Don T Blink Diction

Do you ever feel like it was just yesterday when you were a kid playing in the park with your friends without a care in the world? This poem discusses themes of growing up in what feels like the blink of an eye and not knowing where one wants to go in life. It additionally touches on that unshakable feeling that everyone around you knows exactly what they're doing with their future but you're stuck in this state of disorientation and longing for the past. “Don't Blink” by Brooklyn Thompson expresses the fear and anxiety surrounding growing up so quickly using shifts, powerful diction, and vivid imagery. Thompson uses shifts to convey the struggles of growing up and longing for the past. The speaker is constantly going from reminiscing on

The speaker's strong word choice and use of metaphors help the reader truly understand how the poet feels in regards to the subject of unwanted nostalgia and yearning for the past. The poem's first line opens up with “longing for my days of naive youth will forever be a curse”. Here, the speaker is expressing how they are constantly looking back at how things used to be when they were just an innocent child who had no idea what life had in store for them in the future. They desire this feeling so constantly that they compare it to a curse that they are stuck with. The poem then references previous lines with “Climbing through the monkey bars of life faster than me, because now I sit in that circle silent as can be.”(13-14). The speaker is referencing the circles that they used to sit in as a kid where they would discuss what they wanted to be when they grow up in order to express that when the question is presented to them now, they have absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation. They went from having all of these goals and aspirations for the future to not having any idea of what they want. They also relate the literal monkey bars that they would climb through at a playground to figurative “monkey bars of life”, meaning the different stages one must go through as one approaches adulthood. The speaker feels as if everyone is moving on and going through these stages with no struggle while they are stuck in this endless aching for the past instead of planning for the