I open my mouth,
and the word—no, not that one, the other—
slips into swap.
An acronym, maybe three letters,
some RAG or RAM or ROM,
something to fetch, to store,
to forget on purpose so I can recall it in poetry.
My speech:
modular, anecdotal,
each clause a .dll loaded on-demand,
every tangent a callback,
each metaphor a memory leak.
trailing reference cycles through polite conversation.
They say,
“You talk in circles.”
I say,
“Round is just a loop unbroken;
recursive, perhaps, but always terminating,
eventually, when the right word drops
from disk to tongue.”
My brain fog is weather,
sometimes a gentle mist,
other days a whiteout,
where “that thing” (noun, verb, feeling, science term,
name of my best friend’s cat)
waits at the bus stop,
misses the transfer,
arrives just in time for Act Three.
I build new words out of context,
stack synonyms in a heap
until the stack overflows and—aha!
A realization.
A RAG, a RAM, a rogue acronym,
slotted back into my lexicon
by luck, or by the kindness of a friend
who says, “You mean…?”
And I do.
(I do mean that.)
Every conversation is a debugger trace,
breakpoints set by other people’s patience,
step-over, step-into,
watch variable: “What are you trying to say?”
Somehow,
meaning compiles,
even if the build log is three pages of warnings
and not a single error.
If I speak in tangents,
it is because the shortest path
was swapped out for a story,
a thread waiting to join,
the dominos falling in a direction
I didn’t intend,
but needed,
for the poetry to land.
So here’s to the dominos,
the metaphors, the modules,
the moment a word is both too much and not enough,
the stack of context,
the comfort of recursion,
and the never-ending joy
of being
just a little bit
out of memory
and still
making sense.