"SHIFT"
Poem: Contorting my comfort
Note:
The nature of my job requires me to assist my young college students in sending emails. Sending an email is yet another life skill bound by the rules of displaying proper etiquette, and sometimes my young college students break these rules, because texting and emailing are the same thing, right?
I ask my students to draft their emails before passing their laptops to me for corrections. As I make corrections, I try to explain things like “Hi” is not an appropriate greeting to a professor, and abbreviations like “lol” do not exhibit their humor in an email. Usually, while I’m explaining these corrections, the student is on their phone, texting.
With one student in particular, I noticed they never capitalized the first letter at the start of a new sentence. I was puzzled, so I asked why they were doing this. They told me the shift button on the keyboard didn’t work, and when I placed the Macbook on my lap to type, the shift button simply didn’t shift. I asked them when they would get the keyboard fixed, but they told me they didn’t have the money right now. So, to revise their email, I had to inconveniently use the CAPS LOCK button or stretch my little pinky to the right side shift button every time I needed to capitalize a word.
Now, this was a very first-world problem, but it made me think about all the other times the student had to type something, like papers for homework assignments. How inconvenient that they would have to somehow rhythmically type correctly while simultaneously pausing to press CAPS LOCK on and off to begin a new sentence. I would go through the same trouble if I didn’t have the money. Learning to will oneself through inconvenience and a lack of money always knew each other fairly well.
“Shift” by Cole Henderson
The shift key is broken
Too expensive to fix
Hope to tab on a token
Caps lock and I don’t mix
Accidentally screaming
contorting my comfort
What I want to say
I keep deleting
After a while
I submit like a slave
File
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©Cole Henderson. All Rights Reserved.
I love that you turned this experience into a poem! 👏🏽
The more “mundane”, the more creative the piece feels.