Poem "The Game"

The Game by Michael Kegel

My competitive spirit misses no opportunity
Nothing hurts more than defeat
I must always win, even on the academic stage
For I know there’s no one I can’t beat.

I stay up till one, sleep I must fight
I struggle up the stairs; I need to rest
A scream of terror awakes me in the night
Then reads, “4 AM. No wonder I’m the best.”

I would rather be starving in Africa
To lie down and die is my only wish
I begin to see and hear things that aren’t really there
My head silently roars at me in anguish.

Surviving on naps, the days start to run together
But look at my grades, they couldn’t be better!
I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives
Then I realize, it’s better to be alive

Being the best becomes a kind of game
Nothing else makes me feel the same
Think what you want, call me lame
In the future I’ll be the one shrouded in fame

My journey is almost over, I can see the light
I’ve risen to the challenge, I’ve put up the fight
I ask myself why I put myself through all this strife
But then I decide that I really love my life.




​In my poem, I manipulate my diction (choice of words) to cause the lines to rhyme. I do this to give it a sort of rhythm, and I think it makes the words come alive. In the first line of the second stanza, I used the literary technique of inversion (inverted order of words in a sentence, or variation of the subject-verb-object order), because I think it makes the delivery more dramatic. In this second stanza, I am describing my lack of sleep, and I used inversion and rhyming to make it seem almost like a ritualistic chant. I feel that this intensifies the effect what I am describing. In the third line of the second stanza, I used imagery (language which appeals to one of the five senses), “A scream of terror awakes me in the night.” The startling imagery of a scream in the dark of night perfectly represents the feeling of being woken up by an alarm. It is also a metaphor (a comparison in which something is is said to be another, without using like or as), as I call the alarm clock a scream of terror, but in the next line I have hinted enough for the reader to figure out that I am actually talking about the alarm clock.
​In the third stanza, I describe the horrible adverse effects of my sleep loss. In the fourth line, I use a paradox (contradicting ideas used together for description), “silently roaring” to relay the feeling of a voice yelling at you from within your head, but knowing that in reality you are just hallucinating. This is also personification (describing the action of an inanimate object with a human verb), as my head, which shouldn’t be able to talk for itself, is roaring at me, as if it had a mind of its own. In the fourth stanza, I begin to transition into the much happier section of the poem, and in the third line I use a metaphor, “I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives,” to show my intense jubilation that comes when I get a couple of days off from school.
​In the fifth stanza, I used rhyming words at the end of each line, to signal to the reader that I am building up to the dramatic climax of the poem. In the sixth and final stanza, in the second line I use the literary technique of asyndeton, which is the omission of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, used to intensify the content included in the two phrases. I then end the poem with a happy ending, deciding that despite the difficulty of my life, I still like it.