned about myself

I learned that I could give a speech off the cuff

That I liked art history and that

I worked best under pressure.

I learned who I wanted to be

What I wanted to do

And for that

It was worth it.

The tone changes throughout the poem. In the first stanzas, I wanted to capture an excited, idealistic tone. The speaker here is scatterbrained, excited for the first day of high school. This was my rationale for inserting the question "Did I forget my calculator?" into the mass of other thoughts in the first stanza. I wanted to weave ideas throughout the poem, and I thought it was best to introduce them early on. I discussed the energetic behavior of the people on TV as well as the idea of the locker. Throughout the poem, I started lines with conjunctions like "and" and "but" to emphasize the continuous, run-on nature of my thoughts. This first part of the poem serves to set up my expectations for high school. The lines are relatively short and disjointed to capture my excited state of mind. 

The shift in tone occurs with the line it was a stupid idea. The lines are still short and some of them still sound like a run-on sentence, not to capture my excitement, but to capture the hectic quality of day-to-day life. I made a conscious effort to refer back to what I had set up in the first part of the poem--to juxtapose the "TV" version of reality with the "Henry Clay" version of it. The tone here is somewhat disillusioned--things don't measure up to the TV version. Indeed, the reference to "Star Trek" makes this juxtaposition more pointed.  I may have tricked myself into thinking I was going into the unknown earlier, but soon the novelty of high school wears off.

Another shift occurs with the line "but it was better than TV." The tone here is more detached and objective. The lines are longer--they are no longer disjointed and they do not sound like a run-on sentence. They sound like a resume, like a college application, like a summary of what I have done so far in high school. However, throughout the poem, I used causal, everyday language to comment on the ordinary aspects of the high school experience. The shifts in the poem are similar to the shifts in my attitude in high school--first I was excited, then overwhelmed by daily chores. Now, as I near the end of my high school career, I can look back on it with an unbiased eye.