Fishing the grid

a small boat floating
on a sea of memories
words I readily
use swim
near the surface

some words dwell
in the darkest deeps
every year
more nouns and
names

but I
will fight the good
fight
on the tip of my
tongue

buyer’s remorse I think
slower
I’m slowing
her
down

I want to churn
the cross
words
at my chosen
speed

This poem was FOUND in a blog post by James Wallace Harris
poem & photo by rachel mcalpine CC BY 2.0

What’s a found poem doing in a prose blog?

It’s all my stuff,whether it happens to be on this blog or on my blog across the way (Poems in the Wild). But this particular poem is a found poem, and as such, of interest to the original writer and his own followers. Who write and read prose. What a tangled web we weave.

In brief, I loved James’s original post about crosswords and memory and aging, and couldn’t resist reassembling some of his phrases into a poem that added a hesitant rhythm to the sound and meaning, to suggest that too-familiar experience of fishing around for that elusive word.

Thank you James!